Donald Trump became president because large numbers of traditional Democrat voters unexpectedly came over to his side. Some of them voted for Mr Trump, while many others did not bother to vote for Hillary Clinton and stayed home.
It really is no more complicated than that.
By dumping white working men, the political wing of the “intellectual, yet idiot” wing of the Democrat Party forgot its basic navigation skills, and with a Freudian slip, jettisoned as excess baggage the anchors of its political identity since 1896; the “working man” and “breadwinner”.
So suddenly they find today they are a rudderless vessel listing hard to port without a sextant or compass, having auctioned their 19th century guide on navigation on Amazon so they could buy Google Earth apps for their cell phones. The Percy Fawcetts of modern politics, with no maps for a trackless land, no bearers to tote their luggage, still Democrats hope to find that lost city of the Incas.
A lot of fine Americans were lost to the Democrats in that transaction, only they are just now beginning to calculate the magnitude of their loss. It never dawned on these Democrats that one cannot be both a member of a very small club of elitists yet still claim majority rule over millions of minions (as their sensibilities tell them the are entitled to do) without either giving those voting minions something in return or at least rigging the system to make it appear they were elected by a majority in the first place.
Tossing their white, breadwinning excess baggage overboard may have finished the Democrats, for there doesn’t seem to be any bloc of unaffiliated voters out there to replace them, or, having no power in the key places in government and bureaucracy, any way they can raise the bribe price to reel them in.
As is stands today, there is virtually no lie Democrats can come up with that there isn’t standing off to the side several million Americans who can roll up their sleeves, bare their arms and show the scars proving that Democrat promises aren’t so.
What to do? What to do?
C S Lewis once said that he couldn’t write a sequel to “The Screwtape Letters” because he became so uncomfortable trying to see mankind through the eyes of Satan. Since I spent half my life on pretty good terms with Ol’ Clootie, I’ve never had that problem so can take a stab at how both delusional and pragmatic Democrats might see their way forward.
It ain’t pretty.
Already we’re seeing articles from The Hill and AP, hopeful articles about a new dawn for Democrats just over the hill in 2018. These are aimed at, as I said, the delusional Dem0crats who are also encouraged to see, also via the media, a Trump presidency already spiralling out of control. Maybe the Democrats can take back the House soon, they beam.
I assume the objective here is fundraising and not vote-getting, witness the spin on the recent win in Kansas of Ron Estes, to take the seat of Mike Pompeo, who moved onto to become Trump’s CIA director. You see, Estes only beat the Democratic challenger by seven points in probably the reddest state in America, while in 2016 Pompeo had won that seat by 31 points.
The devil of course is in the details, namely that Estes is new, his highest position in Kansas, that of glamour-less state treasurer. He is indeed an unknown quantity. So over 100,000 normal R-voters did not show up to vote in this special election, while the D’s under-voted by only 25,000. The Dems got about as good as they could get in any election.
True, Estes can yet make himself vulnerable next time around, only probably to no benefit to Democrats. Delusional Dems won’t see this, but pragmatic Dems do.
You see, and you will find this true around the country, there are two active wings of the Republican Party now; the Trump (People’s) wing and the Establishment wing. The Establishment is a known quantity, with a known history, especially for inaction since it was promoted to power in 2010, largely by the same voters who now comprise the Donald Trump wing, hoping to prod it along. They in part hired Trump to get the GOP-e into line. Conservatives, both real and faux, flit back and forth between these two camps depending on the issue, so indeed, we will see a few head-to-heads in the primaries in a little over a year, depending on how the GOP moves forward with Trump’s legislative agenda in the coming months.
So there are delusionals in the GOP as well, those who suffer under the illusion that the voters of the United States actually gave them a mandate to do what they’d already been doing since 2010…nothing. What they were in fact given was a Commission by the People, namely to carry through with the promises of Donald Trump. That is the common thread that run through every red district in America.
So, in the eyes of the pragmatic Democrats, this potential GOP intra-party contretemps offers no solace for Democrats in Kansas, since there is a limit to the number of votes even the most recognized Democrat could get in that state. This is because, as in most red states, open season has been declared. Nationwide, GOP infighting is less about policy and most about how best to defeat…not manage, not neutralize, but dismantle…the hardcore Leftwing elements of the Democrat Party wherever found in America. In Kansas’ 4th District, this is probably represented by the faculty and liberal arts student body at Wichita State University, the state teachers union, and assorted state and local government employees. Not very many. The financial backing for the Democrat challenger, James Thompson, from hard core national leftwing groups such as DailyKos and some Bernie Sanders funding groups, tends to bear this out, none of which has any sizeable popular support in Kansas.
The key to understanding “delusional Democrats” then, is that they believe, among other lunacies, that money can still buy elections, notwithstanding the gigantic size of the rat-hole Miss Hillary poured her money down in 2016.
Still, hope springs eternal for the delusionals.
So, my title should give you an idea of the existential dilemma for the Democrats’ pragmatic wing, for as long as they remain the party of the Left, their day will never come. At least not via honest electoral process, and on this, both delusionals and pragmatics agree. This is not heartening
Of course, the Democrats can always go socialist-Bernie all the way, all the time.
Bernie Sanders is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest true-believing political figure of the 21st Century. Cut out of the Karl Marx mold, like Marx’s view of the 19th Century working class, Sanders entire view of the American common man, who he so awfully wants to save, was gained at the library. His knowledge of American liberty and freedom is strictly Sacco and Vanzetti anarchy. A deep hole swallows both his intellect and his soul. His comment at Liberty University that America was born on racist principles was one of the most vacuous lies ever uttered by an American politician, and one utterly indefensible in the light of history.
Bernie is old, (older than me) and may not live to see 2020 as an active candidate, but his kind of uni-vision for the ignobility of the human spirit really resonates well with younger peoples, much as Eugene McCarthy did with flower children in the 1960s. No one could really explain why the hipsters took to that dull man back then, but they did. So I won’t try now. “It’s a mystery.”
Indeed.
Of course, an all-socialist, all-the-time Democrat Party could lock up as much as 30% of the American electorate, which is where they are headed anyway if Trump keeps his promises This is not what a resurgent Democratic Party can afford to allow itself to become. Especially since they can’t get back the baggage they’ve thrown overboard, at least until those with a living memory of Democrat lies to the working class have all passed on, say, in 35 years.
And since it’s clear Trump is not a potted plant, his offerings of new opportunities for those white breadwinners will speed that process even more.
Which leads us to consider what will happen to that voting bloc of the Democrats called the “client estate”, or plantation, which I would argue to Bernie is America’s (and his party’s) greatest sin. That will take a generation to clean up, but look for the exodus to begin by the end of Trump’s first term. Remember, Dr Ben Carson is largely in charge there.
Of course, pragmatic Democrats could also try to pull another Bill Clinton out of their hats, a liberal posing as a centrist. A Mark Warner (without the aw-shucks or political savvy) comes to mind. My own view is that won’t happen with anyone carrying a D for at least another 20 years, again, because there is still a too recent memory of the 1993-200o Clinton flim flam, which the unwise Democrats decided to remind everyone about all the way into 2016. They would have been wiser to let those sleeping dogs lie.
Finally, yes, I know, the Democrats can also start an armed insurrection. In fact, to achieve the kind of power the Left wants, that is their only hope.
But not likely.
True, they’ve run out of electoral options. I’ve discussed this option elsewhere, but the giant catch is, about 60% of the red states wishes they would try, since we still have all the guns. As we’ve already seen, Dems don’t even have to work hard to seize Berkeley. Maybe a few other campuses, maybe even the entire states of California, Oregon and Washington, where the police may, I repeat may, join their side. Their only problem is that theirs isn’t an Alamo situation, waiting for reinforcements from Sam Houston. To gain what they want, they have to go all Genghis Khan on America, and again, as I said, we have all the guns.
So the far more Christian, and American, thing would be to lay out a trail of bread crumbs for the moderates in the Democrat Party (there are many) to follow in order to rejoin the community of constitutional Americans. Trump is actually trying that now.
This is the third wing of the Democrats, its silent wing, we haven’t spoken about, but need to say more about now inasmuch as the media will never recognize them until they take back the Party at a convention.
So Jim Webb, call your office. It’s not my circus.
I’m a hard core conservative, but my conservatism extends only to the borders of the Constitution. Inside those borders I may debate, but will never have any harsh animosity with those left of center of the Constitution, as long as that document is honestly recognized by all participants as defining the field of play, the rules of play and the scoreboard…and at the end of the day we all kneel at the same altar and pledge our loyalty to the same overarching political theology..
Until 1976, that used to be presumed in American politics, even when it wasn’t.
If we can achieve this, we will no longer be worried about what our schools will be teaching our children that might distance them from the constitutional foundations of our freedoms, or the binding underlying moral principles we know to be universal among all faiths.
Securing this generation-to-generation passing of our culture and institions to our heirs, we will be able to think of America as an ideal for a millennium instead of mere generations.
A resurgent From-the right-middle Democrat Party has to be a part of that process.
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VASSAR BUSHMILLS
Contact: vbushmills@yahoo.com
Publications: Famous Common People I Have Known and Other Essays
Donald Trump, the Common Man and the American Theology of Liberty
(Both books in Kindle format only, Publishers and agents welcome, as both need to be revised)
Support: Yes, I’ve never been paid a nickel to write.
Donations can be made to vbushmills@thesandsinstitute.org via Paypal
