Posted on 03/01/2016 5:37:11 PM PST by Kaslin
The difference between Donald Trump and Barack Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies.
The Obama years have brought America to the brink of transformation from constitutional republic into an empire ruled by secret deals promulgated by edicts. Civics classes used to teach: “Congress makes the laws, the president carries them out, judges decide controversies, and we citizens may be penalized only by a jury of our peers.”
Nobody believes that anymore, because no part of it has been true for a long time. Barack Obama stopped pretending that it is. During the twentieth century’s second half, both parties and all branches of government made a mockery of the Constitution of 1789. Today’s effective constitution is: “The president can do whatever he wants so long as one-third of the Senate will sustain his vetoes and prevent his conviction upon impeachment.”
Obama has been our first emperor. A Donald Trump presidency, far from reversing the ruling class’s unaccountable hold over American life, would seal it. Because Trump would act as our second emperor, he would render well-nigh impossible our return to republicanism.
Today, nearly all the rules under which we live are made, executed, and adjudicated by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and countless boards and commissions. Congress no longer passes real laws. Instead, it passes broad grants of authority, the substance of the president’s bureaucracy decides in cooperation with interest groups.
Nancy Pelosi’s remark that we would know Obamacare’s contents only after it passed was true, and applicable to nearly all modern legislation. The courts allow this, pretending that bureaucrats sitting with their chosen friends merely fill in details. Some details! Americans have learned that, as they say in DC, if you are not sitting at one of these tables of power, “you’re on the menu.”
Trump’s claim to be an enemy of rule-by-inside-deal is counterintuitive. His career and fortune have been as participant and beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others. Crony capitalism is the air he breathes, the only sea in which he swims, his second nature. His recipe for “fixing” America, he tells us, is to appoint “the best people”—he names some of his fellow crony capitalists—to exercise even more unaccountable power and to do so with “unbelievable speed.” He assures us that, this time, it will be to “make America great again.” Peanuts’ Lucy might reply: “This time, for sure!”
In recent years, Obama and the Democratic Party (with the Republican leadership’s constant collusion) have prevented Congress from voting to appropriate funds for individual programs and agencies. They have lumped all government functions into “continuing resolutions” or “omnibus bills.” This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, shielding elected officials from popular scrutiny, relieving them of the responsibility for supporting or opposing what the government does. This has enabled Obama to make whatever deals have pleased him and his Republican cronies.
Trump touts his own capacity to make good deals. But good for whom? And who is to say what is good? Who or what causes would benefit from continuing government by secret deals? Who or what would lose? Trump’s stated objective is to wield whatever power might be necessary to accomplish whatever objectives upon which he—in consultation with whomever—might choose from time to time. But the difference between Trump and Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies.
By contrast, the U.S. Constitution of 1789, as explained by James Madison, envisages a continuous mutual effort at persuasion among the American people’s many parts, to “refine and enlarge the public views” and to result in ”decisions based on the “cool and deliberate sense of the community.” For two centuries, the government’s main decisions have happened through open congressional proceedings and recorded votes. That’s the republic we used to have.
Like Obama, Trump is not about persuading anybody. Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them. Throughout history, this style of politics has been the indispensable ingredient for wrecking republics, the “final cause” that transforms free citizens into the subjects of emperors.
This style of politics has grown, along with a ruling class that rejects the notion that no person may rule another without that person’s consent. As I have shown at length elsewhere, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.
This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate. The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the “country class” for returning the favor with interest.
Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class’s favorite epitaphs—racist, sexist, etc., and, above all, stupid; they have had careers and reputations compromised by speaking the wrong word in front of the wrong person; endured dictates from the highest courts in the land that no means yes (King), that public means private (Kelo), that everyone is entitled to make up one’s meaning of life (Casey), but that whoever thinks marriage is exclusively between men and women is a bigot (Obergefell).
No wonder, then, that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.
Trump’s voters expect precisely such turnabout. Within good measure, not only would this right any number of wrongs and restore some balance in our public life, it is also indispensable for impressing upon the ruling class and its constituents that they too have a stake in observing the limits and niceties that are explicit and implicit in our Constitution.
But not only do opposing sets of wrongs not make anything right. As I have argued (Sophocles did it a lot better), trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.
Neither Obama nor Trump seem to know or care that cycles of reciprocal resentment, of insults and injuries paid back with ever more interest and ever less concern for consequences, are the natural fuel of revolutions—easy to start and soon impossible to stop. America’s founders, steeped in history as few of our contemporaries are, were acutely aware of how easily factional enmities deliver free peoples into the hands of emperors. America is already advanced in this vicious cycle. The only possible chance of returning it to republicanism lies in not taking the next turn, and in not following one imperial ruler with another.
Home run. At least one person gets it.
I agree, no imperial dictators! Vote Trump and save the world from Hillary.
“Doesn’t matter, when you’re losing this badly you resort to anything and everything....including lying.”
I can hardly believe how much of that I’ve seen here in the last few months. It’s why I keep saying that I’ll be glad when Trump takes the nomination. This destructive infighting has got to stop.
Trump will still need Congress to impeach, convict and remove Supreme Court justices, other federal judges and opposition members of Congress.
bmk
>> As I have argued (Sophocles did it a lot better), trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it
I gather the author is unaware of Trump’s self-funding.
Or maybe just the money saved by cutting off entitlements to illegals will be enough to buy the wall.
Anti-Trump are rapid and the reason I pretty much stay away from here. It’s reached a low that is insulting to me.
Not sure how it get so far, but it has. Cruz has shown himself to be a very little man.
I admit I just love seeing all the gnashing of teeth from so many quarters - we’ve been living in some weird matrix for years and finally, light is shining through to expose them all.
Looks like the “Trump Effect” has smoked out another phony “conservative” media outlet that’s really just another mouthpiece for the GOPe side of the modern aristocracy’s Uniparty.
For the record, the word is ‘epithets’ not ‘epitaphs’. I guess Angelo was agitated when he wrote the piece.
The anti-Trump rabidness is only gonna get worse, but it’almost over for the GOPe. Trump is on his way to the White House.
1)
“I think the white voters who seem to believe that Trump represents their turn to get revenge will be equally disappointed,...”
I for one am not after revenge; I am after our borders being honored and secured. Trump is the only one I think might - I emphasize, might - do something about that. Without that, the nation, as a nation, is lost - period.
I am equally convinced the former Canadian, with the CFR wife, would never secure our borders. He would be much sound and fury, signifying nothing.
2)
“The real fault of the GOP is that they honestly didn’t know how to respond to Obama’s unconstitutional acts because he acted so fast and so aggressively...”
I am convinced that the RNC (I refuse to call them the GOP - there is nothing grand about them) knew exactly what Obama would do, and secretly approved. They thus huffed and puffed, and did nothing. They are mostly globalists, just like the DNC.
We need a nationalist.
We have gone absolutely insane - even after 8 years of Obama, we still have folks claiming that our best hope to attain the WH is every bit as bad as the worst that they have - there’s some serious brain damage out there or these are folks who call themselves Conservative Patriots but who actually work for the other side - either way, we are screwed if folks keep listening to this kind of crap.
By their own admission, Trump already has all the resources he needs for his empire/crony capitalism! Why would he want to be the president to keep these resources? Wouldn’t it be easier to let hillary have her way?
Are they saying he runs to ensure he wins the primary so he can lose to hillary?
Isn’t that the most stupid move - a successful business person spending a fortune, exhausting himself, getting attacked on all sides to get what he is already enjoying?
AND, does Trump have a crystal ball that tells him he will win the primary but lose to hillary?
Their theories on what a Trump presidency would be like defy logic and common sense.
I know, sad isn't it?
Well, that makes me feel better. After listening to the media elite, I thought that Trump was the Anti-Christ.
Obama's whole adult life, bespeaks his hatred of traditional American values--and hatred of rooted American families. Do we need to review his mentors; the Church with which he was affiliated for 20 years; his day dreams over a Marxist Luo father, from Kenya?
Donald Trump clearly loves America; clearly identifies with Americans, American culture & an American future.
While he is still a work in progress (the progress every one on the Conservative side went through at one point), he is probably already the most Conservative in the race, personality-wise. (See Trump: Metaphor For American Conservatism.)
Of course, Obama is deliberately trying to fundamentally change America from what we value. He hates us; but Rubio is not up to dealing with him. Trump is far more up to the job.
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