(1) Fierce battle within FBI, & between FBI and Justice Dept, over Clinton Foundation (2) FBI investigation shifts focus to Hillary (3) Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside - Chicago Trubune (4) Hillary’s Wall St Fundraising used Anti-Corruption Loophole (5) Citigroup bank chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet - WikiLeaks (6) Ruling Class understands Trump represents a counter-revolution - MacDonald (7) After the Republic, by Angelo M. Codevilla (1) Fierce battle within FBI, & between FBI and Justice Dept, over Clinton Foundation http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/31/pers-o31.html Political warfare explodes in Washington Patrick Martin and Barry Grey 31 October 2016 Just a week before Election Day, the crisis gripping the American ruling class and its state, marked by intractable and bitter internal conflicts, has erupted into open political warfare. Last Friday’s letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey to Congress announcing new "investigative steps" in the probe of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, itself a manifestation of the crisis, has brought the underlying tensions to the boiling point. It has exposed raging conflicts within the FBI and, more broadly, the national security apparatus as a whole. Comey’s cryptic letter acknowledged that the FBI has not actually reviewed a new batch of emails that "appear to be pertinent" to its previous investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business while she was secretary of state. The agency, he wrote, "cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant." This astonishing admission makes all the more extraordinary Comey’s decision to make the discovery of the new emails a public issue only eleven days before the election. In a rapid-fire series of developments this weekend, Justice Department officials revealed that they had opposed Comey’s decision to send the letter, arguing that it violated a longstanding principle that no Justice Department or FBI action that might impact on a candidate should be announced within 60 days of an election. The Clinton campaign and congressional Democrats lashed out at Comey for the timing of the letter. At a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, Clinton said Comey’s action is "not just strange, it’s unprecedented." She also tweeted that "FBI Director Comey bowed to partisan pressure," suggesting that the letter was an effort to appease congressional Republican leaders opposed to Comey’s determination last July that there was no basis for criminal charges against Clinton over her use of a private email server. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Comey suggesting that he had violated the law forbidding government employees to use their official positions to influence the result of an election. "I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act," he wrote. "Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law." He added that Comey had "demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be clear intent to aid one political party over another," because he had made public the renewed FBI interest in Clinton’s emails, but was silent on what Reid called "explosive information" supposedly connecting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to Russian government officials. Here Reid was resorting to the Russia-baiting that has been the Clinton campaign’s main response to the publication by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of emails and other documents sent or received by campaign chairman John Podesta, including devastating information on Bill Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to obtain lucrative speaking engagements with corporations and business associations. Campaign spokesmen have refused to discuss the contents of the emails, claiming that they were hacked by Russian government agents and then handed over to WikiLeaks to damage Clinton and help Trump. NBC News reported Sunday that the FBI has now obtained a search warrant to go through all 650,000 emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl. The Wall Street Journal gave details, in a story posted on its web site Sunday afternoon, of the explosive internal crisis within the FBI that led to Comey’s letter to Congress. By this account, there has been a fierce battle within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice Department not only over the Clinton email investigation, but over separate investigations involving four FBI field offices (New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Little Rock, Arkansas) into the operations of the Clinton Foundation. More than eight months ago, FBI agents presented plans for a more aggressive investigation of the foundation to career prosecutors in the Justice Department, only to have the proposal blocked on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. The FBI offices nonetheless continued their investigations, which were intensified after the Clinton email investigation was wound up in July. The Journal report suggests that either a substantial faction within the FBI was convinced that top FBI officials were covering up criminal activities on the part of Hillary and Bill Clinton, or the FBI dissidents were politically motivated to use agency resources to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, or both. When top officials in the FBI and Justice Department opposed these efforts, open rebellion followed, expressed in leaks to the Wall Street Journal centrally targeting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state senate in Virginia last year. According to some press reports, Comey sent his letter to Congress last week because he was convinced the information would become public anyway through further leaks by FBI subordinates. The open warfare engulfing Washington on the eve of a presidential election reveals that the entire political system and the state apparatus itself are riven by tensions and conflicts so deep and bitter that they cannot be contained within the traditional framework of bourgeois elections. Fueling these tensions is the convergence of crises on the economic, geopolitical, internal political and social fronts. The US and world economy remain mired in stagnation more than eight years after the 2008 Wall Street crash, and there are growing fears that central bank policies designed to buttress the banks and drive up stock prices are leading to a new financial disaster. The economic crisis is fueling social anger and alienation from the entire political system, as reflected in different ways in the mass support for the anti-Wall Street campaign of the self-styled "socialist" Bernie Sanders and the "America first" pseudo-populist campaign of Donald Trump. Twenty-five years of unending war and fifteen years of the "war on terror" have failed to secure US hegemony in the Middle East and only heightened fears within the ruling elite that US imperialism is losing ground to rivals such as Russia and China. The disarray of US policy in Syria, in particular, has led to bitter conflicts and recriminations over US policy, and demands for a major escalation of military violence, not only in Syria, but throughout the Middle East. These are combined with calls for a more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China. [...] (2) FBI investigation shifts focus to Hillary http://www.globalresearch.ca/waning-mainstream-media-support-for-hillary-clinton-will-she-make-it-to-the-white-house/5554004 Will She Make it to the White House? Waning Mainstream Media Support for Hillary Clinton. By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, October 31, 2016 What has been the response of the mainstream media which sofar has endorsed Hillary through a process of coverup of her criminal undertakings? Without mainstream media propaganda, Hillary’s political legitimacy would collapse like a deck of cards. The Second Letter by FBI Director James Comey opens up a "Pandora’s Box" of fraud and corruption. Moreover, following the October Surprise release by FBI Director James Comey, the media narrative seems to have taken on a different slant. The media is controlled by powerful economic interest groups. Are the power brokers behind Hillary having second thoughts? Does it serve their interests in supporting a candidate who has an extensive criminal record? Do they want a dysfunctional presidency? Has the Mainstream media dumped Hillary? Sof ar, Not Yet. With some exceptions the MSM continues to support Hillary candidacy, without applause. A report by the Chicago Tribune (October 29, 2016) entitled "Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside" is nonetheless revealing. does it point to shift in direction? [...] (3) Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside - Chicago Trubune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-emails-kass-1030-20161028-column.html Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside Tribune columnist John Kass says, in his opinion, the newly opened FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server marks "a potential Constitutional crisis" for the country. Oct. 31, 2016 John Kass Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday's FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state? We'll find out soon enough. It's obvious the American political system is breaking down. It's been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they're properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect. FBI director James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious. This can't be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner's wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been "reckless" with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution. If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails. What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands. The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin demanding it. But what will Hillary do? She'll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence. She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been. Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas. If you take a step back from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd never be hired. As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids. And there was no prosecution of Hillary. That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous. And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants. I've always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes. The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars. All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it. If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we? Listen to the Chicago Way podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin. Guests are Tribune cartoonist Scott Stantis and former White House Chief of Staff William Daley: www.chicagotribune.com/kasspodcast. jskass@chicagotribune.com (4) Hillary’s Wall St Fundraising used Anti-Corruption Loophole http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/hillary-clintons-wall-street-fundraising-benefited-loophole-federal-anti Oct 31, 4:13 PM EDT Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Fundraising Benefited From Loophole In Federal Anti-Corruption Rule By David Sirota @davidsirota AND Andrew Perez (MapLight) AND Avi Asher-Schapiro On 10/31/16 AT 2:07 PM Despite an anti-corruption rule that was designed to reduce the financial industry’s political power, top officials from the investment firm BlackRock hosted Hillary Clinton at campaign fundraisers earlier this year. The cash -- which poured in through a loophole in the law — came in as BlackRock’s federal contracts to manage billions of dollars of retiree assets will be up for renewal during the next president’s term. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission looked to stop campaign donations to public officials from financial firms seeking to convince those officials to hire them to manage public employees’ retirement assets. The agency enacted a pay-to-play rule that applied such a restriction to state and local officials. The rule, however, was structured in a way that effectively exempted federal agencies from its restrictions -- and it was created even though a major federal agency had just been plagued by an investment-related influence-peddling scandal. In practice, the gap in the rule allows BlackRock executives to raise big money for presidential candidates who -- if they win -- will appoint the officials that run the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which awards contracts to manage retirement assets for nearly 5 million current and former federal employees. The loophole also allows Wall Street executives to give cash to presidential candidates, even as those executives’ firms get deals to manage -- and earn fees from -- investments for the federal government’s separate pension insurance agency, which is run by presidential appointees. In all, the loophole in the SEC rule effectively leaves nearly a half-trillion dollars of retirement assets unprotected by the nation’s major anti-corruption measure. Clinton’s presidential campaign has raised more than $1 million from financial firms that are contracted to manage those assets. Two SEC spokespeople, Ryan White and Judith Burns, declined to answer questions from International Business Times and MapLight about the pay-to-play rule carveout for federal agencies. ‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play Practices’ This report is part of an IBT/MapLight series examining the extent to which corporate interests are able to circumvent federal and state anti-corruption rules designed to restrict the influence of money on public policy. When the SEC passed its rule to restrict Wall Street campaign contributions, the agency said the measure was necessary because publicly administered retirement programs "are particularly vulnerable to pay to play practices" which can end up "leading to inferior management, diminished returns or greater losses" for retirees. A study released last month validated that concern: Researchers at Stanford, Rice and Erasmus universities found that retirement systems whose overseers "have received relatively more contributions from the financial industry have lower returns." Federal regulators ended up prohibiting investment firms from earning fees from "a government entity" -- that is, a retirement system -- if firm executives donate to a public official who has power to influence the retirement system’s investment decisions. The rule, though, narrowly defined "government entity": It says the term means only an agency at the state or local level, not the federal government. "There's no clear carve-out for federal plans, but the definition itself also does not insinuate that they are covered," Benjamin Keane, an attorney at the law firm Dentons, told IBT/MapLight. Through legislation, congressional lawmakers could close the loophole by passing a pay-to-play law that defined "government entity" to encompass the federal government. Without that, the loophole will remain. [...] (5) Citigroup bank chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet - WikiLeaks http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html Citigroup chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet, WikiLeaks document reveals By Tom Eley 15 October 2016 One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet. The memorandum, revealed by WikiLeaks in a recent document release from the email account of John Podesta, who currently serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, was written by Michael Froman, who was then an executive with Citigroup and currently serves as US trade representative. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject line "Lists." It went to Podesta a month before he was named chairman of President-Elect Obama’s transition team. The email was sent at the height of the financial meltdown that erupted after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15. Even as Citigroup and its Wall Street counterparts were dragging the US and world economy into its deepest crisis since the 1930s, they remained, as the email shows, the real power behind the façade of American democracy and its electoral process. Froman’s list proved remarkably prescient. As it proposed, Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, became secretary of Defense; Eric Holder became attorney general; Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff; Susan Rice, United Nations ambassador; Arne Duncan, secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget; Eric Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs; and Melody Barnes, chief of the Domestic Policy Council. For the highly sensitive position of secretary of the Treasury, three possibilities were presented: Robert Rubin and Rubin’s close disciples Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama chose Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with Bush Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, had played the leading role in organizing the Wall Street bailout. Rubin had served as Treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton administration from 1995 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Summers. In that capacity, Rubin and Summers oversaw the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which had imposed a legal wall separating commercial banking from investment banking. Immediately after leaving Treasury, Rubin became a top executive at Citigroup, remaining there until 2009. A notable aspect of the Froman memo is its use of identity politics. Among the Citigroup executive’s lists of proposed hires to Podesta were a "Diversity List" including "African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level," in Froman’s words, and "a similar document on women." Froman also took diversity into account for his White House cabinet list, "probability-weighting the likelihood of appointing a diverse candidate for each position." This list concluded with a table breaking down the 31 assignments by race and gender. Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets. Then-presidential candidate Obama played a critical political role in shepherding the massively unpopular bank bailout through Congress. The September financial crash convinced decisive sections of the US corporate-financial elite that the Democratic candidate of "hope" and "change" would be better positioned to contain popular opposition to the bailout than his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona. As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms. The same furtive and corrupt process is underway in relation to a Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump administration. Froman’s email is one of many thousands released by WikiLeaks from the account of Podesta. Those communications, such as the Froman email, which expose who really rules America, have been virtually ignored by the media. The pro-Democratic Party New Republic called attention to it in an article published Friday, but the story has received little if any further coverage. The media has instead focused on salacious details of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sexual activities, designed, in part, to divert attention from the substance of the Clinton campaign-related emails being released by WikiLeaks and other sources. The New Republic drew attention to the Froman memo not because it opposes such machinations, but as a warning to the interests it represents that they must move now to influence the eventual composition of a Hillary Clinton administration. "If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors," wrote New Republic author David Dayen. "And if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late." (6) Ruling Class understands Trump represents a counter-revolution - Kevin MacDonald http://www.unz.com/article/claremonts-codevilla-on-the-coming-revolution-americans-will-be-nostalgic-for-donald-trumps-moderation/ Claremont’s Codevilla On the Coming Revolution "Americans Will Be Nostalgic For Donald Trump’s Moderation." Kevin MacDonald October 11, 2016 We are nearing the climax of a watershed election. The Ruling Class understands that Donald Trump represents a counter-revolution to all they have built up over the last 50 years. That emphatically includes GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan, who hastened not merely to step on Trump’s bounce back in the second debate by announcing he was suspending support, but is signaling he will continue to damage Trump as much as possible [Inside Ryan’s decision to (almost) dump Trump| The speaker might still fully rescind his endorsement before Nov. 8, sources told POLITICO, by Jakee Sherman and John Bresnahan, Politico, October 11, 2016] This phenomenon has inspired an important essay from Angelo M. Codevilla, a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and emeritus professor of International Relations at Boston University, : After the Republic. [Claremont Review, September 27, 2016]. Codevilla’s basic idea: the cultural revolution of the last 50 years has destroyed America as a constitutional republic. As many on the Alt Right have noted, there is nothing left to conserve. The question now is where our post-republic period will take us. Codevilla [Email him] writes     Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: "fake constitutionalism." Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power. [Emphasis added] This is why we see repeated crazy comparisons of Trump to Hitler—most recently, This New York Times ‘Hitler’ review sure reads like a thinly disguised Trump comparison. [By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, September 28, 2016] Despite absolutely no statements from Trump suggesting that he would suspend the Constitution and assume dictatorial powers, the concern is lurking that, like Hitler, he would do just that. The fundamental reason for this fear among the elites: their guilty conscience. They understand that in the last 50 years they have completely upended the old order in America. They have created a revolution that opposes the most fundamental interests of the historic white American nation. They understand that this election could confirm their revolution—but only if Hillary Clinton wins. Her victory would mean continued Leftist appointments to the Supreme Court (Codevilla has an excellent summary of the vast changes in "Constitutional Law" imposed by the new regime) and it would mean importing around many millions more non-whites, the great majority uneducated, poor, and dependent and the vast majority of whom will be entirely on board with their revolution. The top-down nature of this revolution cannot be overemphasized. There was never a demand by a majority, or even close to a majority, from any Western country for a complete transformation, to the point that white people will soon be minorities in societies they had dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, thousands of years. This top-down revolution has never been supported by a majority of white Americans. There is anger, resentment, and fear for the future. Trump represents an inchoate backlash against this revolution. But we have entered an era where it is too late to simply turn back the clock. The changes have been too drastic. One could change the legal situation with one or two judicious Supreme Court picks. But that will not undo the importation of a new people—tens of millions of non-whites with all that that implies for the future. As Codevilla notes, because we have entered an era of fake constitutionalism and because the most fundamental interests of the traditional American majority have been r uthlessly suppressed, there is no obligation to restrain one’s passions. The situation is indeed what Codevilla calls "a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power." The new Ruling Class realizes that it rules by lawless bureaucratic coercion:     In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents. [My emphasis While the traditional America aspired to be and substantially attained a society based on individual merit, the new elite is not a meritocracy (the poster child for this is Elena Kagan), and not just in terms of Affirmative Action and ethnic favoritism in university admissions. The Clintons may be seen as representative of the corruption of this new ruling elite, able to flout laws with impunity. At this writing, Hillary Clinton remains ahead in most national polls and has the support of the entire Establishment, left to right, despite:     highly credible charges of unprecedented corruption involving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation from donors, many of them foreign entities, while she was Secretary of State, as well as outrageous speaking fees for Bill Clinton from these same donors (importantly, his speaking fees skyrocketed after Hillary became Secretary of State);     violation of an agreement between Clinton and the Obama Administration not to accept foreign donations during her tenure as Secretary of State;     the destruction via BleachBit (a program designed to make the information non-retrievable) of likely incriminating emails after a subpoena,     being cleared of criminal conduct by the FBI that would have sent ordinary people to prison;     her staff pleading the Fifth Amendment in Congressional hearings;    many of her staff receiving immunity deals even there is good reason to think they lied to the FBI;     an agreement for the FBI to destroy computer owned by Clinton aides, including Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, plus looking only at contents between June 1, 2014 and February 1, 2015 and hence ignoring much possibly incriminating evidence. [...] If the Democrats win, Codevilla sees them driving "the transformations that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its members can imagine." They would continue their war on traditional "racist," "sexist" America with literally nothing to stop them. The     disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained fundamental…. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that "half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’" as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed. Exactly. Thus, despite appearances to the contrary, there is a unified oligarchic Establishment that straddles both the Republican and Democrat parties. This has not been so obvious in previous elections, when Republicans and Democrats were apparently quite different on some issues. However, the rise of Donald Trump has shown that the Establishment is entirely united. For example, billionaires are supporting Hillary Clinton 20–1, whereas in previous elections, they were much more split between the two parties. Not one Fortune 100 CEO is supporting Trump. The other pillar of the Ruling Class is the media which reflects academic culture and political culture generally. The media, along with academia, and the bureaucracy, have been prime drivers of this top-down revolution, in which the moral and intellectual high ground has been seized by people hostile to the traditional peoples and cultures of the West. This new Ruling Class is completely out of touch with the interests of a majority of its citizens—particularly White Americans. Thus the print media is almost completely in the anti-Trump camp:     The [endorsements] are overwhelmingly against him, and they just keep coming, in language that is notable for its blunt condemnation of the candidate and its "save the Republic’’ tone.     The endorsements are coming not only from the usual mainstream media suspects but also from newspapers that either never before supported a Democrat or had not in many decades—The Dallas Morning News, The Arizona Republic, The Cincinnati Enquirer—or had never endorsed any presidential candidate, like USA Today. The Wall Street Journal has not gone there, at least not yet, but a member of its conservative-leaning editorial board has: Dorothy Rabinowitz, who called Mr. Trump "unfit."     What’s most striking is the collective sense of alarm they convey—that Mr. Trump is a "dangerous demagogue" (USA Today) whose election would represent a "clear and present danger" (The Washington Post, The Cincinnati Enquirer), or, as The Atlanticeditor Scott Stossel said in an interview Tuesday [October 4, 2016 "a potential national emergency or threat to the Republic."[The Editorialists Have Spoken; Will Voters Listen?, by Jim Rutenberg, NYT, October 5, 2016 ] [Links in original] It is ironic indeed that these media people see Trump as threatening the republic when, as Codevilla notes, that republic is already gone as a result of the actions of our new Ruling Class. [...] But as Codevilla notes,     Under our ruling class, "truth" has morphed from the reflection of objective reality to whatever has "normative pull"—i.e., to what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time. That is the meaning of the term "political correctness," as opposed to factual correctness." Truth is whatever you want to make it, just as the Constitution now means whatever the Ruling Class says it means. While it’s obvious what a Clinton victory would mean, the consequences of a Trump victory are far less certain. Codevilla is pessimistic that there could be real change:     Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking about something so monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much less leading his constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the country’s current direction. Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them. But the two great revolutions of the twentieth century—the Bolshevik Revolution and National Socialism—did indeed replace ruling elites. And of course, the fear that a Trump victory would indeed lead to a wholesale replacement of our ruling elite is behind the hysterical opposition that he has received from the entire Establishment. Codevilla’s conclusion is worth pondering:     We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation. [Emphases added] Finally, given my research interests, II would be remiss if I did not mention the critical role played by Jews and the organized Jewish community in the changes that are now coming to a head. There is no question that Jews are a prominent component of our new elite and played a determinative role in passing the watershed 1965 immigration law. I have written five VDARE.com articles on Jewish opposition to Trump, often expressed in terms of Jewish identity, interests in multiculturalism, immigration and refugee policy, and fear of a fascist America. Given the very powerful position Jews enjoy in the American media (summarized briefly here and more extensively here, pp. xlvi-lvi), they necessarily play a major role in the anti-Trump movement. Jewish opposition to Trump is virtually unanimous, and in the Republican Party, Jewish neoconservatives are leading the #NeverTrump movement. (One of them, Paul Ryan adviser Dan Senor, is rumored to have leaked the Access Hollywoodtape, although the MSM seems reluctant to ask him). According to 538, in 2012, around 70% of money given by Jews directly to candidates went to Obama, while in 2016, 95% has gone to Clinton. [The GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump,By Eitan Hersh and Brian Schaffner, September 21, 2016] Jews are vastly overrepresented among the top donors to pro-Clinton PACs, while the Republican Jewish Coalition has not endorsed Trump, with many donors switching to Clinton. Adelson, after investing $93 million in the 2012 campaign for Republicans, including $30 million to a Romney PAC, now says he will donate only $45 million, of which only $5 million will go to Trump, the rest going to House and Senate candidates. [Donald Trump Gains the Support of a Former ‘Never Trump’ Billionaire, by Michal Addady, Fortune.com, September 20, 2016] Codevilla says frankly that a deep unhappiness with the current political culture is brewing that could ultimately lead to a revolutionary upheaval. Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Can he accomplish a hostile takeover of the presidency in the teeth of unanimous opposition from our hostile elites? (7) After the Republic, by Angelo M. Codevilla http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/after-the-republic/ After the Republic By: Angelo M. Codevilla September 27, 2016 Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, "Donald Trump and the American Crisis," this has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s "stakeholders" or its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, "America and the West" now are so firmly "on a trajectory toward something very bad" that it is no longer reasonable to hope that "all human outcomes are still possible," by which he means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition from that republic to some kind of empire. Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives. Many Enemies, Few Friends The overriding question of 2016 has been how eager the American people are to reject the bipartisan class that has ruled this country contrary to its majority’s convictions. Turned out, eager enough to throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater. The ruling class’s united front in response to the 2008 financial crisis had ignited the Tea Party’s call for adherence to the Constitution, and led to elections that gave control of both houses of Congress to the Republican Party. But as Republicans became full partners in the ruling class’s headlong rush in what most considered disastrous directions, Americans lost faith in the Constitution’s power to restrain the wrecking of their way of life.  From the primary season’s outset, the Democratic Party’s candidates promised even more radical "transformations." When, rarely, they have been asked what gives them the right to do such things they have acted as if the only answer were Nancy Pelosi’s reply to whether the Constitution allows the government to force us into Obamacare: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" On the Republican side, 17 hopefuls promised much, without dealing with the primordial fact that, in today’s America, those in power basically do what they please. Executive orders, phone calls, and the right judge mean a lot more than laws. They even trump state referenda. Over the past half-century, presidents have ruled not by enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state. As for the Supreme Court, the American people have seen it invent rights where there were none—e.g., abortion—while trammeling ones that had been the republic’s spine, such as the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. The Court taught Americans that the word "public" can mean "private" (Kelo v. City of New London), that "penalty" can mean "tax" (King v. Burwell), and that holding an opinion contrary to its own can only be due to an "irrational animus" (Obergefell v. Hodges). What goes by the name "constitutional law" has been eclipsing the U.S. Constitution for a long time. But when the 1964 Civil Rights Act substituted a wholly open-ended mandate to oppose "discrimination" for any and all fundamental rights, it became the little law that ate the Constitution. Now, because the Act pretended that the commerce clause trumps the freedom of persons to associate or not with whomever they wish, and is being taken to mean that it trumps the free exercise of religion as well, bakers and photographers are forced to take part in homosexual weddings. A commission in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reported that even a church may be forced to operate its bathrooms according to gender self-identification because it "could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public." California came very close to mandating that Catholic schools admit homosexual and transgender students or close down. The Justice Department is studying how to prosecute on-line transactions such as vacation home rental site Airbnb, Inc., that fall afoul of its evolving anti-discrimination standards. This arbitrary power, whose rabid guard-dog growls and barks: "Racist! Sexist! Homophobic!" has transformed our lives by removing restraints on government. The American Bar Association’s new professional guidelines expose lawyers to penalties for insufficient political correctness. Performing abortions or at least training to perform them may be imposed as a requirement for licensing doctors, nurses, and hospitals that offer services to the general public. Addressing what it would take to reestablish the primacy of fundamental rights would have required Republican candidates to reset the Civil Rights movement on sound constitutional roots. Surprised they didn’t do it? No one running for the GOP nomination discussed the greatest violation of popular government’s norms—never mind the Constitution—to have occurred in two hundred years, namely, the practice, agreed upon by mainstream Republicans and Democrats, of rolling all of the government’s expenditures into a single bill. This eliminates elected officials’ responsibility for any of the government’s actions, and reduces them either to approving all that the government does without reservation, or the allegedly revolutionary, disloyal act of "shutting down the government." Rather than talk about how to restrain or shrink government, Republican candidates talked about how to do more with government. The Wall Street Journal called that "having a positive agenda." Hence, Republicans by and large joined the Democrats in relegating the U.S. Constitution to history’s dustbin. Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: "fake constitutionalism." Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power. The ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the American people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to counter it, and looked for candidates who would do that. Hence, even constitutional scholar Ted Cruz stopped talking about the constitutional implications of President Obama’s actions after polls told him that the public was more interested in what he would do to reverse them, niceties notwithstanding. Had Cruz become the main alternative to the Democratic Party’s dominion, the American people might have been presented with the option of reverting to the rule of law. But that did not happen. Both of the choices before us presuppose force, not law. A Change of Regimes All ruling classes are what Shakespeare called the "makers of manners." Plato, in The Republic, and Aristotle, in his Politics, teach that polities reflect the persons who rise to prominence within them, whose habits the people imitate, and who set the tone of life in them. Thus a polity can change as thoroughly as a chorus changes from comedy to tragedy depending on the lyrics and music. Obviously, the standards and tone of life that came from Abraham Lincoln’s Oval Office is quite opposite from what came from the same place when Bill Clinton used it. Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm was arguably the world’s most polite society. Under Hitler, it became the most murderous. In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class's chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents. And, because the ruling class blurs the distinction between public and private business, connection to that class has become the principal way of getting rich in America. Not so long ago, the way to make it here was to start a business that satisfied customers’ needs better than before. Nowadays, more businesses die each year than are started. In this century, all net additions in employment have come from the country’s 1,500 largest corporations. Rent-seeking through influence on regulations is the path to wealth. In the professions, competitive exams were the key to entry and advancement not so long ago. Now, you have to make yourself acceptable to your superiors. More important, judicial decisions and administrative practice have divided Americans into "protected classes"—possessed of special privileges and immunities—and everybody else. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are memories. Co-option is the path to power. Ever wonder why the quality of our leaders has been declining with each successive generation? Moreover, since the Kennedy reform of 1965, and with greater speed since 2009, the ruling class’s immigration policy has changed the regime by introducing some 60 million people—roughly a fifth of our population—from countries and traditions different from, if not hostile, to ours. Whereas earlier immigrants earned their way to prosperity, a disproportionate percentage of post-1965 arrivals have been encouraged to become dependents of the state. Equally important, the ruling class chose to reverse America’s historic practice of assimilating immigrants, emphasizing instead what divides them from other Americans. Whereas Lincoln spoke of binding immigrants by "the electric cord" of the founders’ principles, our ruling class treats these principles as hypocrisy. All this without votes or law; just power. Foul is Fair and Fair is Foul In short, precisely as the classics defined regime change, people and practices that had been at society’s margins have been brought to its center, while people and ideas that had been central have been marginalized. Fifty years ago, prayer in the schools was near universal, but no one was punished for not praying. Nowadays, countless people are arrested or fired for praying on school property. West Point’s commanding general reprimanded the football coach for his team’s thanksgiving prayer. Fifty years ago, bringing sexually explicit stuff into schools was treated as a crime, as was "procuring abortion." Nowadays, schools contract with Planned Parenthood to teach sex, and will not tell parents when they take girls to PP facilities for abortions. Back then, many schools worked with the National Rifle Association to teach gun handling and marksmanship. Now students are arrested and expelled merely for pointing their finger and saying "bang." In those benighted times, boys who ventured into the girls’ bathroom were expelled as perverts. Now, girls are suspended for objecting to boys coming into the girls’ room under pretense of transgenderism. The mainstreaming of pornography, the invention of abortion as the most inalienable of human rights and, most recently, the designation of opposition to homosexual marriage as a culpable psychosis—none of which is dictated by law enacted by elected officials—is enforced as if it had been. No surprise that America has experienced a drastic drop in the formation of families, with the rise of rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites equal to the rates among blacks that was recognized as disastrous a half-century ago, the near-disappearance of two-parent families among blacks, and the social dislocations attendant to all that. Ever since the middle of the 20th century our ruling class, pursuing hazy concepts of world order without declarations of war, has sacrificed American lives first in Korea, then in Vietnam, and now throughout the Muslim world. By denigrating Americans who call for peace, or for wars unto victory over America’s enemies; by excusing or glorifying those who take our enemies’ side or who disrespect the American flag; our rulers have drawn down the American regime’s credit and eroded the people’s patriotism. As the ruling class destroyed its own authority, it wrecked the republic’s as well. This is no longer the "land where our fathers died," nor even the country that won World War II. It would be surprising if any society, its identity altered and its most fundamental institutions diminished, had continued to function as before. Ours sure does not, and it is difficult to imagine how it can do so ever again. We can be sure only that the revolution underway among us, like all others, will run its unpredictable course. All we know is the choice that faces us at this stage: either America continues in the same direction, but faster and without restraint, or there’s the hazy possibility of something else. Imperial Alternatives The consequences of empowering today’s Democratic Party are crystal clear. The Democratic Party—regardless of its standard bearer—would use its victory to drive the transformations that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its members can imagine. We can be sure of that because what it has done and is doing is rooted in a logic that has animated the ruling class for a century, and because that logic has shaped the minds and hearts of millions of this class’s members, supporters, and wannabes. That logic’s essence, expressed variously by Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, FDR’s brains trust, intellectuals of both the old and the new Left, choked back and blurted out by progressive politicians, is this: America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress. Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism, greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively according to scientific knowledge. Progressivism’s programs have changed over time. But its disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained fundamental. More than any commitment to principles, programs, or way of life, this is its paramount feature. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that "half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’" as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed. The pseudo-intellectual argument for why these "deplorables" have no right to their opinions is that giving equal consideration to people and positions that stand in the way of Progress is "false equivalence," as President Obama has put it. But the same idea has been expressed most recently and fully by New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, as well as Times columnists Jim Rutenberg, Timothy Egan, and William Davies. In short, devotion to truth means not reporting on Donald Trump and people like him as if they or anything they say might be of value. If trying to persuade irredeemable socio-political inferiors is no more appropriate than arguing with animals, why not just write them off by sticking dismissive names on them? Doing so is less challenging, and makes you feel superior. Why wrestle with the statistical questions implicit in Darwin when you can just dismiss Christians as Bible-thumpers? Why bother arguing for Progressivism’s superiority when you can construct "scientific" studies like Theodor Adorno’s, proving that your opponents suffer from degrees of "fascism" and other pathologies? This is a well-trod path. Why, to take an older example, should General Omar Bradley have bothered trying to refute Douglas MacArthur’s statement that in war there is no substitute for victory when calling MacArthur and his supporters "primitives" did the trick? Why wrestle with our climate’s complexities when you can make up your own "models," being sure that your class will treat them as truth? What priorities will the ruling class’s notion of scientific truth dictate to the next Democratic administration? Because rejecting that true and false, right and wrong are objectively ascertainable is part of this class’s DNA, no corpus of fact or canon of reason restrains it or defines its end-point. Its definition of "science" is neither more nor less than what "scientists say" at any given time. In practice, that means "Science R-Us," now and always, exclusively. Thus has come to pass what President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1960 Farewell address: "A steadily increasing share [of science] is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.… [T]he free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution…a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity." Hence, said Ike, "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded." The result has been that academics rise through government grants while the government exercises power by claiming to act on science’s behalf. If you don’t bow to the authority of the power that says what is and is not so, you are an obscurantist or worse. Under our ruling class, "truth" has morphed from the reflection of objective reality to whatever has "normative pull"—i.e., to what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time. That is the meaning of the term "political correctness," as opposed to factual correctness. It’s the Contempt, Stupid! Who, a generation ago, could have guessed that careers and social standing could be ruined by stating the fact that the paramount influence on the earth’s climate is the sun, that its output of energy varies and with it the climate? Who, a decade ago, could have predicted that stating that marriage is the union of a man and a woman would be treated as a culpable sociopathy, or just yesterday that refusing to let certifiably biological men into women’s bathrooms would disqualify you from mainstream society? Or that saying that the lives of white people "matter" as much as those of blacks is evidence of racism? These strictures came about quite simply because some sectors of the ruling class felt like inflicting them on the rest of America. Insulting presumed inferiors proved to be even more important to the ruling class than the inflictions’ substance. How far will our rulers go? Because their network is mutually supporting, they will go as far as they want. Already, there is pressure from ruling class constituencies, as well as academic arguments, for morphing the concept of "hate crime" into the criminalization of "hate speech"—which means whatever these loving folks hate. Of course this is contrary to the First Amendment, and a wholesale negation of freedom. But it is no more so than the negation of freedom of association that is already eclipsing religious freedom in the name of anti-discrimination. It is difficult to imagine a Democratic president, Congress, and Supreme Court standing in the way. Above all, these inflictions, as well as the ruling class’s acceptance of its own members’ misbehavior, came about because millions of its supporters were happy, or happy enough, to support them in the interest of maintaining their own status in a ruling coalition while discomfiting their socio-political opponents. Consider, for example, how republic-killing an event was the ruling class’s support of President Bill Clinton in the wake of his nationally televised perjury. Subsequently, as constituencies of supporters have effectively condoned officials’ abusive, self-serving, and even outright illegal behavior, they have encouraged more and more of it while inuring themselves to it. That is how republics turn into empires from the roots up. But it is also true, as Mao Tse-Tung used to say, "a fish begins to rot at the head." If you want to understand why any and all future Democratic Party administrations can only be empires dedicated to injuring and insulting their subjects, look first at their intellectual leaders’ rejection of the American republic’s most fundamental principles. The Declaration of Independence says that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" among which are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These rights—codified in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights—are not civil rights that governments may define. The free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, keeping and bearing arms, freedom from warrantless searches, protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, trial by jury of one’s peers, etc., are natural rights that pertain to human beings as such. Securing them for Americans is what the United States is all about. But today’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission advocates truncating the foremost of these rights because, as it stated in a recent report, "Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon those civil rights." The report explains why the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights should not be permissible: "The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance." Hillary Clinton’s attack on Trump supporters merely matched the ruling class’s current common sense. Why should government workers and all who wield the administrative state’s unaccountable powers not follow their leaders’ judgment, backed by the prestige press, about who are to be treated as citizens and who is to be handled as deplorable refuse? Hillary Clinton underlined once again how the ruling class regards us, and about what it has in store for us. Electing Donald Trump would result in an administration far less predictable than any Democratic one. In fact, what Trump would or would not do, could or could not do, pales into insignificance next to the certainty of what any Democrat would do. That is what might elect Trump. The character of an eventual Trump Administration is unpredictable because speculating about Trump’s mind is futile. It is equally futile to guess how he might react to the mixture of flattery and threats sure to be leveled against him. The entire ruling class—Democrats and Republicans, the bulk of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the press—would do everything possible to thwart him; and the constituencies that chose him as their candidate, and that might elect him, are surely not united and are by no means clear about the demands they would press. Moreover, it is anyone’s guess whom he would appoint and how he would balance his constituencies’ pressures against those of the ruling class. Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of Americans believe that elected and appointed officials—plus the courts, the justice system, business leaders, educators—are leading the country in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good, make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns, because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something like an ungentle enema. Yet the persons who express such revolutionary sentiments are not a majority ready to support a coherent imperial program to reverse the course of America’s past half-century. Temperamentally conservative, these constituencies had been most attached to the Constitution and been counted as the bedrock of stability. They are not yet wholly convinced that there is little left to conserve. What they want, beyond an end to the ruling class’s outrages, has never been clear. This is not surprising, given that the candidates who appeal to their concerns do so with mere sound bites. Hence they chose as the presidential candidate of the nominal opposition party the man who combined the most provocative anti-establishment sounds with reassurance that it won’t take much to bring back good old America: Donald Trump. But bringing back good old America would take an awful lot. What could he do to satisfy them? Trump’s propensity for treating pronouncements on policy as flags to be run up and down the flagpole as he measures the volume of the applause does not deprive them of all significance—especially the ones that confirm his anti-establishment bona fides. These few policy items happen to be the ones by which he gained his anti-establishment reputation in the first place: 1) opposition to illegal immigration, especially the importation of Muslims whom Americans reasonably perceive as hostile to us; 2) law and order: stop excusing rioters and coddling criminals; 3) build a wall, throw out the illegals, let in only people who are vetted and certified as supporters of our way of life (that’s the way it was when I got my immigrant visa in 1955), and keep out anybody we can’t be sure isn’t a terrorist. Trump’s tentative, partial retreat from a bit of the latter nearly caused his political standing to implode, prompting the observation that doing something similar regarding abortion would end his political career. That is noteworthy because, although Trump’s support of the pro-life cause is lukewarm at best, it is the defining commitment for much of his constituency. The point here is that, regardless of his own sentiments, Trump cannot wholly discount his constituencies’ demands for a forceful turn away from the country’s current direction. Trump’s slogan—"make America great again"—is the broadest, most unspecific, common denominator of non-ruling-class Americans’ diverse dissatisfaction with what has happened to the country. He talks about reasserting America’s identity, at least by controlling the borders; governing in America’s own interest rather than in pursuit of objectives of which the American people have not approved; stopping the export of jobs and removing barriers to business; and banishing political correctness’s insults and injuries. But all that together does not amount to making America great again. Nor does Trump begin to explain what it was that had made this country great to millions who have known only an America much diminished. In fact, the United States of America was great because of a whole bunch of things that now are gone. Yes, the ruling class led the way in personal corruption, cheating on tests, lowering of professional standards, abandoning churches and synagogues for the Playboy Philosophy and lifestyle, disregarding law, basing economic life on gaming the administrative state, basing politics on conflicting identities, and much more. But much of the rest of the country followed. What would it take to make America great again—or indeed to make any of the changes that Trump’s voters demand? Replacing the current ruling class would be only the beginning. Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking about something so monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much less leading his constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the country’s current direction. Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them. We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation. == Also see http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/donald-trump-and-the-american-crisis/ Donald Trump and the American Crisis By John Marini July 22, 2016 -- Peter Myers website: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
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