The idea has been around a long time that maybe we should reorganize our government by electing presidents from the private sector, from outside the political circles we’ve watched for over 30 years bring cost-effective government almost to a standstill.
I walked out of private industry (labor-intensive manufacturing) in 1989, just as George HW Bush replaced Ronald Reagan. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed and I got to be there to watch it. Taking notes. For roughly 18 years.
Reagan and Maggie Thatcher (who for a short period brought Britain back from the brink) were the primary causes for that collapse.
But in achieving that historic collapse, to our regret, Ronald Reagan had to shelve his principal domestic agenda involving the curtailing of the growing size and scope of the federal government.
Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter largely on that account, for Carter was the front man for the newly-reorganized Democrat Party, which had officially gone from “Liberal” to “New Left” in 1976 at his nominating convention. And that New Left had ambitious plans, which, like all things Marxian, required strata-after-strata of bureaucracy, not only at the federal level, but, in hands-across-the aisle fashion, with states as well. A well-oiled (or so they dreamed) machine, co-dependency, and a “I can’t talk to you, but my machine will talk to your machine.”
Like Joe Biden today, Carter-the-pawn simply signed off on new policies that gave America double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, but added new agencies and departments, the Departments of Education and Energy, and numerous other federal side-shows; also gasoline shortages, 55 mph speed limits, and environmental crises, while at the same encouraging Earth Day (Lenin’s birthday) to became a holy day.
This was when people first chose law school with no intention of practicing law but rather becoming regulators.
Reagan said that not undoing that regulatory catastrophe was his one great regret…but like Trump, he had to deal with the barbarians at the gate first, never having the votes in Congress, or when he did, just enough to block Democrat spending initiatives, after having first asked the American people to call their congressmen.
Many of you will not remember those days, but much like Trump’s era, 2017-2021, Ronald Reagan was a man-of-the-people, backed by the People and the free market, standing against regulatory behemoths; military, industrial, and of course, the political class, (the Swamp)…including a growing contingent of very ambitious conservatives and “neoconservatives” who gained very lucrative livelihoods standing as the bulwarks against the rising power of the Left…but only to a point. Like the original Democrats of the 1820s, who saw slavery as a “thing” they could profit from, these new “conservatives” saw this as status quo contest that could enhance their stations.
Of course, what fell off the map were “the People”. The old joke going around then was that if Reagan wanted to invite “his kind of people” to an event in the White House, decency should dictate that he ask them to come in through the kitchen door.
So, when Reagan left office, the regular folks, mostly Christian, simply went into a kind of hiding, until Donald Trump found them and brought them back.
He rejuvenated them and they caught the Left napping, as we chronicled here in 2015-2016 before the election, and their turnout proved in November.
With the 2020 steal the People realized it was they, and not Donald Trump, the Left most needed to subdue. Game on.
But before Trump, there were others. Barack Obama made the august power of government into a royal thing with his speech under Greek columns, and more people than you know were repulsed; that world economies should be redesigned from the top-down, essentially taking “free markets” out of “capitalism”, and sacrificing liberty for sound administrative management.
Many candidates from the private sector were being sought by people such as myself who had seen what sort of devastation a bureaucratic government can inflict on every good idea that ever came down the line; from the Soviet Union to the CDC to The Disney Corporation.
Herman Cain comes to mind. 8 days younger than me, we hit it off well when I met him at a conference in Las Vegas. I interviewed him for a 2-parter at RedState.com, in 2011, which helped in getting me asked to leave that site since Herman wasn’t on their list as a viable 2012 candidate. (It was Mitt Romney who mugged the “sex stories” about Herman in 2012, not the Left.) Herman passed away in 2021, (they say of Covid).
But before Trump Herman Cain scared the bejeezus out of the Left and the status quo Establishment…in part because he was first, black, second, a Christian, and third, from the private sector.
So Donald Trump wasn’t the first to cross “the People’s” path. Both the inside-the-Beltway class and the Democrats feared anyone who could disprove by their own success formulas that what the Democrats had been selling to voters for generations was a total lie.
That said, a Natural Law reminder from the first settlers in Massachusetts and Virginia, to the Founders, then Lewis and Clark, and the trailblazers who followed them, thence to the Wright Brothers…
…Somebody always has to go first to find all these things out.
In that vein, for the past year I’ve been seeing/hearing many Trump supporters moaning how he blew it that first term by not hiring better advisors and staff. Too many let him down. Not being a political insider Trump had to rely on too many whispers in the ear that were often self-aggrandizing…and that is a major short-coming.
It doesn’t have to necessarily work that way.
Dr Larry Schweikart, the noted historian, @WallsOther on Twitter, has graciously noted the “shortcomings” of Abraham Lincoln, who arrived in Washington in 1861, already with a secession-of-states to deal with simply because he had been elected, and had virtually no one he could rely on for solid advice that wasn’t somehow tainted with at least some degree of self-promotion, as well as downright snobbery for this out-of-the-loop hick from Illinois.
Since the rise of the bureaucratic state, Woodrow Wilson era, for over 100 years now, presidents have had to rely on others to ensure they were capably and honestly being advised by people and who were on the same page as the President.
Obviously Donald Trump could find very few, for anyone in Washington who pledged allegiance to him immediately signed their own social-status death warrant.
So, in preparation for this next round, I’m sure Mr Trump has come up with some sort of “kitchen cabinet” arrangement from where he can do original thinking. I think Schweikart, Ben Carson, General Flynn, Mike Pompeo, and others can advise him as how best to establish an 8-16 year plan, reducing the spending and regulatory power of the federal government, and through them, properly liaised, the several states.
And shut the media completely out. We now know the true size of Media’s constituency, no more than 30%, and their ability to wreak havoc actually reduced greatly after that first bloody nose, so I imagine that in a short period The People can reassert control of their governments top-to-bottom, and return to gigging frogs down on Gray’s Creek.
