By Patrick J. Buchanan
At the declaration by Donald Trump that he is a candidate for the
presidential nomination of the Republican Party, media elites of left
and right reacted with amusement, anger and disgust.
Though he has been a hugely successful builder-businessman, far more
successful than, say, Carly Fiorina, who has been received respectfully,
our resident elites resolutely refuse to take Trump seriously.
They should. Not because he will be nominated, but because the Trump
constituency will represent a vote of no confidence in the Beltway
ruling class of politicians and press.
Votes for Trump will be votes to repudiate that class, whole and entire, and dump it onto the ash heap
of history.
Votes for Trump will be votes to reject a regime run by Bushes and
Clintons that plunged us into unnecessary wars, cannot secure our
borders, and negotiates trade deals that produced the largest trade
deficits known to man and gutted a manufacturing base that was once “the
great arsenal of democracy” and envy of mankind.
A vote for Trump is a vote to say that both parties have failed
America and none of the current crop of candidates offers real hope of a
better future.
The first book in Arthur Schlesinger’s trilogy about FDR’s ascent to
power was “The Crisis of the Old Order.” That title is relevant to our
time. For there is today a crisis of the regime in America — a crisis of
confidence, a crisis of competence, a crisis of legitimacy.
People are agitating for the overthrow of the old order and a new
deal for America. For there is a palpable sense that the game is rigged
against Middle America and for the benefit of insiders who grow rich and
fat not by making things or building things, but by manipulating money.
Americans differentiate the wealth of a Henry Ford and a Bill Gates
from that of the undeserving rich whose hedge fund fortunes can exceed
the GDP of nations.
Trump says America is becoming a “dumping ground” for mass
immigration from the failed states of the Third World, that Mexico is
not “sending us her best and finest,” that China is stealing American
jobs, that invading Iraq was a blunder.
Politically incorrect and socially insensitive certainly, but is he entirely wrong?
Was not the Iraq war a disaster for which our foreign policy
priesthood and journalist-acolytes never paid the price that would be
exacted in other societies were thousands of soldiers to die and tens of
thousands to be wounded and maimed in so predictable a blunder?
Is it not true that among the millions of illegal immigrants who have
broken into our country the great majority has illegitimacy rates,
delinquency rates, dropout rates, drug use rates, crime rates, and
incarceration rates far higher than those of native-born Americans?
Is Trump wrong on this, or simply wrong to bring it up?
Has not mass immigration brought to America old diseases we once stamped out and new diseases we had never heard of?
Do Americans not have the right to decide who shall come to our country, how many, and whence they shall come?
Is there no correlation between a decrepit Maoist China rising to
become the greatest manufacturing power Asia has ever seen — and the $3
trillion to $4 trillion in trade deficits we have run with Beijing — and
the disappearance of a third of all American manufacturing jobs?
Who negotiated those deals? Who paid a price for the misery they brought to Rust Belt America?
There are precedents in U.S. history for outsiders — Norman Thomas
and Henry Wallace on the left, George Wallace and Ross Perot on the
right — to enter the presidential lists. And across the pond a similar
crisis of the old order is calling forth new people and new parties.
As in America, dominant parties like the Tories and Labour in Britain
are losing loyalists to the “a-plague-on-both-your-houses” dissident
parties.
Millions in Europe now want out of the EU. Old nations are coming
apart. Leftist parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have
arisen to defy Brussels and Berlin.
The Scottish National Party is of the left while the Independence
Party in the U.K. is of the populist right. In Southeastern Europe,
there have arisen parties of the extreme right.
This endless proliferation of parties, like the welcome being given
to Trump, testifies to the new reality: Everywhere, including here, old
parties are losing the people in whose name they presume to speak.
And the specter of Republicans, who just won an historic victory by
promising to do battle against President Obama, colluding with Obama to
surrender Congress’ right to amend trade treaties and sign on to a
Trans-Pacific Partnership pact that looks like another transfer of jobs
and factories to Asia, has re-enforced these sentiments.
If Trump wants to stake his claim as a different kind of Republican,
he will go to Washington and pound the Boehner-McConnell Congress until
it gives up on Obamatrade and fast track.
No comments:
Post a Comment