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.
MAKE UP YOUR MIND....
I thought Trump was the next Hitler.
Republicans have Trump, followed by three candidates who lie about, or won’t address having been naturalized by the 14th Amendment. Ben Carson and Carli Fiorina would have been fine. Could it be that the quiet majority actually does understand that birth in a foreign country and to an alien parent, triple citizenship for Cruz’ at birth and double for the rest, is not natural born citizenship? If we believe in honoring, defending and protecting the Constitution, Trump is the only choice with a chance at defeating Hillary. This time the Democrat candidates are both natural born citizens while the Republicans, the party representing these four naturalized citizen(when Nikki Haley, proposed VP candidate is included) with hundreds of attorneys at least a few of whom might even have taken a constitutional law course from some one as competent as Obama and Cruz’ Larry Tribe, who know that naturalization precludes being president or vice president, chose not to vet its candidates again.
The Democrats have no reason to cover for the Republicans this time, as Obama and his campaign co-chair Clair McCaskill did for McCain with Senate Bill 2678, Feb 2008, a “Foreign-born Children of Military Citizens Natural Born Citizen Act”, which failed to pass, or the “Senator John Sidney McCain Natural Born Citizen Resolution” Senate Res. 511 in April 2008, co-sponsored by McCaskill, Leahey, Menendez, Obama and others. Either we suspend the Constitution for a while, or we admit that it doesn’t matter now that such smart people are interpreting our Constitution for us.
BALDERDASH. Americans have put up with this crap long enough. If Trump turns on us like the others have he cannot seal our fate. We are Americans.
Well he thinks Mexico is going to pay for it, even though Mexico already made it clear that it won’t
“Trump did vote for Obama”
That has been debunked. Didn’t happen.
...as will be our once proud nation. We had the opportunity handed to us on a silver platter but 40% of us got hoodwinked like the hapless, poorly educated fools Trump and his fellow democrats could count on.
I pray for my country.
He did run in 2008 and that was when Trump voted for him
It’s obvious and it shows how ridiculous and small they are. They just can’t face the truth
TDS is rampant over at The Federalist, isn’t it?
Mexico is going to learn real quick that under Trump we’re not their bitch, as we’ve been under Zero and under your idol, Dubya.
another birther chimes in
You said it
Texas: Where the illegal Mexicans vote for the illegal Canadian
It is true, because he has done it to every article that tells the truth about Trump that I posted
Really? Trump's position on taxes? Raise them for hedge fund managers. Immigration? Trump favors touchback amnesty. Trump's position on trade? Same as Bernie Sanders. Life issues? Keep the funding flowing for the wonderful things Planned Parenthood does. Second Amendment? Does he still support an assault weapons ban?
The big question is will he?
I read this last night. As usual Codevilla is right on the mark. Looks like he is getting a lot of flak in comments, so he must be right over the target. He is one of two people I always pay attention to, the other being Victor Davis Hanson. I’ve been reading his analysis for more than 30 years, and he is invariably correct in his assessments, even when I do not like them. This is not one of those instances as I have noticed many of the same data points.
“Donald Trump Is The Next Barack Obama”
Oh, nonsense. The two men are nothing alike. Obama actually serves core political beliefs...
LOL!
What is an Angerlo Codevilla?
Kinda sounds like that crappy car made in Detroit during 1970s.
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