Super Tuesday results: Ted Cruz won in three states, Alaska, Oklahoma, and his home state of Texas; Marco Rubio won in Minnesota; Donald Trump won the remaining seven (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia). For what it’s worth, Hillary Clinton won seven states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia) while Bernie Sanders won four states (Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Vermont). Who won Alaska across the aisle is not in as of this writing.
There were 595 GOP delegates up for grabs. To win the nomination, a GOP candidate must win 1,237 delegates in all. It should be clear: Donald Trump’s chances of securing the GOP nomination have improved. He won’t secure all the delegates in all the states where he won, because his margin of victory wasn’t large enough. With some delegates not yet assigned as of this note, one estimate of the totals I saw has Trump with 316 delegates, Cruz with 226, Rubio with 106, Kasich with 25, Carson with 8, and Bush with 4. (Kasich has said he will drop out if he fails to win his home state, Ohio.)
Guide to delegate arithmetic (also to the calendar from here until the July convention) here:
It is now those intent on stopping Trump who have an uphill climb as he keeps winning delegates. At stake is a vision of what the country should be which we discussed yesterday, and which is now being repudiated by a certain segment of the public which has not seen visible benefits from it. What Trump could do or would do in office is still something of an unknown. We’re gradually moving into unexplored territory. The last outsider to secure the GOP nomination was Barry Goldwater in 1964. He was destroyed by a mainstream media. In those days, mainstream media had no competition from Internet-based media. (Reagan was not truly an outsider, as his choice for Vice President indicates.)
In the meantime, the psychoanalyzing has not just begun but gone into high gear. Consider this short treatise on authoritarianism, which a number of political scientists claim has come to infest those segments of the American electorate who are drawn to Donald Trump:
It makes for interesting reading, at least, to see what the correlations are and what the implications might be. Let’s remember, first, what we’re about here. This blog is intended to fill a gap. It is intended to analyze, not advocate. I don’t see Trump as the political equivalent of the Second Coming; nor do I see any benefit to the sort of demonizing we are seeing in mainstream media or the mainstream GOP. The above article cites political scientists who argue that authoritarianism has appeared among a GOP base that is resistant to the sorts of change we have seen over the past 25 years, ranging from economic change to demographic changes. The authoritarian personality prefers stability and resists change, when threatened will seek out a “strongman” who promises to restore order, who is “simple, powerful, and punitive.”
The irony I see here is that while the author and academics cited never say they limit authoritarianism to Trump populists, they imply that it is relatively uninteresting or uninfluential in the hands of Establishmentarians. Let’s look at it this way: if Trump fails to win the GOP nomination, this will result from one of two things, one of them authoritarian-based and the other not. Trump may fail to win the GOP nomination if the voters choose someone else in the remaining states, whether Cruz or Rubio. This would be nonauthoritarian. Or Trump may fail to win the GOP nomination because representatives of the Establishment step in and change the rules at the last minute. In this case, who are the authoritarians?
Now again, Trump may win the GOP nomination and win the presidency. When we look at the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in particular, especially their foreign policies of blunder, bluster, and wars of choice, we have to wonder how a President Trump could possibly do any worse! Much of the Middle East is a destabilized wreckage, traceable to Bush’s disastrous choice to invade in March 2003. Trump has been the only Republican other than Ron Paul to call out the Bush clan on this, suggesting that Bush may have lied about their being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Be all this as it may, have we not seen plenty of authoritarianism in the centers of power in this century so far? If Trump and his supporters are authoritarians, then how are they different? (If they are not different, that would be unfortunate!)
Or Trump may win the GOP nomination and lose in the general election. He might lose for more than one reason. If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate and gets more electoral votes, she wins. (I am leaving aside the problematic nature of electronic voting machines for now, i.e., whether they could be used to steal the election.) That would be nonauthoritarian again.
Now suppose the GOP Establishment decides to run a candidate of their own as an independent, and this draws enough votes away from Trump to assure Hillary Clinton a landslide victory. Is this authoritarian or isn’t it? While like most things authoritarianism is not an all-or-nothing proposition, such a gesture would purposefully disadvantage Trump, by those with the money and power to do so, in a society where all too much comes down to money and power.
We don’t want to evade the issue: is Trump an authoritarian? A strongman? In many respects, he does come across that way. My response is the same as before: welcome to the post Ron Paul U.S. We tried libertarianism, and no one was interested. Those who say the Establishment set the stage for this situation have a point. Choices always have consequences.
Donald Trump on NAFTA (old but worth archiving for future reference): we will renegotiate or break it. The county does not need free trade but fair trade.
http://time.com/4051371/donald-trump-nafta/
Nine Republicans who say they will refuse to vote for Donald Trump should he become the GOP nominee. You won’t have heard of most of them (Christie Todd Whitman, perhaps, because she’s a former New Jersey governor), but these are among the movers and shakers in the upper echelons of the Republican Party.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/9-republicans-won-t-vote-195636501.html
Chris Christie’s endorsement of Trump has backfired badly. Mainstream media at work:
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/new-jersey-newspapers-call-for-christie-to-resign-144350557.html
The strangest of all possible bedfellows:
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