s I type this, Trump is in a church in Washington, listening to the British national
anthem played on a church organ. I'm hoping they'll play my favorite tune, Toccata
and Fugue in D Minor, next. I suspect they won't, but it would suit the mood of
the Democrats, and probably the Never Trumpers as well.
Unlike the Dems, some Never Trumpers are finally coming to grips with the existence of Donald J. Trump. George Will might be a hopeless case, but Walter Hudson at Pjmedia, a confessed never Trumper, says this:
The Obama years . . . sacked long-standing institutions and burned them to the ground. . . . Healthcare has been devastated. Race relations have been undermined. . . .
Voters wanted to be treated with a form of respect which Obama and his party do not understand.
All true, but it seems that the Never Trumpers, while a lot less rioty, teary, teddy-beary, and fetal-positiony than the Democrats, still don't quite get it. Why Trump and not, say, Ted Cruz or Rand Paul? Both candidates presented small-government conservatism more articulately than Trump. Yet they lost.
New Trump 20 trillion dollar bill
Hudson's explanation is that Trump's celebrity made the difference:
While never Trump folks like me were focused on his content, the plurality of voters in key states were captivated by his methods. . . . Gone are the days of campaigns won on policy. From now on, it's largely about production value.
I disagree.
The reason for Trump's success is the worst kept secret of all time, yet many
people still don't believe it: Trump was created by political correctness, and he
is its destroyer. Trump was entertaining because his lack of PC was liberating and
exhilarating to the voters. The Republican establishment never got that because
they never recognized PC as a serious threat.
They saw it as something that could be accommodated, and fighting it as a diversion
from their vision of government.
A couple of points
Trump's election demonstrates the truth of the maxim that an extreme begets its
opposite. PC created Trump; in today's PC environment, only a Trump could have
won.
When the Democrats call our greatest presidents fascists, not only do they degrade
the political dialogue; they create the idea that fascism isn't such a bad thing.
To my Democrat friends, I suggest just relax and count the days:
only 2,919 days until it's over. Not counting President Pence.
But freedom of speech is the most fundamental freedom. Societies that suppress it invariably evolve into autocracies; those hoping to achieve absolute power start by curtailing freedom of speech because speech is a necessary prerequisite for group action.
At the risk of being boring (I know, it never stopped me before), PC is being forced to pretend to believe what others want you to believe. In practice this means the Left's attack machine and its army of evil lawyers and vicious activists will go after your livelihood if you dare to publicly disagree with them.
Freedom of speech must be absolute or it is nothing. That includes the right to yell “grab 'em by the *****!” in a crowded theater showing Vagina Monologues, if you so desire. Crudity is an essential part of it: freedom to speak is freedom to offend. The never Trumpers were content to let this freedom slip away. Their candidates—Jeb, Rubio, Fiorina, and even Ted Cruz—dared not cross that line, and that is why they lost.
There were other factors, of course. Trump's optimism made the others look like Pat Paulsen. Ted Cruz's voice was too high, and Rand Paul was always leaning back, as if everyone else had bad breath. But even Rand Paul, the libertarian, was not as libertarian in theory as Trump was in practice. Rand Paul preached free speech; Trump practiced it.
Just in the past year we've seen how suppressing free speech creates reactionary movements like the alt-right, which prides itself on perfecting their trolling skills. They express their ethno-tribalist views not because they believe them, but because they are shocking and outrageous. But what is outrageous is that when our corporate overlords tried to block them, many conservatives felt no obligation to defend them.
In such an environment only a Trump, a multi-gazillionaire so bloody frickin' rich he need not care what anybody else says, could have succeeded. For you and me, if Macy's drops our product for saying something impolite, the prospect of losing our livelihoods looms before us. Trump just buys Macy's and fires everyone on the board.
PC made it impossible for anyone other than Trump to succeed. Trump can't be fired, he can't be bought, and (it appears) he absolutely will not stop tweeting, ever, until PC is dead. That is why he won. And we should celebrate that.
Shortened jan 21 2017 5:45 pm. Image added jan 23, 2017. Last edited jan 23 2017, 7:09 am.
Correction: An earlier version of this paper quoted Trump as saying “Grab 'em by the *****”. This has been corrected to “Grab 'em by the *****”.
