By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, February 05, 2019
As he stands to address the nation tonight, President
Donald Trump represents a genuine crisis in the American political order, but
it is not the crisis we hear about from rage-addled Democratic hyper-partisans
and their media cheerleaders. The fundamental cause of our current convulsion —
studiously ignored by almost all concerned — is this: In the United States, the
ruling class does not rule. At least, it does not rule right
now.
Consider the context.
The ladies and gentlemen of Goldman Sachs liked Mrs.
Clinton a great deal in 2016, and their generous donations to her presidential
campaign outnumbered their donations to Donald Trump’s campaign by an
incredible 70-to-1 margin. Mrs. Clinton was in fact the largest single
recipient of Goldman Sachs–affiliated donations that year, whereas Trump’s
presidential campaign was way down the list behind not only Mrs. Clinton’s
campaign but also the legislative campaigns of such Democrat powers as Steny
Hoyer of Maryland, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and newcomer Kyrsten Sinema of
Arizona. The results were similar for many other financial firms: 19-to-1 at
JPMorgan, 7-to-1 at Wells Fargo, 27-to-1 at Citigroup, 10-to-1 at Bank of New
York, etc. Across the commercial banking industry nationwide, Mrs. Clinton
out-raised Trump by a nearly 7-to-1 margin. She beat him 17-to-1 among venture
capitalists, 8-to-1 among hedge funds, and 7-to-1 among private-equity firms.
Among people associated with Harvard, Mrs. Clinton’s
donations outperformed Trump’s by an an even more incredible 200 to 1. In fact,
no Republican even cracked the top 15 at Harvard, and Marco Rubio, at No. 17,
didn’t even crack the six-digit mark — and the first of his five digits is a 1.
At Princeton, it was Clinton 209-to-1. It was 128-to-1 at Yale.
Mrs. Clinton enjoyed a 100-to-1 margin of support among
people associated with Facebook; 76-to-1 among Google employees; 135-to-1 at
Apple. Mrs. Clinton beat Trump by only a 4-to-1 margin at Exxon Mobil and
3-to-1 at Walmart.
Presumably, the votes of these donors were distributed in
roughly the same way, along with their general sympathies and allegiances.
But money is not the only currency in politics.
Mrs. Clinton also enjoyed the endorsements of the former
chairman and CEO of General Motors, the executive chairman of Delta, the former
president of Boeing, the chairman and CEO of Salesforce, the founder and
chairman of Costco, the CEO of Airbnb, the CEO of Netflix, the founder of DISH,
the CEO emeritus of Qualcomm, the former CEO of Avon, the CEO of Tumblr, the
former chairman and CEO of Time Warner, the chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts,
the owner of the Chicago Cubs, and many others. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich had
planned to hold a Trump fund-raiser in his home and was bullied by his peers
into canceling the event.
Among the nation’s 100 largest newspapers in 2016, only
two — the Las Vegas Review-Journal
and the Florida Times-Union — endorsed
Donald Trump. Most endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and those included the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington
Post. USA Today, which does not
typically endorse candidates, did not endorse Mrs. Clinton but ran a
“not-Trump” anti-endorsement, and other newspapers did so, too — more of them,
in fact, than endorsed Trump.
Mrs. Clinton won the majority of the vote in almost every
state capital — 47 of them. Trump won Carson City, Bismarck, and Pierre, the
micro-capitals, respectively, in Nevada, North Dakota, and South Dakota, with
fewer residents combined among them than Chattanooga, Tenn. Mrs. Clinton won an
average of 76 percent of the vote in the ten largest U.S. cities. Trump won a
majority in none of them, nor was he close to a majority in any of them.
All Donald Trump won was a majority of the voters in a
substantial majority of the states — 30 states plus the second congressional
district in Maine.
To Democrats, this is an obvious injustice and an
outrage. Theirs is the politics of manifest destiny, with their endless
Hegelian insistence that capital-H History
is on their side. And not only History
but Harvard and Goldman Sachs and Facebook, too. Their sense of entitlement to
political power is just a smidgen short of Divine Right, but not much. The
obstacle to fulfilling their entitlement is the structure and the
constitutional order of the United States, which is neither a direct democracy
such as Switzerland’s nor a unitary state such as China’s but a union of
states. Hence the aspects of the American system that most reflect this
arrangement — the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Bill of Rights — are
regarded by the Left as illegitimate, a way to rig the system against History and The People.
The most dramatic example of this was Harry Reid’s
attempt to nullify the First Amendment during his time as Democratic leader in
the Senate, an initiative that enjoyed unanimous
support among Senate Democrats. Democrats are if anything even more hostile to
the Second Amendment than to the First, and they seek to strip the states of
their constitutional political power through such means as abolishing the
Electoral College, either formally or through such shenanigans as the “national
popular vote” project.
Donald Trump’s deficiencies as a man and an administrator
are not the fundamental cause of the Cold Civil War. George W. Bush was
denounced as illegitimate before him, George H. W. Bush as a callous extremist
before him, Ronald Reagan as a dangerous dunce before him — every Republican
president of my lifetime has been denounced as the most radical, most
dangerous, most extreme, most unqualified in history. It is just barely
possible that that is true, though highly unlikely, and the ones who didn’t win
— Mitt Romney, John McCain, even Bob Dole — were also denounced in the same
terms. That Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are understood to be interchangeable
commodities says a great deal more about the Democrats’ politics of Manifest
Destiny than it does about Mitt Romney or Donald Trump.
The State of the Union Address, as I argue without much
effect year after year, brings together much of what is worst in our politics:
the presidency as desultory monarchy, the tribalism and daft Kremlinology of
who stands and applauds or sits on his hands looking sullen, the irreconcilable
differences and subsequent divorce between political promises and reality, the
absurd ghastly grotesque and revolting pageantry of Washington, our own tawdry
little Vanity Fair “where everyone is striving for what is not worth having.”
The symbolic subordination of the House to the president — an evil that the
donkey-souled Nancy Pelosi had an opportunity but not the guts to correct — is
perhaps worst of all.
But while all eyes are on Donald J. Trump, think for a
minute on what his presence there represents. And perhaps some of my
Democratic-leaning friends and neighbors could at this point be men and women
and citizens enough to forgo telling themselves a flattering just-so story,
that President Trump is President Trump because of white supremacy, malevolent
billionaires, and Christian fundamentalists, or — most risible of all — a
little platoon of Russian trolls on Facebook. What Trump represents is the fact
that while Wall Street and Harvard and Silicon Valley and the New York Times have one view of this
country, its values, and its role in the world, a very large number of their
fellow citizens — who are not monsters — have another view. And there are
enough of them to win a presidential election, too.
There are many possible ways for the ruling class to
respond to that political reality. One is to burrow into the cheap moralism
characteristic of our times and insist that those who looked at the choices in
2016 and came to a different conclusion than did the executives of JPMorgan and
Citigroup must be driven by some occult malevolence; this is Paul Krugman’s
argument, that “good people can’t be good Republicans.” That is a sentiment
unworthy of even so trifling and vicious a creature of the New York Times editorial page as Professor Krugman, who once was a
highly regarded economist. Equally unworthy is the related sentiment: “Our
candidate got 2 percent more of the vote than their guy did in 2016, so it’s
only technicalities keeping us out of power. Once we have rectified that, we
will simply dominate the other side with our superior numbers.” Never mind that
those are only slightly superior numbers and that this advantage is not as
fixed as the stars but like all things in the affairs of men subject to change.
Is the domination of one group of citizens with their own way of life and their
own values by another group of citizens with a different way of life and
different values the best outcome? Is that what liberty is for?
As the polling consistently demonstrates, this division
is not about policy. It is about hatred.
Even on such controversial issues as late-term abortion,
there is a wide and deep consensus, and that holds true across many (indeed,
most) of the broad policy questions. No, ours is a politics of hinterland Hutus
and coastal Tutsis bound in mutual antagonism by status-jockeying, generations
of real and imagined slights and offenses, and a sacramental politics centered
on the devotion to the holy/unholy person of the president/pretender into which
these resentments and insecurities are channeled. Because our politics has been
made sacramental and focused on the person of the president, the State of the
Union has been made into a liturgy. That is the only reason it commands such rapt
attention. And that is the reason that it is a focus of intense hatred: The
presidency is just one more bauble to be fought over, one more opportunity to
exercise power, an instrument for the domination and humiliation of the other
tribe.
As it happens, the tribe that has every other kind of
power is for the moment denied the power of the presidency. And that tribe has
gone mad. They recognized this madness when it infected the minds of the other
tribe during the Barack Obama years, but it is in the nature of madness to fail
to comprehend one’s own madness. Never mind that all that shallow, slavering
talk about the emoluments clause is an exact
functional substitute for all that 2008–2016 nonsense about birth certificates,
much of which was amplified and initiated by none other than the current
president himself. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, damn the
facts and figures — these things are not “factually correct” but “morally
correct,” which is what’s really important. Or so they say.
The most radical idea in American politics right now is
not taxing this or subsidizing that or any other dusty old relic of Chancellor
Bismarck’s ur-welfare state. The most
radical idea in American politics is that it is possible to have a politics
that is not oriented toward the domination and subordination of competing
social groups but that instead seeks to enable Americans to seek fulfillment
and human flourishing on their own terms in accordance with their own
interests, values, and priorities.
But that will require abandoning the politics of manifest
destiny and the idea that the Harvard–Wall Street–New York Times view of the republic and the good life is the only
legitimate one or that it even ought to be considered normative, a national
default position from which deviation much be formally justified. It requires
the supersession of the politics of tribalism by the politics of neighborliness, which proceeds from the
axiom that “We are all in this together”
is not a synonym for “One size fits all.”
Perhaps that is difficult to see from Cambridge,
Brooklyn, or Austin. President Trump is many things, including a middle finger
in human form raised to those places by the residents of another America who
are trying, desperately, to tell them something, but who have trouble making
themselves heard in the New York Times,
in Silicon Valley, in the boardrooms, on campus, and even in their own state
capitals, where the ruthlessly enforced homogeneity of intellectual and public
life leaves our ruling class in a state of almost pristine ignorance of the
facts about those whom they would presume to rule.
But rather than make that effort, the party of the Ivy
League, Silicon Valley, General Motors, 94301, the Washington Post, Hollywood, Wall Street, etc., will offer — what?
Another lecture on “privilege”?
Ever hearing, but never understanding, ever seeing, but
never perceiving.
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