What political conclusions must be drawn from Trump’s Super Tuesday?
3 March 2016
In the aftermath of Super Tuesday, not even the political
establishment and media can deny that the United States is in the throes
of a profound political crisis. The candidacy of Donald Trump can no
longer be dismissed—as it has been until very recently by so many
pundits—as merely a bizarre and even somewhat entertaining sideshow.
While the outcome remains uncertain, the front-runner for the Republican
Party’s presidential nomination is a candidate whose persona and appeal
are of a distinctly fascistic character.
During the past few weeks, as it became increasingly evident that he
was poised to emerge from Super Tuesday as the leading candidate for the
Republican nomination, some of Trump’s critics began to acknowledge
that he was a “Frankenstein’s monster” created by the party’s
decades-long cultivation of racist elements. This can be dated all the
way back to the 1960s, when Richard Nixon inaugurated the Republican
Party’s “southern strategy,” which aimed to appeal to lingering
hostility to the civil rights movement. In August 1980, immediately
after winning the Republican nomination, Ronald Reagan chose
Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil rights workers had been
murdered 16 years earlier—as the site of his first public campaign
speech as the party’s presidential candidate.
There is no question but that the racist political culture of the
Republican Party has provided an ideal environment for the development
of Trump’s career and his present-day baiting of Muslims and immigrants
of Hispanic origin. However, inasmuch as overt appeals to racism are the
stock in trade of virtually all the Republican candidates, it does not
explain the political phenomenon of Trump’s dramatic rise.
More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has pitched his
message to the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of
Americans who feel—quite justifiably—neglected and scorned by a
political system that is indifferent to the problems with which they are
confronted every day of their lives. It was only a matter of time
before one or another right-wing demagogue would recognize the political
potential of an appeal to the economic and social insecurity of
millions of desperate people.
Exit polls taken of voters in the Republican primaries establish that
the phrase used by Trump supporters to describe the candidate is, “He
tells it like it is.” What does that mean? Quite simply, Trump proclaims
that “America is failing.” That assessment of the state of the country
sounds a good deal closer to the truth than the usual declaration—which
has become an obligatory applause line in every annual presidential
State of the Union address—that America is doing great.
Trump talks about high unemployment, low wages and the disastrous
state of health care. The fact that he has no solution to the
problems—or only absurd, reactionary and even insane “solutions”—counts
for less than the perception that Trump is describing a reality of
relentless economic decline that the voters can relate to. In an article
posted Tuesday, the
Los Angeles Times states:
Polling data from the early-voting states confirm that many of
Trump’s supporters complain they are falling behind financially. A
plurality of Trump voters so far stopped their education at high school,
limiting the job prospects.
It’s partly a reflection of the nation’s stagnant incomes since the
Great Recession. At $32,089, per capita income for white Americans has
only barely rebounded to what it was in 2005. Economic conditions in the
Southern states, which have lost manufacturing jobs at a steady clip,
have been particularly difficult as workplaces change and begin to
demand higher skills and education levels. In South Carolina, where
voters handed Trump an easy victory last month, new technology-rich
automotive manufacturing plants have replaced shuttered textile mills.
But the median household income, $44,929, still hasn’t caught up with
its inflation-adjusted, pre-recession high of $50,484, set in 2006.
Tennessee, which, like Georgia, is expecting record voter turnout on
Tuesday, saw its median income last peak in 1999, at $51,910, adjusted
for inflation; today it is $43,716.
Trump invokes a mythical past and promises to “Make America Great
Again.” America is the ancestral home of snake oil salesmen. Mark
Twain’s Duke of Bilgewater marketed a substance that he claimed would
remove tartar from teeth. Unfortunately, it also burned off the enamel.
Trump peddles his economic and political wares to the desperate and
discouraged. Some of his media and political critics believe that Trump
can be discredited if it can be shown that many of his businesses ended
up in bankruptcy court. They are sorely mistaken. The story of Trump’s
bankruptcies and subsequent resurrections offer a strange sort of hope
to those who know what it means to lose everything they have. If Trump
rose phoenix-like from the ashes of his many business failures, perhaps
he can share with others, and even the entire country, the secret
formula of his success. He will apply “The Art of the Deal” to the
problems of America. Trump offers the promise of miracles to those who
are on their last legs.
Whether or not Trump is worth the billions he claims to have is a
matter of debate. Whatever the exact amount of his personal fortune, it
seems strange that a right-wing real estate mogul should find support
among significant sections of low-income white workers. Why, it must be
asked, hasn’t this substantial layer of the population been drawn to the
left?
To answer this question one must take a hard look at what is generally represented as “left” politics in the United States.
Official “left” politics is constituted by the Democratic Party,
which is—no less (and in some respects even more) than the Republican
Party—the political instrument of Wall Street and substantial sections
of military and intelligence strategists. The Obama administration,
which entered the White House promising “change you can believe in,”
continued and expanded the policies of the Bush administration. Its
economic policies have been dedicated entirely to the rescue and
enrichment of Wall Street. Its signature social initiative was the
restructuring of health care in a manner designed to massively expand
the power and boost the profits of the insurance industry. Obama’s
administration has institutionalized assassinations as a central
instrument of American foreign policy and overseen a dramatic escalation
of attacks on democratic rights.
Of what, then, does the “leftism” of the Democratic Party consist?
Its “left” coloration is defined by its patronage of various forms of
identity politics—fixated on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual
preference—promoted by a broad swathe of political organizations and
groupings that represent the interests of affluent sections of the
middle class. They have no interest in any substantial change in the
existing economic structure of society, beyond achieving a more
agreeable distribution of wealth among the richest 10 percent of the
population.
The essential characteristics of this political milieu are
complacency, self-absorption and, above all, contempt for the working
class. In particular, the affluent “left” organizations—or, to describe
them more accurately, the “pseudo-left”—make little effort to suppress
their disdain for the white working class, for which they can find no
place within the framework of identity politics. A vast segment of
American workers is written off as “reactionary.” Their essential class
interests—decent jobs and a safe workplace, a livable income, a secure
retirement, affordable health care, inviolable democratic rights,
peace—are ignored.
In this insidious way, the struggle against racism acquires a
thoroughly demagogic character. Genuine socialists have always insisted
that all forms of divisions among workers—whether of ethnic, national or
racial character—can be overcome only to the extent that workers become
conscious of their common class identity and the underlying economic
source of their oppression.
This is no less true in the fight against other forms of
discrimination related to gender and sexual identity. The attitude of
socialists toward such important democratic issues is that they must be
fought for on the basis of the political mobilization of all sections of
the working class against capitalism.
The hostility of the pseudo-left organizations to this perspective is
so great, they have declared that the slogan “Black Lives Matter” must
be counterposed to the elemental democratic conception that “All Lives
Matter.” This reactionary stance plays into the hands of Trump and his
ilk.
As for the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the efforts to promote this
corrupt veteran of two reactionary administrations—that of Bill Clinton
and Barack Obama—as a champion of the oppressed is nothing less than
grotesque. Her presidential bid is a monument to the deceit of identity
politics. The administration of her husband presided over the repeal of
the Glass-Steagall Act, which cleared the path for the corruption that
led to the crash of 2008. The first President Clinton eviscerated
welfare payments, which had a devastating impact on the living standards
of millions of African-American workers. The crime bill passed with the
support of the Clinton Administration led to a vast increase in the
rate of incarceration.
And yet, it is argued that the election of this Lady Macbeth of
American politics—who instigated the Libyan invasion that led to the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—will be a triumph for American
womanhood! The pillar of “left-liberal” politics in the United States,
The Nation,
carried an article by a wealthy feminist in a recent issue entitled,
“Why I Am Supporting Hillary Clinton, With Joy and Without Apologies.”
The author noted, in passing, that her daughter was on the payroll of
the Clinton campaign.
The campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, broadly identified as a
socialist, has gained widespread support and demonstrated the existence
of a desire within large sections of the working class for an
alternative to capitalism. Significantly, polls have indicated that
Sanders would do substantially better against Trump than Clinton.
However, by conducting his campaign within the Democratic Party,
Sanders is directing the popular opposition to capitalism into a dead
end. With each passing day his campaign acquires an ever more
conservative character. He now defines his socialism as nothing more
than support for Social Security. Observing the strict conventions of
bourgeois politics, references to the working class have disappeared
entirely from his speeches. Sanders now identifies himself as a “fighter
for the middle class.”
Sanders, in this way, seeks to block the emergence of an independent
movement of the working class against capitalism and for socialism.
The Republican Convention is still three months away. The November
election is more than a half-year away. The explosive character of
international politics, the extreme economic instability and the growing
social tensions within the United States impart to the 2016 election a
high degree of uncertainty. However, the Trump phenomenon is a serious
political warning. The American political system is rotten to the core.
Even if Trump were to disappear tomorrow, it would not be long before
another fascistic demagogue would emerge to take his place. There is no
small number of discontented military and police-intelligence
operatives, with substantial combat experience and access to serious
fighting forces, who are preparing to enter the political arena.
The building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working
class in the United States is an urgent political task. We call on the
many supporters and readers of the
World Socialist Web Site to draw the necessary conclusions from the political situation and to get off the sidelines and join and fight to build the
Socialist Equality Party.
David North
President Obama “has wreaked such havoc on America,” Sasse said in my interview with him.
“America is in dire times,” the freshman U.S. senator told me, fresh off his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C. “We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis. And we have to begin that constitutional recovery by being sure of how to affirm first principles first.”
FROM AMERICAN THINKER:
I managed to sneak into a Ted Cruz rally Wednesday night in suburban Kansas City. Upon leaving, I no longer counted myself among the uncommitted. I and thousands of others in this overflow crowd had to be thinking the same thought, “Why would a...
The nation has barely survived eight years of Barack Obama. It will be unrecognizable after four years of Hillary Clinton, let alone eight.
March 4, 2016
Why I am Supporting Ted Cruz for President
That is not to take anything away from the other candidates. This is easily the best Republican crop in anyone’s memory. Even the remaining go-along, get-along candidate, John Kasich, would make for a better president than the five go-along, get-alongs the Republicans have nominated since 1988.
If Cruz is not nominated, I will vote for the Republican who is.
Those luminaries who insist they will not vote for Donald Trump if he is the nominee, confuse idealism with narcissism. The nation has barely survived eight years of Barack Obama. It will be unrecognizable after four years of Hillary Clinton, let alone eight. To worry about the Republican “brand” while the country speeds down the diamond lane towards serfdom flirts with treason.
Cruz represents conservative values more consistently, intelligently and forcefully than any candidate in the field. I recall seeing George Bush speak during the 2000 campaign. He used a briefing notebook to guide him through his speech. Lacking a fully formed understanding of conservative principles, he had to remind himself how he felt about a particular issue, and Bush was a more serious conservative than Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or his own father.
Barack Obama, of course, has no gift for impromptu speech.
At a campaign event in Virginia in June 2008, Obama was making an impassioned speech about the wasteful use of ER services in the treatment of childhood asthma when, suddenly, he seemed to lose his place on the teleprompter.
As he signaled his distress, he stuttered badly, talked about the use of a “breathalyzer,” corrected himself to say “inhalator,” laughed, stuttered some more, and blamed his performance on not having much sleep in the last 48 hours. The right word, by the way, is “inhaler.”
It is unimaginable that Cruz would falter so. At the rally he spoke for forty-five minutes without notes, let alone a teleprompter. His speech was a mix of time tested tropes and new riffs pulled from the headlines. He did not stutter, stammer, or search for a word. There was an ideological coherence to his presentation that I have not seen from a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan.
Nor was this just all talk. In his three-plus years in the Senate, Cruz has deviated from his stated principles far less than any of his colleagues and has the stab wounds in his back to prove it. One can compromise, Cruz noted, on details like, say, the top marginal rate on taxes. What one cannot compromise on are core beliefs.
Of this year’s candidates, no one has a more solid core than Cruz. One cannot imagine him proposing a David Souter for the Supreme Court or expanding Medicaid or creating a new federal agency. For obvious reasons, one cannot have quite the same confidence in Marco Rubio, an otherwise exceptional candidate.
If Cruz has a weakness as a candidate it is that he can sometimes seem preachy and unpersonable. Watching him last night I got a sense of why that might be. Given his roots in the evangelical tradition, he is fundamentally a big tent speaker. That style does not work well on a small screen.
Charm is a valuable commodity in televised politics, and no candidate has more of it than Rubio. All factors being equal, charm carries the day, but in deciding between Cruz and Rubio, all factors are not equal. Besides, the Republican nominee will likely be running against a candidate with no charm at all.
A final question, perhaps a preliminary question, is whether Cruz qualifies as a natural born citizen. This is a subject I have researched at some length. In merely raising this question earlier in the campaign, I was smacked with the Scarlet R for racism by two different writers for the left-leaning TPM.
The delusional Amanda Marcotte insisted that my argument was “just an elaborate mechanism for conveying, without coming right out and saying, that ‘real’ Americans are white -- preferably of the blonde and WASPy stripe.” No, Amanda, it is a legitimate question, one that the left will surely raise if Cruz is the nominee.
The founders, I am convinced, were less concerned that a child be born in the United States than that he born to two parents of undivided loyalty. As to Cruz and Rubio, the courts would likely rule in favor of both of them, with Cruz, despite his Canadian birth, having the stronger case. I would like to say I welcome input on this subject, but I don’t. I have been inundated with input for months. Basta! Please! Tell me something I don’t know.
After I posted a picture from the Cruz rally on Facebook, a liberal friend from New York responded, “Cruz? Really Jack? He would suffer a Goldwater style defeat.” No, the most principled Republican in thirty years would be running against the least principled Democrat in the history of the Republic.
This is a match-up I would enjoy. These are debates for which I would have friends over and make pop
corn. This campaign season, finally, would be fun.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/why_i_am_supporting_ted_cruz_for_president_.html#ixzz41xlMlUJr
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MORE HERE:
Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information by using her private, unsecured server to store sensitive documents makes it look more and more as though a criminal case is being developed against her by the FBI. One by one, her campai...
Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton may be the most pathetic presidential nominee of any major political party in our nation's history.
Just How Bad a Candidate Will Hillary Be?
I asked last March, "Just How Bad a Candidate Would Hillary Be?" As Hillary locks up the Democrat nomination, the question is "Just How Bad a Candidate Will Hillary Be?" Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton may be the most p...nomination, the question is "Just How Bad a Candidate Will Hillary Be?" Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton may be the most pathetic presidential nominee of any major political party in our nation's history.
First dispel the myth of her husband as a consummate politician. Bill was a flop as governor of Arkansas and as president of the United States. Bill managed to be the only Democrat in Arkansas state history to lose re-election as governor and won two presidential elections with a minority of the popular vote. He entered the White House with huge Democrat majorities at every level of government and left with Democrats in the minority at every level of government.
Bill Clinton was impeached, disbarred, and found in contempt of court while president, which was a worse record of determined malfeasance than any president in history. As an ex-president, Clinton seems frail, dull, and testy – as evidenced most recently by his snapping angrily at a veteran in South Carolina asking about Hillary ending corruption in the Veterans Administration.
Since my article last March, the women who have been harassed, threatened, and raped by Clinton have served notice that they will not be quiet while his wife, Hillary, ignores and dismisses them. This is a problem Hillary has never addressed but cannot ignore, as Republican candidates have made clear, in a presidential election.
The hideous behavior of Hillary towards these women brutalized by her husband is one problem. A related problem is the limp appeal of "women's issues" in electoral campaigns. Consider the utter failure in the 2014 election cycle of every candidate who based a campaign on "women's issues." Further, the failure of Hillary to attract young
women in primaries against an ancient Vermont Socialist shows how little she appeals to female voters.
If there is an issue that motivates Americans across the spectrum, it is trust, because we have been lied to so often and so cavalierly by Washington politicians. No sane person trusts Hillary. She not only lies even when the truth would serve as well, but she lies about telling the truth, as in her recent CBS interview. She lies almost as much as her husband.
Compounding this pathological dishonesty are the natural consequences of aging, obesity, and health problems that strongly suggest a slowing down of her mental processes. The ravages of immoral life and old age clearly have
reduced her husband into a very dull mind, and it is likely that many of the same abuses of youth harrowing her husband are affecting her, too.
There is another aspect to her lying. Hillary has a very ordinary brain, artificially inflated by the left because leftists always consider those who agree with them "smart." In college she followed the familiar path of lackey to leftism. Hillary failed the District of Columbia Bar Examination; nearly everyone who takes it passes. Her legal career was
constructed around her husband's political success.
Hillary has for decades been surrounded by flacks and toadies whose work is making Hillary seem and feel intelligent. Some of the emails released from her server note that these minions, among themselves, note that she
is often confused. The numerous unforced errors in her campaign also suggest a rather mean old lady used to bullying rather than reasoning. This, too, becomes over time a mental limp, a cognitive sloth, an atrophied intellect.
The stench of criminal conspiracy follows Hillary, and that is because Hillary is so utterly conspiratorial in nature, but these crimes are also so frequent that if the FBI and Justice Department does nothing, then the Justice Department itself may face future investigation – indeed, some of us may ask why we even need a department to protect criminals like Hillary.
Finally, Hillary cannot embrace that "change" Americans want when she has been a Washington insider so long. How can Hillary campaign for those goals in a general election when the only real selling point she has is
"experience"? There is nothing Hillary says that is not hopelessly tired and hackneyed rhetoric, and nothing that inspires hope.
Forget the fact that she is finally dispatching the non-Democrat running against her for the Democrat nomination, and ignore the general polls today, which mean nothing. Hillary will be swamped this November.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/02/just_how_bad_a_candidate_will_hillary_be.html#ixzz41gVqacHm
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