There was a moment in the late spring of 2015 when I realized that the ground beneath our feet was shifting. During an appearance on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer was asked to predict the Republican and Democrat nominees for the 2016 election. He said rather confidently that the nominees would be “Jeb” Bush and Hillary Clinton. When asked to explain his reasoning, Dr. Krauthammer pointed out that Bush and Clinton had the money, the political infrastructure, and the backing of their respective party elites.
I found his predictions unsettling — partly because “Jeb” and Hillary represent dynastic houses whose mere mention sharply divides the American people and partly because their preordained anointments seem particularly distasteful in a nation that enjoys lecturing the rest of the world on “democracy.”
We were a decade and a half into “nation-building” projects in Afghanistan and Iraq and several decades into our grand mission of “making the world safe for democracy,” and voters were being told that they would have to choose between unlikable scions from two of America’s most despised politico-aristocratic families. Why? Because the moneyed elites had decided that a Bush or Clinton would again rule in the United States. That awful choice appeared indistinguishable from telling the people of Afghanistan or Iraq that they could vote for whomever they wanted to lead their nations — so long as that leader came from one of a handful of noble families preselected by Western intelligence agencies.
Making matters worse, it was well known how chummy the Bushes and Clintons are. President George Bush I reportedly thought of the credibly accused rapist Bill Clinton as another son. President Bush II still refers to Bill as his “brother” and Hillary as his “sister.” So a contest between “Jeb” and Hillary wasn’t really a contest at all. If they were the nominees, a member of the Bush-Clinton extended family would definitely return to the White House.
After hearing Krauthammer’s answer, I checked online social media platforms to see what regular Republican voters thought. They were livid. I had witnessed shades of this fury years before, when President Obama and Senate Democrats ignored traditional filibuster rules and rammed nationalized medicine (AKA Obamacare) through Congress. I had seen percolating anger grow more intense as Tea Party movements across the country struggled to elect Republicans who would actually represent their constituents. (News flash: Many of those RINO liars betrayed their voters, too.) After working so hard over three election cycles to arrest America’s descent into “woke” socialism and getting nothing in return other than broken promises and feckless weaklings such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Republican voters were in no mood to hear that 2016 would be the year for another Bush princeling or wicked Clinton queen.
There had been many contributing factors that led us to this consequential moment in American history: the societally destructive 2000 election, when America had no president-elect until mid-December; the psychological whiplash of the 9/11, anthrax, and D.C. sniper attacks; the “pre-emptive” wars and regime changes that transformed into decades-long occupations; Bush’s support for mass amnesty for illegal aliens; the risky (yet government-backed) mortgage securities that nearly collapsed the stock market; Obama’s government takeover of health insurance; Obama’s support for mass amnesty for illegal aliens; Obama’s decision to divide Americans by racial animus whenever possible; the realization that post-9/11 security protocols at airports and pervasive public surveillance are never going away; the realization that the PATRIOT Act has been retooled to spy on Democrats’ political enemies; the realization that Establishment Republicans such as Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn work to undermine grassroots Republicans; the realization that most elected Republicans (especially in D.C.) despise their voters and advance the interests of the administrative state, the Intelligence Community, and multinational corporations; the realization that most elected Democrats and Republicans pretend to fight one another, belong to the same Uniparty, and secretly want the same things.
These insidious cancers ate away at the national psyche, each a proximate cause of America’s twenty-first-century infirmity. The Bush vs. Clinton redux was the straw that broke the camel’s back. For regular voters who might have been sleepwalking toward another national nightmare filled with Jimmy Carter’s soul-crushing “malaise,” the Deep State’s theatrical pageantry during the 2016 election was simply too grotesque to ignore.
Within weeks of Krauthammer’s prediction, a well known businessman, celebrity, and political “outsider” took a ride down a golden escalator and changed everything. Donald Trump recognized the significance of the turbulent political winds. Republican voters recognized the unique opportunity they had to smash the Republican Establishment in the teeth. Even Democrat voters recognized the revolutionary moment in American history and pushed hard for their version of an “outsider”: Vermont communist Bernie Sanders, a man who would have likely won the Democrat party nomination had Hillary Clinton and Democrat elites not rigged their own primaries.
It’s worth remembering that Establishment Democrats cleared the primary field for Hillary. Only she, Bernie, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley competed in the first nominating contest, the Iowa caucuses. When Hillary barely bested Bernie in Iowa (with the closest margin in state history), O’Malley dropped out. And when Bernie won big in New Hampshire (by over twenty points), Hillary’s planned coronation looked far from certain. Ultimately, Hillary Clinton prevailed for three reasons: (1) “superdelegates” in the Democrat party vetoed primary voters’ preference for Sanders, (2) Obama’s corrupt DOJ threatened Bernie’s wife with criminal prosecution, and (3) Bernie refused to call out Democrat party officials for actively undermining his campaign.
Communist Bernie Sanders was never supposed to be serious competition for Hillary Clinton in 2016. She was supposed to annihilate him in spectacular fashion on her way to a certain nomination and use her landslide victory as a springboard for the general election. The fact that she managed to beat a relatively unknown Vermont hippie only by rigging the primaries proved that Democrat voters really did not like her.
It’s also worth remembering that Hillary’s campaign was not so quietly pushing for the candidacy of Donald Trump. While MSNBC hosts such as Joe Scarborough promoted Trump daily until he clinched the nomination, Hillary surrogates went on television and pretended to fear the possibility of facing Trump in the general election. They should have been afraid, but they most definitely were not. They couldn’t imagine an easier path to the White House for Hillary Clinton than a scenario in which she had only to beat Vermont communist Bernie Sanders and New York “reality show tycoon” Donald Trump.
The corporate news media gave Hillary every advantage. They ignored her culpability in the 2012 Benghazi attack. They laughed off the fact that she kept top-secret documents on a private server that foreign governments had repeatedly hacked. They pushed her Russia collusion hoax framing Donald Trump as a Russian asset — effectively conspiring with the Clinton campaign and Obama’s Intelligence Community to defraud the American people. They did everything they could to aid her in the presidential debates. They treated her victory as a foregone conclusion. And still she lost!
So much has happened since President Trump beat Hillary Clinton that it is easy to forget how revolutionary that moment in history was. For more than a century, the American Establishment had been “manufacturing consent” — pretending to respect the will of the people while engineering elections in which Americans had no real options. The planned Bush vs. Clinton general election of 2016 was a bridge too far. Americans detested the idea of another Bush or Clinton, and millions of irregular voters liked what Donald Trump had to say.
President Trump’s victory represented a massive shift in social consciousness. Because people are “awake,” the Establishment is afraid. Now, that’s what I’d call “progress.”
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Jesus Christ is King
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