"The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method ... [E]ither party in office because in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies." (pp. 1247 – 48).
Welcome to the political economy of Carroll Quigley. Quigley explained, in one paragraph, why the U.S. has been moving in the same direction regardless of which party had the White House, controlled Congress, etc. While the dominant, untouchable policies change with time, those of the past half-century have included financialization of the economy, globalism (internationalization of political economy, often to the detriment of American workers), open borders, disempowering labor, money printing, indebtedness, and wars of choice (e.g., in Iraq). Slightly over a quarter-century ago the dominant policies began to incorporate political correctness, e.g., speech codes, thought control, Orwellian concepts of equality where "some are more equal than others."
The political economy of Donald Trump now threatens to upend all this, and at least some of his backers (if they read my stuff, or that of Paul Craig Roberts or Simon Black, e.g.) know that these are the policies at stake, policies which have shifted the U.S. from a country based on production to one based on financialization and debt, which have hollowed out the U.S. economy, partly destroyed what was the largest financially independent middle class in history and begun a downward spiral in the standard of living for nearly all but a tiny elite, while creating an economy based on low wages and various forms of precarity. And these comments (except for that last one) do not even touch what's been done to education, in the name of producing blindly obedient workers, consumers, and taxpayers who will blindly believe whatever government and mainstream corporate media tell them to believe.
Are these the reasons many people find the need to "stop the Donald" so strong? Otherwise what is everyone so afraid of? Trump is not destroying "conservatism" in the Republican mainstream, simply because there hasn't been any actual conservatism in the Republican mainstream for over 30 years now. Some are worried about, e.g., Trump’s lack of foreign policy experience, but did Obama have any foreign policy experience when he stepped into the White House? This has all the sound of a red herring. What Trump does represent is a resurgence of economic nationalism: America-First, as against the mindset that gave us NAFTA back in the early 1990s (and eventually destroyed over 5 million jobs), and is now threatening to give us the Trans-Pacific Partnership which will destroy more jobs. Is Trump a protectionist? Yes, he is, of a sort. And this is essentially how every other nation in the world plays things except for the U.S. China certainly does, with its rampant mercantilism, and anyone who doesn't think this is the norm among nations needs to stop reading economics textbooks full of computer-generated mathematical models and stop kidding himself.
Am I wrong in suggesting that fear of The Donald is superelite-grounded fear that their political-economic empire is being unraveled by a black swan they didn't predict and can't control? (Those who have read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s brilliant book The Black Swan know the reference. Those who haven’t, should.) The show continues today with Super Tuesday, as twelve states commit delegates. My guess is, Trump will retain his commanding lead. The first article we link to today explains the convoluted process, including both what happens if Trump remains the frontrunner, as seems likely at the moment, and what must happen for someone else to overtake him. That someone, as we said before, will likely not be Rubio if Trump defeats him in his own state later this month.
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/marco-rubio-can-still-beat-donald-trump-no-095752955.html
Speaking of Rubio, here’s a credible account of how he is trying to defeat Trump on Trump’s own territory, that of the strategic put-down. There’s only one problem: Trump is several times better at it than Rubio. Is Rubio really accomplishing anything other than making himself look silly?
Get ready for President Trump! This political scientist claims to have a statistical model that looks at primary results, equivalent items for elections preceding our era, etc., for past presidential elections going back to 1912 and predicts who won with a very high accuracy rate (he has one miss, in 1960). He predicts that Donald J. Trump will enter the Oval Office in January, 2017. The odds of Trump’s winning: 97% if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and 99% if by some chance Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee.
http://nypost.com/2016/02/25/get-ready-for-president-trump-says-election-whiz-whos-scary-accurate/
Other endorsements for Donald Trump are coming in, this one from former State Representative Phil Hart:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hart/phil109.htm
I presume everyone reading this knows that former GOP candidate for the nomination Chris Christie endorsed Trump late last week, possibly also thinking of running mate status (one hopes not; Sessions is a far better choice!).
Time reporter Chris Morris was covering a protest at a Trump event in Radford, Va., when he was slammed to the ground by a Secret Service agent. Maybe Morris shouldn’t have shouted a familiar obscenity at the agent? You think? They don't exactly take kindly to that sort of thing.
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/security-at-trump-event-choke-1375771344773174.html
Should the Republican Party break up? Inside-the-Beltway blogger ponders the issues while asserting a dichotomy of growing familiarity: either the GOP nominates someone else, or the Party basically fractures, with those seeking to maintain the Carroll Quigley political-economic world forming a new “major” political party. How would they do this? The present GOP corporate-globalist donors (Sheldon Adelson types) bankroll it, of course. They will continue to foster the present confusion between conservatism and globalism, between globalism and free markets, and between conservatism and neoconservatism. One wonders what they will call it. The term Globalist Party would get my vote, but that’s too much honesty for these guys. One should expect something far more Orwellian. Perhaps: the American Party? The Conservative Party?
Coming towards a conclusion today with an intriguing piece about the Four Steps Donald Trump used to “hack” this election. If this author is right, then the election is probably already over — unless mainstream media decides to turn its back on ratings (and therefore on the Almighty Dollar) and Twitter can somehow be shut off! Trump: (1) has played mainstream media like a fiddle. He’s ratings, and therefore dollar signs, and he knows it. He knows how to play to an audience, for better or for worse. Not a single other candidate on either side of the aisle has his attention-commanding skills. (2) With the amount of information floating around, if you want to be seen you have to Get Attention. Trump knows how to do this by being outrageous, and he gets away with it both because media allow him to get away with it (ratings, again) and his followers who are fed up with political correctness are practically begging for more of the same. (3) There is no way to develop an idea, much less explain a complicated policy strategy, in Twitter tweets limited to 140 characters. This is part of how social media is dumbing the country down, but Trump knows how to exploit it by sending out profuse numbers of tweets of his own. He would be the first president of the Twitter era. (4) Tell the truth about “diversity,” that icon of political correctness. It’s been an utter disaster, and threatens to be a bigger disaster if the U.S. continues allowing everyone including Muslims to cross its borders. If you have open borders, you soon don’t have either a culture or a country. You have chaos. That’s the real world, and the Trumpsters have figured this out, although writers such as Sam Francis and Patrick J. Buchanan have been beating this drum for years. Trump is not following official GOP dogma by trying to expand the base. He is digging deeper into the base. He thus appeals to the barely-employed white men in this globalist era who are fed up with hearing about their “white privileges.” Instead of apologizing for your race and the achievements that have made you money, embrace them! Promote them! Celebrate them! Whether anyone likes it or not, that is what is working for The Donald.
http://www.wired.com/2016/02/trump-hacked-election-4-far-easy-steps/?mbid=nl_22916
Elites, of course, have no understanding of any of this, which is why they are shaking their heads in dismay or just confusion. Whatever one thinks of Trump, or the thinking I’ve just spelled out, one has to concede: the U.S. is rapidly dividing into at least three “nations” and three separate cultures. One is highly elitist, centralized, well-moneyed and money-focused, and has no interest in social issues such as abortion, homosexual marriage, etc. The second consists of working class whites, who have seen nothing except downward mobility for the past quarter century. Many tend towards Christianity and oppose abortion and gay marriage, although this group is probably more diverse than its media-invented public portrait, and does not speak with a single voice on religious or social issues (some care, others don't). The third consists of minorities, radical feminists, homosexuals, other leftists including many academics, and their allies. This group is growing in both size and volume-level. It is frequently disruptive, while casting itself as consisting of history’s victims. Black Lives Matter is one of its recent incarnations.
The existence of these three separate cultures who are rapidly losing not just the means but the will to communicate with one another is part of the reason I see the U.S. empire unraveling during the next couple of decades, regardless of what happens with the Trump nomination. If Trump wins the nomination and the Establishment engineers a Hillary Clinton victory, it could well speed the coming unraveling.
Patrick Buchanan on whether a “new GOP” is in the making, one which is economically nationalist rather than globalist, which secures America’s borders, and ends the pointless foreign wars that have destabilized much of the Middle East and made us enemies. Trump might be the catalyst, perhaps the first step in what will doubtless be a larger and longer struggle, to break the grip of the Quigley world on U.S political economy, when that world is not benefiting the majority of Americans. I don’t know — it depends on what the elites do, and for reasons previously stated I doubt they will go quietly into the night.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/patrick-j-buchanan/death-rattle-establishment/
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