By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, December 10, 2015
The more analysts try to figure out Donald Trump’s
appeal, the more they sound baffled.
Pundits cite Trump’s verbal sloppiness and ridiculousness
as proof that he must soon implode. But Trump sees his daily bombast as an
injection of outrage for a constituency now hooked on someone who finally
voices their pent-up anger. The more reckless Trump’s doses of scattergun
outrageousness, the better the fix for his supporters.
Trump’s vague “make America great again” was the natural
bookend to Barack Obama’s even more vacuous “hope and change.” The popularity
of such empty slogans reflects a culture in which no one any longer trusts
institutions, the media, government, or politicians.
The public no longer respects U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, the IRS, the VA, or the GSA. Even the once-hallowed Secret
Service has become a near laughingstock of incompetency, corruption, and
politicization. Is the purpose of NASA really Muslim outreach, as NASA chief
Charles Bolden suggested in 2010?
The world that we are told about by our government bears
no resemblance to what we see and hear every day.
President Obama has exacerbated this current disconnect
between the public and its officials. In unserious fashion, he shares his
selfies, parades his annual Final Four picks, and jets off to Los Angeles to
appear on late-night talk shows, even as he hectors Americans in sermons about
their Islamophobia, their carbon footprints, their immigration xenophobia, and
their gun obsessions.
Did the public earn such presidential rebukes because it
believes that jihadism at home and the Islamic State abroad are more dangerous
than global warming? Or because disarming law-abiding citizens will not prevent
law-breaking criminals and terrorists from obtaining illegal weapons? Or
because it is unwise to open the borders to anyone who can make it into the
United States, few questions asked?
The first reaction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch
after the recent San Bernardino terrorist attack was to warn the country about
Islamophobia. Her implicit message to the families of the dead was not that the
government missed a terrorist cadre or let Islamic State sympathizers carry out
a massacre. Instead, she worried more about Americans being angry at the
inability of the tight-knit Muslim community to ferret out the extremists in
its midst.
So we live in an age of disbelief.
The government reports that a record 94.4 million
Americans are not in the labor force. That is almost a third of the country.
How can the same government declare that the official unemployment rate is only
5 percent?
Economists warn that a $20 trillion national debt cannot
be serviced without major calamities once interest rates rise. Yet even as
interest rates are scheduled to go up, the government still borrows nearly $500
billion a year. It calls that profligacy fiscal prudence, because the borrowing
is below the usual $1 trillion a year.
It may or may not have been wise for the Supreme Court to
sanction gay marriage, or for the Pentagon to allow women in the military to
join all combat units, or for the president to tacitly end border enforcement.
But these changes were not made by majority legislative
decision. And they have come thick and fast without time for the public to
digest their consequences. Instead, if a new idea or agenda lacks majority
support, then activists can confidently look for a court or bureaucracy to
implement change by top-down order.
In short, millions of citizens think the nation is headed
for a financial reckoning. They feel threatened by radical Islamic terrorism.
They sense that cultural and social stability has disappeared. And they know
that expression of these worries can be a thought crime — hounded down by
politicians, media, universities, and cultural institutions that do not enjoy
broad public support and are not subject to the direct consequences of their
own ideologies.
Amid these crises and the present absence of responsible
leadership, if there were not a demagogic Donald Trump ranting and raving on
the scene, the country would probably have to invent something like him.
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