College Kids Not Endorsing Socialism, But They’re Open to It

A new survey asks Gen Z about capitalism and its flaws.

By James Freeman
Wall Street Journal
October 29, 2018

Capitalism is more popular than socialism among American college students. But neither one commands majority support and the kids seem disturbingly open to central planning of the economy. That’s according to a new survey of American undergraduates due out later this week.

On Friday this column noted the survey’s results on issues of campus speech. Specifically, a majority of students reported that faculty at U.S. universities frequently share their views in class on social and political topics completely unrelated to the subjects of their courses. Also, a majority of respondents said they felt intimidated in expressing views not shared by professors and fellow students. The national online survey of 800 full-time students includes those enrolled at both public and private four-year universities. Polling was done by McLaughlin & Associates on behalf of Yale’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, which counts your humble correspondent among its directors.

Today the focus is on how students responded to the survey’s questions about dueling economic systems. Given other polls suggesting that Marxism is popular among young people and the journey of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders from fringe irrelevance to intellectual leader of the Democratic party, the latest results are perhaps barely reassuring.
When asked for their opinions of capitalism, 45% said they have a favorable view, 31% expressed an unfavorable view and the rest had no opinion, were unsure, or didn’t answer. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the property rights that have made the United States the most prosperous nation in history, pulled billions of people out of poverty around the world and enabled, among other things, the funding of great universities.

Trying to look on the bright side, some might argue that the phrase “capitalism” is not always the most appealing descriptor for allowing people to voluntarily transact with each other. It’s possible that “free markets” and “open economies” would have polled better.
Whatever we call allowing free people to engage in commerce, it is still beating the competition, even in the minds of college students. When asked for their views on socialism, only 34% of survey respondents said they favor it, compared to 42% with an unfavorable view.

Now for the bad news. While more kids expressed favorable views of capitalism than of socialism, they also seem to think that America could benefit from the latter. Here’s another question from the survey:

Which of the following comes closer to your own personal opinion?
Some who say socialist principles have the potential to be good for America because they promote fairness and give more opportunities to the less fortunate and those who struggle in our society. They say capitalism has left too many people behind.

OR

Others who say while capitalism isn’t perfect, it has promoted freedom and opportunity for millions in America and across the world. They say socialism is too radical and goes against the ideals that our country was founded upon.

On this question, 50% chose the first option on the alleged potential benefits of socialism, while just 35% selected option two’s thumbs-up for capitalism. This seems to contradict the earlier results on the favorable views students have for each economic model. Perhaps it’s simply reflecting an ambivalent group of young people who are vaguely aware that capitalism works but think it could be softened by some socialist policies.

In fact few things in life are more harsh than living in a socialist economy. What’s the best way to help the youngsters avoid having to learn this lesson first-hand? Perhaps parents will choose not to leave their children’s education entirely up to tenured professionals and instead opt to assign readings on their own. Along these lines they might consider adding requirements each semester for any children who want tuitions paid on time. For example, students could be instructed to read and be prepared to discuss “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism” over Thanksgiving dinner.

The recent report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers helpfully describes the history of the real red states—places like Cuba. The report notes that after socialist principles were applied to agriculture there in the early 1960s, production of eggs declined 40%, beef production fell by 45% and the potato crop was cut in half. Pork production plunged by more than 80%.

Over the abundance of an American Thanksgiving feast, students who have read the paper will also be able to respond to the random uncle who works in the non-profit sector and insists that socialism is working like gangbusters in Scandinavia. This is the view of Bernie Sanders, and perhaps he clings to it because Nordic countries were expanding their welfare systems in the 1960s and ‘70s when his views were formed.

The White House economic team provides a more recent report:

Although they are sometimes cited as more relevant socialist success stories, the experiences of the Nordic countries also support the conclusion that socialism reduces living standards. In many respects, the Nordic countries’ policies now differ significantly from what economists have in mind when they think of socialism. For instance, they do not provide healthcare for “free”; Nordic healthcare financing includes substantial cost sharing. Marginal labor income tax rates in the Nordic countries today are only somewhat higher than in the United States, and Nordic taxation overall is surprisingly less progressive than U.S. taxes. The Nordic countries also tax capital income less and regulate product markets less than the United States does. 

However, the Nordic countries do regulate and tax labor markets somewhat more; thus, American families earning the average wage would be taxed $2,000 to $5,000 more per year net of transfers if the United States had current Nordic policies. Living standards in the Nordic countries are at least 15 percent lower than in the United States.
It may well be that American socialists are envisioning moving our policies to align with those of the Nordic countries in the 1970s, when their policies were more in line with economists’ traditional definition of socialism. We estimate that if the United States were to adopt these policies, its real GDP would decline by at least 19 percent in the long run, or about $11,000 per year for the average person.

Let us all give thanks that America hasn’t made the big socialist mistake, and that voters in Nordic countries have corrected so many of theirs.

A Vote for Socialism Is A Vote For State-Run Slavery

Socialism begins as a form of serfdom, tying people to the government just as medieval landlords tied their serfs to the land.

By Stella Morabito
http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/29/vote-socialism-vote-state-run-slavery/
October 29, 2018

What gives? Socialism fails. We know this. Why on earth would anyone be told to vote for it? Today we have right before our very eyes yet another example: imploding Venezuela, standing as yet more proof that socialism fails every single time it is “tried.”

Venezuela is a nation blessed with natural wealth from its massive oil reserves and resources. Today? Its socialism, an ideology tailor-made for corruption and power-mongering, has produced widespread despair. There is chaos in the streets, a climbing homicide rate, starvation, and a mass exodus of perhaps two million people leaving the country.

For those remaining we see a surging suicide rate and other startling problems. For example, there are now reports that human corpses are frequently exploding in morgues because massive power outages along with government ineptitude prevent the growing numbers of dead from being buried before the “emphysematous phase of putrefaction” in the body’s gaseous decomposition occurs. That’s not a pretty picture.

Aside from all that, consider the actual fact that socialism’s natural and consistent spawn, communism, killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century alone,

Despite all of this, what do we hear from a growing chorus of U.S. political candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Andrew Gillum, as well as actual office holders like Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris? That socialism is somehow good if you just put the word “democratic” in front of it. That socialism somehow works, and it’s the only way forward.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, people are supposed to seriously entertain such notions when voting during the midterms? God forbid. Why? Why are people still taken in by the scam called socialism?

Socialism Is Merely a Pretext for Power-Mongering

Okay, I have a theory. It’s actually more like a fact: socialism is akin to slavery. Actually, it is slavery, as so many who have survived such systems will attest. That’s because socialism’s promises—its wrapping paper—are meant to be thrown away once it’s unpacked.

There’s no getting around the fact that socialism is always, always, always about putting all of the power into the hands of a very few people. That’s its starting point. “Just trust me with all of the power, and I’ll take care of you!” socialists habitually promise. Their biggest impediment to helping you is . . . you—you and your pesky freedoms like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Then there is that annoying constitutionalist idea of checks and balances against their power. And the Bill of Rights. Such things get in the way, you see. As then-candidate Barack Obama once stated, the Bill of Rights “only” says what the government cannot do to you. It doesn’t say what the government must do for you—basically to increase your dependence (i.e., addiction) on government.

Due process and the rule of law are other irksome concepts for socialists. They know best. They’ll feed you, clothe you, and shelter you, and give you access to “free” medical care (and re-education) just as long as you make sure they continue in power and continue to consolidate and centralize all of the power.

Then scarcity has a way of setting in. Do you detect a bit of Mr. Ponzi in there, and his devious scheme? Does it sound a bit cult-like? Well, yes, of course. Because it’s all of those things and worse.

Slavery has a way of rearing its ugly head no matter how much a nation’s people think they’ve overcome it. If the bloody 20th century proved anything, it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that socialism issues ever more incarnations of slavery. Always. Why is that? Because, sadly, power-mongering is the nature of the human beast. If we don’t keep it in check, we’re all done for. The American founders understood this well.

That’s why all utopian schemes such as socialism—and socialism’s natural offshoots, communism, fascism, “democratic” socialism, and so-called progressivism—depend to a great degree on coercion and the suppression of human freedom. Socialism begins as a form of serfdom, tying people to the government just as medieval landlords tied their serfs to the land. As government dependency grows ever deeper, it becomes harder to wrest ourselves away.

So it goes: Socialism, when left to its own devices, irresistibly moves towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

Socialism Is the Ultimate Bait and Switch Scam

As with all bait-and-switch scams, socialism promises you the world. That’s the only way it can get any traction before it delivers you to a virtual prison. It forces compliance and dependency in every aspect of life—housing, employment, medicine, mobility, education, even your creativity.

Oh, sure lots of clueless Che T-shirt-wearing kids will talk real savvy about it while they’re free. But once it’s got them for real, it will permeate their daily life both in body and mind. In this very respect, slavery is a very fitting description of socialism. All of socialism’s promises— equality, social justice, blah, blah, blah—amount to nothing but bait.

If you don’t believe me, ask yourself this: What could be more oppressive than living under a system run by a tiny clique of power-mongers who exert control over you through a morbidly obese machinery of bureaucrats? What could be more claustrophobic than having some apparatchik from that bloated bureaucracy telling you where you may live, what you are allowed to study, where you can travel, what you can express in art or writing, whether you may receive medicine for your illness, what you may eat, what you can say, and even to whom you may speak?

In such a state, elections become meaningless because the system is designed to perpetuate the power clique that feeds on it. It’s only natural that they’d intend to punish those they perceive to threaten their authority, whether such threats come in the form of deeds, words, or perceived thoughts.

In the end, socialism is built on lies. It’s just a bundle of ploys that help power-hungry elites acquire power. In many cases that’s by design, but likely in many cases also by wishful thinking paired with ignorance on the part of the citizenry.

In light of all this, it’s quite weird that people still debate socialism on its “merits” like it’s some sort of legitimate system of governance. But I suppose that’s why we’re seeing a “resurgence” of it. Those who promote socialism would have us all play the role of battered wives falling into their arms when they promise all will be well if we just trust them and obey. It’ll be different next time, see? Hey, baby, how ‘bout some more free stuff?

They’ll whisper in your ear the fantasy of “Socialist Scandanavia!” perhaps with lovely fiords and bike share programs, never to mention Stockholm’s surging rape problem and police no-go zones. Of course, the Nordic countries have generally homogenous populations a tiny fraction the size of the United States.

They have had mixed economies, yes, but primarily capitalistic, which is what allows countries like Norway to maintain their wealth and attractiveness, not their public programs. Many Swedes will tell you that the country’s experimentation with so-called democratic socialism set them way back and all of the mythologizing about socialism there is flatly wrong.

Socialism: A State-Run Slavery Racket

The abuse of human beings as chattel is at its most insidious when practiced by the totalitarian state. Traditional slavery focused on forced labor to support agrarian economies. Most know about the enslavement of African-Americans at cotton plantations in the South before the Civil War. Many may also know about their horrific enslavement in the Caribbean to work sugar cane plantations.

Far fewer people know how Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union used slave labor on a massive scale to promote its industrialization plans. Political prisoners made up a large percentage of the millions of people who were captive in Soviet forced labor camps, or gulags. They were often worked to death in the mines of the far north as well as in ruthlessly grueling projects like building the White Sea Canal.

When we allow the state to own the means of production—basically, to own people—that’s the trajectory it takes. The socialist state, after all, is run by a small clique of power elites armed with their ever-expanding bureaucracy.

According to Joel Kotkin, America is actually headed towards “oligarchal socialism”—a convergence of pragmatic Clintonism and the Bernie brand—in which providing free stuff is basically a means of keeping populist pitchforks away. Kotkin writes:

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls . . . The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

Sadly, that seems to sum things up. I’d only add two observations. First, all socialism is basically oligarchic in nature. Throughout history, whether Stalin’s Russia or Mao Zedong’s China or Fidel Castro’s Cuba, socialism has always been about a small power clique controlling the lives of all others. Frankly, it’s always been about re-packaging and selling slavery to the masses in a bait and switch.

The success of this scam with millennials is testament to this. As millennials trade free speech for more free stuff, they’ve no idea that their free stuff will inevitably evaporate right along with free speech. It has always worked that way and always will, no matter what the new oligarch configuration is. So when a clique of power elites gets together to control the citizens of an entire nation—in the name of “equality” or “social justice” or whatever—all become de facto slaves of the Mass State.

Second, always remember that these people, the Mass State, they know better. They already have the answer. They don’t need you to think for yourself. So it feels as though we’re seeing more slavery being imposed over the mind.

After all, K-12 schooling and college education seem totally saturated in political correctness. Political correctness induces self-censorship, which prevents normal conversation and blunts independent thought. The education establishment seems more focused on producing cookie-cutter minds, coercing students to each think exactly alike politically or suffer social rejection.

Conformity based on the fear of being socially isolated is the essence of socialism. No doubt that fear is the mind-control cyanide in the Kool-Aid that has so many millennials parroting socialist talking points today. They don’t have a clue.

Solution: Restoring Knowledge of the Constitution
To understand what’s at stake, all Americans need a new primer in the meaning of freedom. Too many are at sea without a compass because they don’t have a grasp of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and how it protects us from tyranny.

The fact that most of our educational institutions don’t teach this anymore is beyond criminal. It’s almost an act of war, because people cannot protect what they don’t even know about. Knowledge about the foundations of our freedom has been cut off from the minds of most Americans for at least two generations now.

Such ignorance, especially the inability to think things through, only profits the growth of socialism as well as the power-mongering of socialism’s wannabe oligarchs. It certainly doesn’t help normal Americans who wish to live and let live. Such ignorance allows for the growth of dependency, deception, coercion, and debt. It also prevents self-reliance, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and self-defense.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew very well that they were establishing a system that would abolish the institution of slavery in all of its forms, slavery over the mind as well as chattel slavery. But maintaining that trajectory towards freedom—a basic goal of the Constitution—is only possible as long as Americans have the grit and will and knowledge to do so.

Our founders limited government in order to prevent all kinds of slavery, despite the fact that many of the signers were slave-holders. If radical education reformers along with today’s education establishment were not so averse to teaching civics, most Americans would know that. Instead they’ve undermined students’ capacity to think for themselves, which means they are being taught to be good slaves to the state.

We must all devise new ways to teach the meaning of freedom and the Constitution to Americans who have been deprived of that knowledge through the deceptions of the media and academia and celebrity culture. We need to fight through the social media moguls’ censorship of such ideas. That may mean old-fashioned flyers and tracts, a la firebrand Thomas Paine.

We need more actual one-on-one conversations in daily life, helping people understand what the Constitution actually stands for, and guiding them to discover the joys of real thought and conversation. Maybe have a fun and friendly trivia quiz. Virtually shout from the rooftops that we have three branches of government. Name them and tell what they are for. Help repair the ignorance of those nearly 40 percent (!) of Americans who cannot even name one of the freedoms of the First Amendment.

Those who are literate in real freedom need to teach it in any friendly way they can to their friends and neighbors. But expect push back from power elites for doing so. Wannabe slave owners have always been hostile to teaching would-be slaves to read.

Why Would Anyone Vote Socialist?

"Democratic socialism" turns the land of the free and home of the brave into the land of disease and home of the enslaved.

Robin Smith
https://patriotpost.us/articles/59140-why-would-anyone-vote-sociali
October 25, 2018

“What the Democrats don’t realize is that the Nov. 6 midterm elections are not going to be about President Trump — they are going to be about what kind of America we want to become,” wrote former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a recent op-ed.

He’s right. The elections next week will be one more critical step in the direction of how America will look for generations to come.

A fount of analysis is available providing polling, trends, historical behaviors, and turnout models aiming to explain this election. But let’s imagine America as the Democrats are advertising.

First, it’s imperative that public discourse should address openly the historical failures of socialism. The generation clamoring for this collective government-sanctioned way of life has never been educated using historical texts speaking of the greatness of America’s Founders, or of the freedoms sought and established here by deliberate and careful construction of the Rule of Law — observing man’s tendencies and the need for a government that serves its citizens, not creates subjects of tyrannical reign.

Instead, the generation that is being led pitifully down the path of socialism has been indoctrinated by tenure-protected faculty who preach the gospel of secularism and shame the value of a true faith in God. These academics are the evangelists of the collective and manufactured rights available only to the devout who worship at the altar of Big Government — a government that replaces the family; redefines life, gender, and marriage; and speaks of equal outcome instead of equal opportunity.

Recent polling indicates that 57% of Democrats view socialism favorably. Surely, these folks are simply ignorant of the actual history of socialism’s implementation.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 exposed the worst of socialism in a world power. China’s control over its production, information, and property enslaves its population. National Socialism (Nazis) and Marxist Socialism (Communists) murdered at least 100 million people in the 20th century.

Oh, but those are “extreme” examples, we’re told.

Today’s demand for “democratic socialism” is marketed via social media and Google algorithms and sent around by young adults who have no ability to critically think or reason. Ironically, without a free market in a nation that observes property rights, most people would not have access to the capital needed to have the smartphone that spreads their contagion. These comrade-wannabes also miss that the flow of information would be controlled by the state to ensure its subjects were compliant to the needs of masses, not influential on matters such as offering consent to be governed.

With the campaigns of Bernie Sanders (the modern prophet of socialism), Elizabeth “Fauxchahontas” Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Beto O'Rouke on the Democrats’ slate of progressives, the promise of free college tuition with no strings tickles the ears. The “right” of health insurance seems logical when you’ve been indoctrinated to believe that government has its own money and economy without productive citizens lawfully paying their taxes, and that “free” health insurance is as simple as slinging pixie dust. A “universal wage” is equally appealing to those who have spent four, five, and six years completing a degree in women’s studies with a minor in Celtic History and find that their degree yields a job as often as one could find teats on a bull.

The allure of the version of socialism dished out by today’s Democrats is pure desperation for anything to draw voters to their partisan pity party of disgruntled and perpetually aggrieved victims.

So what would socialism look like in America? We could bring to mind Venezuela, where people are going without food, medicine, and social order, while rationing such simple items as toilet paper. We could also look at this “caravan of migrants” coming from Honduras, which is exporting its miserably poor because it refuses to import the currency of Liberty.
But more appropriately, take a look at America’s 31st state, California, to see how socialism takes root. With its vast wealth of population and natural resources, the Golden State has the fifth largest economy in the world, surpassing Great Britain. Yet it remains within the top 10 of these United States as having the highest tax burden on individuals and businesses. Inching toward a single-payer health insurance system, Californians provide illegal immigrants not only with safe harbor in the sanctuary state, but provide them with benefits such as health care, tuition and, even voting rights in local elections.

And what’s happening in this “democratic socialism” on the Left Coast? The state admits to about $1.3 trillion in debt (trillion, not billion). Headlines recently noted that typhus is on the rise. Yeah, that typhus, spread by fleas of rodents. Human feces are a problem in San Francisco, homeless camps are turning Los Angeles into a trash heap, and the call for more spending rings loudly as California proudly promotes itself as the destination for the invasion coming up from Central America.

The new “democratic socialism” turns the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of disease and home of the depraved and enslaved. Wake up, America. Go Vote!

Voters Don’t Like Trump, Just His Results

An opportunity for the President’s party to buck midterm history.


By James Freeman
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/10/22/voters-dont-like-trump-just-his-results-an-opportunity-for-the-presidents-party-to-buck-midterm-history-by-james-freeman/
October 22, 2018

There’s a school of thought that the economy is only a political issue when it’s bad and that prosperous times allow people the luxury of prioritizing other issues. That’s not the message in the latest poll from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News.

The consensus among professional economists is that this Friday’s third-quarter GDP report from the Commerce Department will show another strong period of growth in the U.S. economy after a blowout performance in the second quarter. Voters don’t seem to be taking it for granted. WSJ/NBC survey respondents call “the economy and jobs” the most important factor in deciding their votes in this year’s elections for the U.S. Congress. Since June, this issue has overtaken health care as the top concern for participants in the poll.

Could this mean that despite all the recent positive economic data, survey respondents actually think the economy is lousy? Not likely, because voters are giving high marks to the party that is currently in charge of the nation’s economic policy. When it comes to dealing with the economy, survey participants say that Republicans “would do a better job” than Democrats by a 15-point margin. This appears to be the largest Republican advantage recorded by this survey, which has been asking the question since at least 1991.

This doesn’t mean that voters particularly like the nation’s chief economic policy maker. In fact 68% of respondents say they don’t like President Trump. But Mr. Trump appears to be setting a modern record in the share of the electorate saying that they don’t like the President personally, but approve of most of his policies. This category of voters currently stands at 20% of the electorate. For most recent Presidents such readings were generally in the low-to-mid single digits, though Bill Clinton’s share did climb into the teens.

The Journal reports that survey results show overall approval of President Trump is increasing, and so is enthusiasm among those in his party:

Hand in hand with Republicans’ increased election interest is a rise in Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating to 47%, the highest mark of his time in office, with 49% disapproving of his performance. That is an improvement from September, when 44% approved and 52% disapproved of his performance.
If a significant number of Americans are giving the President what might be called their grudging approval, you can’t say he’s not working hard to earn it. This is not a reference to his tweeting but to the results of two of his signature initiatives on economic policy.

This column has written at length about the encouraging spike in business investment following the December enactment of his tax cuts. Recently the Trump administration provided a progress report on the other pillar of his pro-growth agenda—reducing federal regulation. This is affectionately known as swamp-draining to those outside the D.C. metropolitan area.

It seems Team Trump is exceeding its own expectations. At one point the administration was aiming to cut about $10 billion in regulatory costs during the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on September 30. Now the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs reports the elimination of $23 billion in “overall regulatory costs across the government” during the fiscal year just ended.

During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump appears to have under-promised when he said he would cut two federal rules for every new one promulgated on his watch. Or maybe he is just over-delivering now. Either way, the regulatory affairs office reports on the 2018 results:

Agencies issued 176 deregulatory actions and 14 significant regulatory actions. 57 deregulatory actions were significant. Comparing significant deregulatory to significant regulatory actions yields a ratio of 4 to 1.
And the White House says there’s more good news to come:

In fiscal year 2019, agencies anticipate saving a total of $18 billion in regulatory costs from final rulemakings. This does not include one of the most significant deregulatory rules anticipated in fiscal year 2019, “The Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule for Model Years 2021-2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks,” which the proposed rule estimates will save between $120 and $340 billion in regulatory costs.
Voters have obviously noticed what an unleashed U.S. economy looks like, which suggests that Republicans have a chance to avoid the traditional midterm drubbing typically suffered by the party of the President.

The one big remaining issue where the Democrats have a large advantage in the WSJ/NBC survey, as in so many other surveys, is health care. If Republicans follow Mr. Trump’s lead and contrast Bernie Sanders-style medicine—supported by most House Democrats—with GOP plans to expand consumer choice, Republicans can buck midterm history.

President Trump is winning

Abuse makes Trump stronger and Dems are heading for disaster

There is simply no other way to fairly interpret the fact that he’s just hit a new high in his approval rating.

Even better for Trump, he’s officially more popular than his predecessor Barack Obama was at the exact same stage of his first tenure as President.

According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is now at 47% approval, compared to Obama’s 45% two weeks before the midterm elections in 2010.

Trump is winning. There is simply no other way to fairly interpret the fact that he’s just hit a new high in his approval rating. According to a new poll, Trump is now at 47% approval

Given all the fire, brimstone and perpetual outrage about Trump since he won the White House, this is a truly remarkable state of affairs.

Of course, America’s liberals will respond to the shock poll in the way they respond to all things Trump - with fury, incredulity and by sticking their collective heads in the sand.

‘HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING?’ they will wail, uncontrollably.

‘WHAT THE F**K IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE WHO LIKE HIM?’ they will howl into each other’s kale salads.

‘THIS IS THE END OF PLANET EARTH!’ they will sob, in their normal understated manner.

All of which will be music to the ears of Trump, a man who absolutely revels in liberal hysteria because he knows it works for him, as this new poll proves.

The more Trump-bashers scream abuse at and about him, the more it fires up his base – and indeed, the more it fires up Trump himself.

Obama's approval rating was only 45% at the same point in his tenure. The more Trump-bashers scream abuse, the more it fires up his base – and indeed, the more it fires up Trump himself

After all, at his heart, the President’s a street-fighting New Yorker who loves a good scrap.

And in two weeks time, he may deliver the biggest knockout punch of his presidency.

Until recently, it was widely assumed the Republicans would lose control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

It was being depicted as a ‘damning referendum on Trump’ and historically, most presidents – like Obama - take a whack in the midterms.

But now, I’m not so sure.

In fact, I’d say there’s a very good chance the Republicans will hang onto the House, as well as the Senate, and Trump will move on empowered and emboldened to what could very well be an even bigger win in 2020.

Why is this happening?

Well first, the US mainstream media has become the boy that cried wolf.

Their constant collective outrage over every tiny thing Trump says, tweets or does – much of it driven by commercial self-interest - has had the inevitable effect of diluting the impact of that outrage.

Barely a week goes by without some supposed new ‘Trump crisis’ fuelling wall-to-wall cable news coverage and dire predictions of impeachment or even jail time for the President.

Yet within a few days, each ‘administration-threatening scandal’ dissolves into a giant nothing-burger.

Liberal celebrities are just as bad, relentlessly shrieking away on social media about their hatred for Trump – seemingly oblivious to the fact that nobody cares any more. We just assume all celebrities hate him because they think it’s ‘cool’ to do so.

The effect of this endless hysterical cacophony, as I have repeatedly warned, has been to make Trump ever more popular with his base and with the GOP.

Each ‘administration-threatening scandal’ dissolves into a nothing-burger. Celebrities are shrieking away about their hatred for Trump, but it just seems like it’s ‘cool’ to do so. This endless hysterical cacophony has made Trump ever more popular with his base and the GOP

More significantly, as this poll suggests, it’s also begun to move moderates with no particularly animated view of Trump more to a place of tolerating him.

And that’s terrible news for the Democrats, because their only game plan with Trump is to abuse him and rely on mockery and sneering as an election strategy.

It’s the same flawed, arrogant and elitist mentality that led to Hillary Clinton branding Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’ in a speech that I still believe did more than anything else to lose her the election.

I look at the Democrats today and see a Party that’s learned absolutely nothing about how to beat Trump.

And I see a President who’s growing stronger by the day.

Trump’s become a political Godzilla, crushing everyone who dares challenge him and bulldozing his way through an agenda that is beginning to pay real dividends.

In less than two years, Trump’s got two nominees onto the Supreme Court, entrenching a Conservative majority.

He’s slashed taxes, and regulations – sparking a boom in the US economy that shows no sign of stopping, a surge in jobs and record low unemployment.

Trump’s forged a peaceful dialogue with North Korea, launched a trade war with China that many think is long overdue, withdrawn from the obviously flawed Iran nuclear deal and Trans-Pacific Partnership, forced Mexico and Canada to update NAFTA, bullied NATO countries into paying their bills, and bombed ISIS out of Iraq and Syria.

He’s also clamped down hard on illegal immigration.

As I write this, a ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Central American migrants – most of them from Honduras - is moving towards the Southern border.

They intend trying to enter the United States illegally.

It’s hard to think of a more powerful image to vindicate Trump’s much criticized demand for a new ‘Wall’, isn’t it?

Trump says Democrats responsible for caravan at Arizona rally

A ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Central American migrants is moving towards the Southern border. They intend trying to enter the United States illegally. It’s hard to think of a more powerful image to vindicate Trump’s much criticized demand for a new ‘Wall’, isn’t it?

As he tweeted: ‘Full efforts are being made to stop the onslaught of illegal aliens from crossing our Southern Border… The Caravans are a disgrace to the Democrat Party. Change the immigration laws NOW!’

Trump clearly believes this caravan will help Republicans in the midterms, and so do I. Expect to see the President down on that border very soon, playing Mr Tough Guy.

The combined effect of all these ‘wins’ – obviously this is a subjective word if you’re a Democrat - is that Trump enters this election in an increasingly dominant position as a President who is doing exactly what he said he’d do.

I also think he’s a President who’s beginning to really enjoy himself.

When I saw him several months ago for an interview aboard Air Force One, I was struck by how relaxed and confident he seemed.

He exuded an air of someone who’d worked out how Washington works – or rather, doesn’t! – and how to play the broken, highly partisan system to his advantage.

As for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion, all the signs suggest this may soon deliver a massive damp squib.

Of course, Trump remains a hugely divisive and polarising figure with a penchant for flying loose with the truth and heavy on the inflammatory rhetoric.

But love him or loathe him, there is no denying that he’s winning.

So once again, I can only advise the Democrats to stop their ridiculously self-defeating state of perpetual Trump outrage and work out how they’re actually going to beat him.

Because right now, Trump’s kicking your a**.

The Fantasy of ‘Democratic Socialism’

If the state controls the economy, competition is replaced by rivalries among politicians.

By Stephen Miller
http://luxlibertas.com/the-fantasy-of-democratic-socialism/
October 26, 2018

Doctors speak about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Some people say there’s a good kind of socialism, democratic socialism, that is different from the bad kind, the Marxist-Leninist variety. There’s an obvious problem with this claim: There never has been a socialist country that has been democratic. The Democratic Socialists of America admit it: “No country has fully instituted democratic socialism,” the organization says on its website.

Democratic socialism is not only an unrealized dream. It is a contradiction in terms.

The DSA argues that democratic socialism is possible: “We can learn from the comprehensive welfare state maintained by the Swedes.” DSA also mentions government programs in France, Canada and Nicaragua that smack of socialism. But Sweden, France and Canada are not socialist countries, and Nicaragua is not democratic. “Sweden allows property and profits,” notes economic historian Deirdre McCloskey. “It allocates most goods by unregulated prices.” The U.S. bailed out General Motors , but Sweden didn’t rescue Volvo or Saab.

What would be the defining characteristics of a democratic socialist country? In “The Poverty of Socialist Thought,” a 1976 Commentary article, I argued that “socialism is nothing more than a vague moral commitment to social justice.” I was wrong. Contemporary democratic socialists have a concrete agenda: They want to eliminate capitalism. The DSA says: “In the short term we can’t eliminate private corporations, but we can bring them under greater democratic control.” Meagan Day, a DSA member who works for Jacobin magazine, writes for Vox: “In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism.”

In “The New Socialists,” a New York Times article, political scientist Corey Robin argues that capitalism should be abolished because “it makes us unfree.” He complains that “under capitalism, we’re forced to enter the market just to live.” Well, yes. Would Mr. Robin want the state to be the sole employer? Would he prefer to buy goods at state-owned stores and eat at state-owned restaurants?

Mr. Robin, like all socialists, is hazy on the details of a socialist economy. The first step he proposes is “state ownership of certain industries.” He doesn’t say which ones. Democratically elected workers, he imagines, would decide what to make and what prices to charge. “The trouble with socialism,” Oscar Wilde is reported to have said, “is that it would take too many evenings.”

If democratic socialists looked more closely at the world, they would see that a strong market economy is a necessary condition for freedom, though not a sufficient one. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index lists 10 countries as having the most competitive economies: the U.S., Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. Only two, Singapore and Hong Kong, are not fully democratic.

If democratic socialism is a fantasy, socialist economic proposals are recipes for economic stagnation. “Competitive economies,” the forum says, “are those that are most likely to be able to grow more sustainably and inclusively, meaning more likelihood that everyone in society will benefit from the fruits of economic growth.” If the state owns corporations, there is no competition, only rivalries among people with political power.

To argue in favor of competitive economies is not to endorse libertarianism or laissez-faire economics. Adam Smith understood that markets need to be regulated. The nature and extent of market regulation will always be a matter of debate, but the more the government interferes in the market, the less competitive an economy will be.

Democratic socialists would do well to ponder Yeats’s lines: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/10/22/wolves-in-wolves-clothing-by-victor-davis-hanson/
October 22nd, 2018

If the New Democratic Party was smart, it would do what the old Democratic Party did long ago: always sound centrist if not conservative in the last weeks of a campaign, get elected, then revert to form and pursue a left-wing agenda for a year or two—and then repeat the chameleon cycle every two to four years.

But although many Democrats in Trump states still dance the old bipartisan two-step, lots of blinkered progressive wolves don’t even bother to put on the sheep’s clothing.

Evidently, the new progressive and radical Democratic Party is far more honest—or perhaps far more hubristic—than in the past. So what now looks and sounds like a wolf is a wolf. Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from 2016. Or rather, they still believe it is 2008 all over again, with a host of wannabe Obamas on the 2020 horizon, all appealing to identity politics, Maenad feminism, and neo-socialism. The hipster theory is that 30 percent of the present electorate will always vote en masse for unapologetic progressives, and that bloc number, due to changing demography and persuasive street theatrics, soon will grow to 50 percent of all voters.

More to the point, the strategy of hating Trump 24/7 and fueling the 90 percent negative media coverage of the president had seemed to be a winning hand—given that Trump has usually below 45 percent approval in most polls, and pundits promised a huge blue wave neutering what certainly would be Trump’s last two years in the White House.

Yet the result of a progressive wolf baying proudly like a left-wing wolf is that as we head to the 2018 midterm, progressives may soon blow what should be, by history’s analytics, a big win for the out party in any president’s first term.

Man-Made Disasters
As the economy kept booming and things overseas calmed down, the Democrats found it harder to run a campaign strictly against either the ogre or the incompetent Trump. So they stayed on the offensive and did not bother to hide their agendas of open borders, “Medicare for All,” abolishing ICE, identity politics quotas, radical feminism, abortion on demand, and climate change hysterias. And they were quite lupine in their sincerity even as the public insidiously began to tune them out.

The first disaster was disrupting senate confirmation hearings, on the part of both senators and paid operatives in the gallery. Hysterics by Senators Cory “Spartacus,” Kamala Harris, and Richard Blumenthal soon gave the impression that Democratic stalwarts were unhinged.

After all, somehow the Democrats had managed all at once to 1) lose the vote on Kavanaugh; 2) to ensure that the Bushite Kavanaugh likely would become so radicalized by the horrific treatment meted out that he would not follow the usual David Souter liberalizing trajectory, 3) unite Republicans and more or less end the Never Trump factionalism, 4) go on record of opposing due process of law and rejecting the entire political and cultural tradition of American jurisprudence, and 5) so discredit their opposition to a court nominee, that next time around everything they do and say about a nominee will be seen as mere go-through-the-motions leftist boilerplate.

The second disaster was condoning and indeed empowering street thuggery. Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder went full Maxine Waters in parroting the new incivility and seemed to think most Americans enjoy pampered protestors getting in the faces of their opponents to scream, yell, and in general go berserk. It is never a wise thing to be in alliance with young Bacchants shrieking as they scratch the closed doors of the Supreme Court or rude young activists swarming someone at a restaurant and screaming obscenities in a nasal voice.

Most Americans wondered, what in the world would the frenzied anti-Kavanaugh protestors have done if they had broken down the court doors and plunged into the swearing-in ceremony: scratch Mrs. Kavanaugh and the two Kavanaugh girls, or rip apart Brett Kavanaugh as if he were a young King Pentheus? Progressives seem to think it is cool that the street mobs are now the paramilitary wing of their own party.

Immolated by Identity Politics
A third mishap was senator Elizabeth Warren’s amazingly stupid ploy of releasing her DNA ancestry test before the midterms. The Massachusetts Democrat somehow adduced that a person with about a 1 percent likelihood of being an indigenous person (more likely from Central and South America than from the American plains) somehow was proof of her long-feigned minority status. That Warren worked in cahoots with newspapers to massage the gambit, as refutation of Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” ribbing, backfired when it took the media two retractions to get down the basic math of Warren’s infinitesimally tiny Indian bloodlines.

The reaction was obvious: if someone can cajole a minority billet for careerist purposes based on a 1-percent ancestry, then every American can be anything he wishes. And when everyone is everything, then no one is anything—and the racial basis for diversity set-asides is dead.

In Warren’s logic, how can the average African-American be authentically black with an average white pedigree 25 times greater than her own Indian heritage that she used to authenticate her status as a “person of color” academic? And how weird it is that Warren identifies with the 1 percent of her ancestry, rather than the 99 percent of other various tribes and races—and then claims that she does so not necessarily for any careerist advantages when such advantages are well established.

The timing was even worse, as Boston was also the contemporaneous scene of a landmark lawsuit lodged by Asian groups against Harvard University’s disingenuous racial restrictionist admission policies. Harvard, every bit as intellectually dishonest as Warren, conjured up all sort of personality and character issues to stereotype and demonize Asian applicants for admission, as a way of nullifying their academic records of achievement and thereby reducing their percentages of racial spoils in order to help more “diverse” Hispanics and blacks.

So what will Harvard now do, subpoena its own esteemed law professor Elizabeth Warren to lecture jurors about how minorities like herself would lose out when there are too many Asians? At some point on the horizon, voters are going to conclude that the diversity monster is devouring itself and making a mockery of common sense. The difference between Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill is only that the latter at least more honestly perpetuated his dishonesty by adding an indigenous people’s costume to his fraud.

Following a Clichéd Script
A fourth forced error was the illegal immigration “caravan” now butting up against the Mexican border. We saw last summer how identity politics activists and progressive operatives colluded with counterparts south of the border to stage entries, in which the media portrayed illegal crossers as victims of a cruel Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that gratuitously separates families. It worked in the sense of dropping Trump’s polls a few points.

But that script is worn by now, even though it was timed on the eve of the midterms. The idea that major Democrats would be calling for the abolition of ICE as thousands of illegal entrants near the border is surreal. This time around, most Americans will shrug that Trump really is right and that a wall will not only keep illegal crossers out, but do so in a way that does not separate families. That is, non-U.S. citizens can do whatever they like in organizing their family structures and relationships, but on their side of the border.

In a nation with over 20 million illegal aliens, and when caravans approach of would-be border crashers, abolishing ICE is not a winning idea. And the Democrat weaponizing of the #MeToo movement to target conservatives and exempt liberals (given that too many of the progressives’ best and brightest in the past had been sidelined as collateral damage) more or less discredited both parties to the transaction.

Despite these recent self-inflicted wounds, the new Socialist-Democratic party has an uphill battle anyway, even in taking advantage of the historical opportunities for an out-party during a president’s first midterm. It has to convince Americans that at a time of record national debt, it is easy to embrace a $20 trillion entitlement such as “Medicare for All”—which would force those, who waited a lifetime to receive their Medicare cards, instead to deal with rationed care, and thereby eventually a likely call by a bankrupt government for enhanced hospice and perhaps euthanasia to unplug the bottleneck of the elderly who would get in the way of younger Medicare holders.

But give progressive wolves credit. Unlike liberals, they are as they talk and act. They are at least proud of their agendas of remaking America in their own image—and in the last few weeks that image is appearing a veritable nightmare.

The Origins of Progressive Agony

In the wake of Obama, the Democratic party was a shipwreck, to be saved only by Hillary and the Supreme Court . . .

Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/10/17/the-origins-of-progressive-agony-by-victor-davis-hanson/
October 17, 2018

What has transformed the Democratic party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement? Even party chairman Tom Perez concedes that there are “no moderate Democrats left,” and lately the rantings of Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez confirm that diagnosis.


Obama, the Fallen God

Paradoxically, Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and 2012 and yet helped to erode the old Democratic party in the process. He ended up in opulent retirement while ceding state legislatures, governorships, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court to conservative Republicans.

Obama had promised leftists — in his prior brief tenure in the Senate he had compiled the most partisan record of his 99 colleagues — that his social-justice methods and agendas would lead to a proverbial “permanent Democratic majority.” Do we remember the February 2009 Newsweek obsequious cover story “We Are All Socialists Now”?

Trump’s Midterm Pitch

Supposedly, changing demography, massive illegal immigration, and identity politics had preordained a permanent 51 percent “Other” whose minority statuses, as defined by gender and race, had now become a majority, given the destined demise of the white working classes. If Obama had not existed, someone like Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Kirsten Gillibrand was supposedly foreordained to be president anyway.

But while Obama sermonized about our predestined “arc of history” and how its moral curve bent this way and that, he managed to lose both his supermajority in the Senate and the House itself by 2011. By 2015, the Senate lost its Democratic majority.

Ruling by pen-and-phone executive order only took the country more leftward. And it came at the price of stagnating the economy, acerbating social, cultural, and racial differences, raising taxes, and recalibrating foreign policy.

Obama bequeathed to his successors neither a popular progressive record nor a robust economy nor a stellar foreign-policy success. If he did ensure massive minority voting registration and bloc voting, that served largely himself — and came at the cost of alienating independents and the working classes. In other words, Obama most certainly did pass on to his successors the downside of his polarizing sermonizing and divisiveness, but not the upside of record minority turnout and uniform voting.

Progressives once thought that Obama was their godhead and their assured pathway to permanent power. In those heady days of 2009, the American system of government was still deemed wonderful. Conservatives were bitter dead-enders, and the country was in the process of being fundamentally “transformed.” Basking in the rites and rituals of her role as first lady, Michelle Obama had finally learned, by her own admission, to be proud of her country.

But then with the loss of local, state, and federal legislative power, progressives grew understandably bitter. Never had so much been promised and so little delivered. And they began to recalibrate Obama the erstwhile savior as mostly a narcissist who had thrived while emasculating his followers.

That bitter disappointment was something akin to the shipwreck of Republican dreams of the late 1950s. Giddy after the elections of 1952 and 1956, Republicans had thought that a beloved Ike was their permanent salvation, when, in fact, Ike, but not necessarily his party, did well for a brief hiatus of two terms — after following 20 years of Democratic presidential rule and ushering in eight more.

The 2016 Election

The 2016 election understandably embittered and radicalized Democrats — as happens when a party wins the popular but loses the electoral-college vote. And given the propitious start of the 2016 campaign, the election year certainly was not supposed to end that way.

On Election Eve, the New York Times still preened that its various models and polls gave Donald Trump no real statistical chance of victory — or rather respectively a mere 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, or less than 1 percent chance of winning the election. Such faux mathematical precision was invented to lend accuracy to suspect polls and biased models that were already eroding. The supposedly buffoonish Trump would not just humiliate but destroy the Republican party, as it split asunder — and as Never Trumpers joined liberals in blasting their comedic nominee.

A boastful lame-duck Obama was lecturing the nation on the eve of the anticipated Clinton landslide that there was zero chance of any party, much less any nation, warping the U.S. election. Pre-election, a smug Hillary Clinton pontificated that Trump had to grow up and accept the impending verdict of the voters that would shortly demolish his candidacy and humiliate his person. She would add insult to Trump’s injury by sweeping Georgia and Arizona and by a landslide that would reinvigorate the Obama dream.

Indeed, dozens of the careerists and progressive appointees at the Washington FBI, DOJ, CIA, and National Security Council took all sorts of risks to insure a Clinton blowout. They variously sought to warp the FISA court, subvert the Trump campaign, collude with Fusion GPS and its Russian sources, and weaponize the FBI to ensure the Clinton victory — on the premise that their unethical and often illegal behavior would soon be rewarded by the Clintons, who for decades had proven far less ethical than 2016’s miscreant minions.

Hillary’s defeat caused unimaginable shock. It almost immediately prompted a collective psychological meltdown. The tragedy was not just that an inept Clinton had squandered the gifts of a $1 billion war chest, the deep-state collusion of the Obama administration, and a completely captive and obsequious media. But she had lost to Trump, the reality-TV-show host, the controversial raconteur, the first serious presidential candidate with neither military nor political experience.

Worse still, Clinton had blown a huge lead by foolishly seeking an electoral mandate while Trump, the supposed dunce, outsmarted her analytics and young techies by battering down the blue wall and stealing her Democratic Midwest with a populist nationalist message, part JFK, part Ronald Reagan.


Nothing is more humiliating than to be already doling out White House patronage jobs on Election Day at noon, and by evening suffering a shipwrecked candidacy and the certainty of eight more years of progressive rule incinerated. No wonder progressives were recently reduced to frenzied maenads gnashing their teeth and breaking their fingernails on the closed doors of the Supreme Court.

Trump

In the past, the usual progressive attack on traditionalists and conservatives had been met with a sort of tsk-tsk appeasement, a Marquess of Queensberry forbearance from men and women who had learned their polite political manners at the country club.

The Bush, McCain, and Romney approach was to be above the fray and expect Americans to condemn progressive excess, when in fact the attitude of exasperated conservative voters was always something more like, “If they won’t do their job and fight back, then why in the hell should we support them?”

Then came Trump, who considered politics as a sort of televised WWE wrestling mat, and who enjoyed the political fray as much as he had when he once climbed into a real Wrestlemania ring with Vince McMahon.

He said bluntly and often crudely what most had thought silently and soberly. Trump had a looney idea that millions of the deplorable middle and working classes had no innate advantages accruing from “white privilege” (whatever that still means) — and were tired of being told they did by those who really had clout and connections. Trump, crazily, said that globalization made more voters poorer than richer, and that making things in the U.S. still mattered. And the more the punditocracy wrote him off, the more it galvanized voters who despised talking heads.

Had progressives just lost to Rubio or even Cruz, it would have been almost tolerable. And had they lost while still winning Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, they could have endured it. But to lose to an orange and combed-over Trump with a mile-long tie, who outfoxed their own Silicon Valley experts by demolishing their blue wall, only added terrible insult to staggering injury.

The System

Progressives soon woke up to the reality that without power they were unable to stop Trump, and so they embraced any desperate means necessary to trap the ogre. The effort proved as frenzied as it was impotent: boycotting the inauguration, suing over state voting machines, using the courts to stymie Trump appointments and executive orders, appealing to the emoluments clause and the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, and winking and nodding at the assassination chic of celebrities and politicos such as Johnny Depp, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffith, Madonna, Robert de Niro, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others. The many methods to subvert Trump’s presidency or fantasize about his gory death were as varied as the number of faux-accusers who would come out of the woodwork to smear Brett Kavanaugh. And the result was eerily the same: the more the impotent frenzy, the more it discredited its source

Blacks Lives Matter, Antifa, and #MeToo were all in a sense weaponized to do what elections had not. Finally, in exasperation, Democrats have begun demonizing the Electoral College itself, which has gone from the legal basis of Obama’s treasured “blue wall” to a relic of old, white male Founders who supposedly favored rural hicks over the better people of the cities. Progressives now damn the idea of a nine-person Supreme Court and mysteriously praise the discredited, hare-brained scheme of FDR to pack the court with progressive toady judges.
They bitterly lament the unfairness that a Wyoming or Montana might have as many senators per state as California or New York, though they had no such complaint in 2009 when they had a Senate supermajority — a margin they won in part because a tiny progressive state such as Rhode Island had the same number of senators as odious conservative Texas.

How could it be that a picture-perfect system that had empowered Barack Obama now gave the country Donald Trump? How unfair of the deplorable Founders to have bequeathed that ball and chain to the better people of 2016!

If the system does not deliver the correct results to progressives every time, then change the damned system to ensure that it does!

The Supreme Court

In 2008, all the stars above — terror over the September 14 stock meltdown, unhappiness over the Iraq War, the kick-me McCain campaign, the Obama heritage candidacy, and stay-home conservatives turned off by the traditional Republicans — aligned to give Democrats control of the Congress and presidency.

Progressive astrologists predicted a series of Obamas for the next half-century. But in truth, the country was never really progressive. Until Obama, no Democrat without a Southern accent had won the popular vote since John Kennedy in 1960. And by 2010, the pushback became a near rout, within a few years, leaving the Left with its last vestige of power: a divided Supreme Court, which since the Roosevelt era had always salvaged the progressive dreams that had been wrecked in the executive and legislative branches.

Trump, however, not only got elected but in matters of court appointments he also proved to be an originalist and constructionist in a way that recent Republican presidents had never quite envisioned. He outsourced his Supreme Court nominations to the no-nonsense Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Progressives went regressive in their furor and demonized Trump’s picks to such a degree that there was little chance that a Georgetown cocktail circuit would ever manage to turn a Gorsuch or Kavanaugh into a Souter or Stevens.

Fear grew over a future that would be even worse than the bad present. Should Trump be reelected, he might have one or two more deleterious picks yet — and perhaps even female Supreme Court justices more conservative than their male counterparts (and whom it might prove difficult to smear with supposed questionable teenage behavior four decades prior).

Trump’s criteria for selections seemed to be youth, strict constructionism, and intellectual brilliance — along the lines of a cohort of young Scalias. In short, the Court could no longer save for progressives what the presidency and Congress had lost them — an unfortunate downturn brought about once again by none other than the odious Donald J. Trump.

The catastrophic yet suicidal loss in the 2016 election and the disappointment over the Obama presidency radicalized Democrats. A combative Trump himself certainly enraged them, on a variety of political, social, and cultural levels.

When Democrats lost, they realized that they still lived in a Republic and not a volatile Athenian democracy — and found this also hard to take.

More exasperating still was the loss of the Supreme Court, the last bastion of elite brilliance and superior morality that might yet save America from the prejudices and ignorance of the irredeemables, deplorables, clingers, and crazies.

Add it all up, and it was enough to drive any liberal to binge progressive drinking.

Victor Davis Hanson — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson

The Real Reason They Hate Trump

David Gelernter
https://outline.com/TFnHMu
October 21, 2018

Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared.

The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten.

This has happened before, in the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s, but then the financial crisis arrived to save liberalism from certain destruction. Today leftists pray that Robert Mueller will put on his Superman outfit and save them again.

For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful.

Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American—except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.

Mr. Trump lacks constraints because he is filthy rich and always has been and, unlike other rich men, he revels in wealth and feels no need to apologize—ever. He never learned to keep his real opinions to himself because he never had to. He never learned to be embarrassed that he is male, with ordinary male proclivities. Sometimes he has treated women disgracefully, for which Americans, left and right, are ashamed of him—as they are of JFK and Bill Clinton.

But my job as a voter is to choose the candidate who will do best for America. I am sorry about the coarseness of the unconstrained average American that Mr. Trump conveys. That coarseness is unpresidential and makes us look bad to other nations. On the other hand, many of his opponents worry too much about what other people think. I would love the esteem of France, Germany and Japan. But I don’t find myself losing sleep over it.

The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of. They skip Davos every year and watch Fox News. Not even the very best has the dazzling brilliance of a Chuck Schumer, not to mention a Michelle Obama. In truth they are dumb as sheep.

Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is. Not the average male American, or the average white American. We know for sure that, come 2020, intellectuals will be dumbfounded at the number of women and blacks who will vote for Mr. Trump. He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones.

Many left-wing intellectuals are counting on technology to do away with the jobs that sustain all those old-fashioned truck-driver-type people, but they are laughably wide of the mark. It is impossible to transport food and clothing, or hug your wife or girl or child, or sit silently with your best friend, over the internet. Perhaps that’s obvious, but to be an intellectual means nothing is obvious. Mr. Trump is no genius, but if you have mastered the obvious and add common sense, you are nine-tenths of the way home. (Scholarship is fine, but the typical modern intellectual cheapens his learning with politics, and is proud to vary his teaching with broken-down left-wing junk.)

This all leads to an important question—one that will be dismissed indignantly today, but not by historians in the long run: Is it possible to hate Donald Trump but not the average American?

True, Mr. Trump is the unconstrained average citizen. Obviously you can hate some of his major characteristics—the infantile lack of self-control in his Twitter babble, his hitting back like a spiteful child bully—without hating the average American, who has no such tendencies. (Mr. Trump is improving in these two categories.) You might dislike the whole package. I wouldn’t choose him as a friend, nor would he choose me. But what I see on the left is often plain, unconditional hatred of which the hater—God forgive him—is proud. It’s discouraging, even disgusting. And it does mean, I believe, that the Trump-hater truly does hate the average American—male or female, black or white. Often he hates America, too.

Granted, Mr. Trump is a parody of the average American, not the thing itself. To turn away is fair. But to hate him from your heart is revealing. Many Americas were ashamed when Ronald Reagan was elected. A movie actor? But the new direction he chose for America was a big success on balance, and Reagan turned into a great president. Evidently this country was intended to be run by amateurs after all—by plain citizens, not only lawyers and bureaucrats.

Those who voted for Mr. Trump, and will vote for his candidates this November, worry about the nation, not its image. The president deserves our respect because Americans deserve it—not such fancy-pants extras as network commentators, socialist high-school teachers and eminent professors, but the basic human stuff that has made America great, and is making us greater all the time.

Mr. Gelernter is computer science professor at Yale and chief scientist at Dittach LLC. His most recent book is “Tides of Mind.”

Sanity Prevails. Thanks Susan!

Susan Collins’ Game Changer

Editorial of The New York Sun
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/susan-collins-game-changer/90417/
October 5, 2018

It’s tempting to Susan Collins' Game Changer call Senator Susan Collins’ announcement of her intention to vote for Judge Kavanaugh a profile in courage — and it surely is that.

In recent weeks she has been subjected to threats of violence and what she considers to be a bribery attempt by those who vowed to punish the decision she just announced with $2 million in donations to her campaign opponent.

Yet what strikes us about Senator Collins’ magnificent moment is that it is about more than courage — it is a profile in substance. The Maine Republican is practically the only person in the Senate to approach this decision by reasoning out the substance of the constitutional questions that have the Democrats so panicked. She parsed the parchment’s preambular purpose of a more perfect union.

This didn’t entirely surprise us. For we have twice or thrice encountered the senator in the dining room of one of America’s greatest newspaper publishers, Alan Baker, back when he owned the Ellsworth, Maine, American. Those dinners were off the record, but we don’t think it would violate the ground rules to say we came away from the table with an enormous regard for Ms. Collins’ character.

How that shone through today. The senator touched on Brown v. Board of Education (which ended separate but equal), Griswold v. Connecticut (which found among the shadows and penumbras of the Bill of Rights an entitlement to privacy), as well as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. She spoke of Judge Kavanaugh’s articulation of the logic — and constitutional glue — of precedent.

What riveted us, though, was the senator’s fidelity to fairness. She made this clear from the start, saying the confirmation process had become “dysfunctional . . . a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign.” She proceeded to lace into those who declared against Judge Kavanaugh even before the hearings, including some who declared against him before his name was announced.

Ms. Collins didn’t mention Senator Schumer by name. Her remarks, though, will stand as a sharp rebuke of his leadership of the Democratic caucus. She noted, without naming him, Senator Schumer’s blather about how the confirmation process was not a trial, and then, whammo.

“Certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them,” she confessed in what will become a famous sentence. Added she: “We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” She called the presumption of innocence particularly relevant “when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record.”

A more balanced view of the Vietnam War

The Hidden Atrocities of the Vietnam War

The communist regime prevented journalists from documenting its war crimes, leaving an unbalanced historical record that continues to distort our memory of the conflict

By Max Hastings
Wall Street Journal
October 4, 2018

As a young BBC correspondent visiting Saigon in 1971, I avidly devoured a bootleg copy of Frances FitzGerald’s book “Fire In the Lake,” which was officially banned. Ms. FitzGerald ended her powerful account of America’s failure in Vietnam with an impassioned expression of yearning for communist victory, when “‘individualism’ and its attendant corruption [will] give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community.” Many observers back then assumed that nothing could be worse than the bloody, shambolic, corrupt mess that had prevailed in Vietnam since the abdication of the French colonial regime in 1954.

Today, however, there seems reason to modify the verdict of such writers as Ms. FitzGerald and Jack Langguth, another reporter covering the war, who wrote: “North Vietnam’s leaders…deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders…deserved to lose.” This is not because what either journalist recorded about America’s record in Vietnam has proved to be untrue. It is because we can now see that those who delivered tales of woe from Saigon—to which I contributed something myself—told only half the story.

Most history-conscious people in America and across the world know, for instance, the story of the My Lai Massacre of March 1968, when U.S. troops murdered at least 504 Vietnamese people of all ages and both sexes. Modern tourists in Vietnam hear plenty about My Lai and other American deeds of the same kind. But they are less likely to hear about the much larger-scale killings carried out by the communists around the same time.

The root of the problem is that modern society is extraordinarily susceptible to visual images, or a lack of them. Few people question the evil of Hitler, because almost everyone has seen images of his death camps. Yet many find it hard to view Stalin and Mao Zedong through the same lens, because those mass murderers and their successors have made sure that few photos of their killings are available.

Like other communist regimes, the North Vietnamese created what the intelligence community calls “denied areas,” where access for reporting and photography was available only to a few ideological sympathizers. It is dismaying how successful this policy was, and in considerable measure remains, in influencing both journalism and the writing of history.

‘ As is often the case with historical events, neither belligerent had much claim to the moral high ground. ’
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Thus, countless millions of people are familiar with the photos of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot by Saigon’s police chief in February 1968 and of a naked, screaming child fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm strike in 1972. But no visual records are available of the thousands of landlords and “class enemies” executed in North Vietnam in the 1950s, often publicly and with conspicuous brutality. This policy was acknowledged by General Vo Nguyen Giap in a speech in October 1956: “We indiscriminately viewed all landowners as enemies.... In suppressing enemies we adopted strong measures...and used unauthorized methods [a communist euphemism for torture] to force confessions....The outcome was that many innocent people were...arrested, punished, imprisoned.” Up to 15,000 people were executed in this fashion.
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Communist terrorism was a continuous feature of the later war in South Vietnam. In the country’s central highlands in 1965, for example, two Vietnamese antimalaria workers spraying DDT were seized, convicted of “spying for the Americans and the puppet government,” and executed with machetes. In another case, two Vietnamese nurses working on a cholera inoculation program, one of them pregnant, were found guilty of “acting in the name of the American imperialists and as a propaganda tool.” The woman’s life was spared, but her male colleague was hacked to death before her eyes.

The families of South Vietnamese soldiers suffered as well. Giong Dinh, an outpost south of Saigon, was attacked by Viet Cong on an October night in 1965. In the initial shootout, two South Vietnamese guards were killed and two bunkers destroyed. Lieut. Nguyen Van Thi, the post commander, continued to hold out with 15 men. The attackers seized members of the soldiers’ families—two men, four women and four children—and forced the wives to call on their husbands to surrender, on pain of the hostages’ lives. Lieut. Thi refused. At dawn, when a relief column reached Giong Dinh, it was found that the Viet Cong had indeed murdered their captives before withdrawing.

During the communists’ occupation of Hue in the 1968 Tet offensive, their cadres systematically murdered every government official, intellectual, bourgeois and “enemy of the people” whom they could identify, along with their families. Among the victims was Nguyen Tat Thong, the government’s national director of social services, together with six of his relatives, including two teenage brothers. Hundreds were killed whose only offense was to be fingered as alleged government sympathizers.

None of this is meant to suggest that the U.S. and its South Vietnamese clients should be viewed as the heroes of the war. Beyond My Lai, it is dismaying to discover from U.S. Army and Marine court-martial records how many atrocities were perpetrated against civilians and how inadequately they were punished. But the communist record of oppression and murder merits matching attention, not least from modern tourists in Vietnam, who are exposed to so many propaganda exhibits about American war crimes.

The mistake made by antiwar protesters half a century ago, and by some journalists and historians both then and since, was to conclude that, if America’s cause was a bad one, the other side’s must be a good one. As is often the case with historical events, neither belligerent had much claim to the moral high ground. Since the communist victory in 1975, many Vietnamese have found reason to reach that conclusion, and it may be time for Americans to do likewise.

—This essay is adapted from Mr. Hastings’s new book, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975,” to be published on Oct. 16 by HarperCollins (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).

Bret Stephens: For Once I am Grateful to Trump

For Once I am Grateful to Trump


Bret Stephens
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/10/04/bret-stephens-for-once-i-am-grateful-to-trump/  October 4, 2018             


In the president, one big bully stands up to others.

For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it. I’m reluctant to admit it and astonished to say it, especially since the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford in his ugly and gratuitous way at a rally on Tuesday. Perhaps it’s worth unpacking this admission for those who might be equally astonished to read it.

I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.
A few moments have crystallized my view over the past few days.

The first moment was a remark by a friend. “I’d rather be accused of murder,” he said, “than of sexual assault.” I feel the same way. One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman. But if that’s true, so is this: Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.

The second moment, connected to the first: “Boo hoo hoo. Brett Kavanaugh is not a victim.” That’s the title of a column in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the possibility of Kavanaugh’s innocence is “infinitesimal.” Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature.

Since when did the possibility of innocence become, for today’s liberals, something to wave off with an archly unfeeling “boo hoo”?

A third moment, connected to the second: Listening to Cory Booker explain on Tuesday that “ultimately” it doesn’t matter if Kavanaugh is “guilty or innocent,” because “enough questions” had been raised that it was time to “move on to another candidate.”

This is a rhetorical sleight of hand in three acts: Elide the one question that really matters; raise a secondary set of “questions” that are wholly the result of the question you’ve decided to ignore; call for “another candidate” because it will push confirmation hearings past the midterms, which was the Democratic objective long before most anyone had ever heard of Blasey’s allegation.

Fourth moment: Watching Julie Swetnick, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attending parties decades earlier where women were gang raped, change key details of her story in an interview with NBC News.
Swetnick’s claims border on the preposterous. They are wholly uncorroborated. But that didn’t keep Kavanaugh’s opponents, in politics and the press, from seizing them as evidence of corroboration with Blasey’s allegation, which is not preposterous but is also largely uncorroborated, and with the allegation of Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez — uncorroborated again.

Uncorroborated plus uncorroborated plus largely uncorroborated is not the accumulation of questions, much less of evidence. It is the duplication of hearsay.

Fifth moment: Reading about a 1985 bar fight at Yale — a story that involved Kavanaugh throwing ice, resulted in no charges against him, and should never have been reported. Or reading a 1983 handwritten letter by Kavanaugh, in which he says of his gang of friends that “we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us” — adolescent boasting now being treated as if it is a crucial piece of incriminating evidence. Or hearing from Yale classmates who claim to have seen Kavanaugh drunk, which somehow is supposed to show that he’s a demonstrable perjurer and possible sex offender.

Will a full-bore investigation of adolescent behavior now become a standard part of the “job interview” for all senior office holders? I’m for it — provided we can start with your adolescent behavior, as it relates to your next job.

Sixth moment: Listening to Richard Blumenthal lecture Kavanaugh on the legal concept of falsus in omnibus — false in one thing, false in everything — when the senator from Connecticut lied shamelessly for years about his military service.  And then feeling grateful to Trump for having the simple nerve to point out the naked hypocrisy.

Seventh moment: Listening to Dianne Feinstein denounce Kavanaugh for failing to reflect an “impartial temperament or the fairness and even-handedness one would see in a judge.” This lecture would have gone down more easily if Feinstein hadn’t gamed the process for her own partisan purposes, and at huge personal cost to Kavanaugh and Blasey alike.

Eighth moment: Being quizzed in recent days about my teenage years at a New England boarding school — the subtext being that I must know something about elite prep schools and the mentality of the boys who attend them.

I do. It was at boarding school where I first formed lasting friendships with kids of different races and economic backgrounds, and where liberal-leaning teachers showed us how to think critically, keep an open mind, and value tolerance and respect. I have no idea if Georgetown Prep was anything like that, but the facile stereotype of “white privilege” that keeps cropping up in discussions of Kavanaugh’s background is yet another ugly tactic in the battle to defeat him.

We will learn soon enough what, if anything, the F.B.I. has gleaned from its investigation of Kavanaugh. If the Bureau finds persuasive evidence of Blasey’s charge, the judge will have to step down and answer for it. Until then, I’ll admit to feeling grateful that, in Trump, at least one big bully was willing to stand up to others.

The Next Kavanaugh Stakes

Lessons from the confirmation fight as Election Day nears.

Lux libertas
October 7, 2018

Anyone who thinks the brawl over Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court ended with his confirmation by the Senate on Saturday might want to listen again to Chuck Schumer’s floor speech. The Minority Leader made clear that Democrats are going to use accuser Christine Blasey Ford as a campaign prop from here to November and beyond.

That may have been the Democratic plan all along once they learned of Ms. Ford’s accusation: Hold it for weeks, spring it as close to the election as possible, and if it doesn’t defeat Mr. Kavanaugh then use it to mobilize Democratic turnout. Perhaps that will work, and if it does Democrats will feel their delay-and-destroy strategy was worth it. Republicans should call out this behavior for how Democrats would govern if they take Congress.

Meantime, Senate Republicans held together and prevented a Supreme Court defeat that would have been a political disaster. Judge—now Justice—Kavanaugh deserves the most credit for refusing to withdraw and fighting for his seat under enormous pressure.
By forcefully defending his integrity and repudiating the Democratic strategy, he gave GOP Senators the confidence to stand with him. He would have been defeated had he played it as meekly as his critics now say in retrospect that he should have. Credit to Donald Trump too for standing by his nominee.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell somehow managed to keep his conference together except Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. Susan Collins opposed ObamaCare repeal, but Mr. McConnell understands you never know when you might need every vote with a 51-vote majority. The Maine Senator’s confirmation speech was the finest moment of this Congress and in any confirmation fight in many years.

Democrats won’t forgive Mr. McConnell for denying Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016 pending the presidential election. But he was doing what Democrats would also have done, and what Chuck Schumer explicitly said in 2007 that they would do when Democrats held the Senate during the last year of George W. Bush’s Presidency.

Mr. McConnell’s legacy now includes a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, as well as some 26 new appellate judges, substantial deregulation and tax reform. He has done more policy with a narrow Senate majority than any leader we can recall. Had John McCain not defected on health care, he might have even repealed most of ObamaCare. More than a few people on the “anti-establishment” right owe Mr. McConnell an apology.
As for the new Court majority, Democrats are predicting doom, but our guess is that it will be more cautious than they fear. The Justices themselves say that the dynamics at the Court change each time a new colleague joins them, and often in surprising ways.

Chief Justice John Roberts will become the swing vote, and he is an incrementalist who will not want to overturn precedents willy-nilly. With the politics surrounding the Court so polarized, he might be more cautious than warranted on issues where the Court needs to clear up its own indecision. One of those issues is the constitutionality of racial preferences, about which former Justice Anthony Kennedy continued the legal hair-splitting of Sandra Day O’Connor. Justice Kavanaugh is likely to join the other four conservatives.
Another area ripe for the Court to be heard again is the Second Amendment. Cities and states have been willfully defying the Court’s Heller and McDonald rulings with gun bans and other regulation, and liberal lower courts are upholding the laws. The Court needs to set clearer limits on the kind of regulation that is constitutional.

The real source of Democratic grief is less what the new Roberts majority might do than what it won’t. For some years at least, the Supreme Court is unlikely to be the left’s alternative legislature for its policy agenda. A conservative majority won’t bar arbitration if Congress hasn’t done so, won’t create new rights that aren’t in the Constitution, and will be more skeptical of executive-branch rewrites of Congressional statutes.

The paradox is that over several years this could reduce the political tempers over the Supreme Court. The reason nominations have become so contentious isn’t merely because the country is politically divided. It is because progressives have used the courts as a political pile-driver on abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty, among other controversial issues. Democrats will now have to achieve their goals the old-fashioned way—by winning elections.

Which brings us back to Mr. Schumer’s use of Justice Kavanaugh to rally voters in November. The stakes are high, especially for the courts. If Democrats retake the Senate, no Donald Trump nominee will be confirmed for the Supreme Court and perhaps not the appellate circuits. Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who would be Judiciary Chairman if Democrats retake the House, says he will investigate Justice Kavanaugh for perjury and reopen the sexual-assault probe. He means it.

We doubt this is what most Americans want from Congress, but it is where the Resistance will drive Democrats. The ugly Kavanaugh confirmation has awakened many complacent Republicans to the methods of the American left. Those methods will be in charge if Democrats control Congress.

The Never Conservatives:

The Kavanaugh fight isn’t about Trump. We’re all deplorables now.
               
The Editorial Board     
Wall Street Journal                     
October 3, 2018       
           
Donald Trump didn’t help Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation with his crude mockery of Christine Blasey Ford on Tuesday night in Mississippi, but then this Supreme Court moshpit isn’t about this President. The left’s all-out assault on the judge is clarifying because it shows that the “resistance” is really about anything and everything conservative in America. Mr. Trump is its foil to regain power.

Brett Kavanaugh isn’t part of Mr. Trump’s New York menagerie, or some Steve Bannon insurgent. The judge is the epitome of the GOP legal establishment, a Supreme Court nominee from central casting. He went to the best schools and served his apprenticeship among legal elites including a clerkship with former Justice Anthony Kennedy.
     
He has spent 26 years in public service instead of cashing in as a Beltway lawyer. He served at the highest levels of George W. Bush’s White House staff in positions of great trust. On the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, he has written more than 300 opinions and had at least 10 adopted by the Supreme Court. He has taught at Harvard Law School at the invitation of then dean, and now Justice, Elena Kagan.

With these credentials Judge Kavanaugh would have been on any Republican’s short list for the Supreme Court. He could have been Jeb Bush’s nominee, or John Kasich’s, though Mr. Kasich in the ambitious ebb of his career now tilts with the anti-conservative left against Mr. Kavanaugh. In 2012 the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Mr. Kavanaugh would have been Mitt Romney’s “most likely first nominee” for the High Court. Mr. Toobin, who loathes conservatives, meant it as a warning.

Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh is a credit to the process he established to win the election and govern with conservative support. He sought the help of legal elites on the right, led by the Federalist Society, who compiled an impressive list of potential nominees. This isn’t a rogue judicial operation to choose presidential cronies. It is the gold standard for legal talent that believes in the original meaning of the Constitution. It’s hard to see how any GOP President would have done better, and others have done much worse.

Yet this is precisely why Democrats and the left have set out to destroy Judge Kavanaugh—not in legal philosophy or competence, which they knew was a political loser, but as a human being, a spouse and father. They need to destroy him personally with accusations but no corroboration, as they tried with Clarence Thomas, so they can deny the open Supreme Court seat to a judicial conservative.

So much the better if playing the #MeToo card also helps Democrats retake Congress. In this sense too, Mr. Trump is the left’s foil, though the Kavanaugh fight has usefully exposed the dishonesty of the loud worries about Mr. Trump’s threat to “democratic norms.”

Democrats were so worried about Senate norms that they hid Ms. Ford’s name from Republicans for six weeks, found her a lawyer, midwifed a lie detector test whose results they still haven’t fully disclosed, and then orchestrated the rollout of her accusations. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is too often divisive and dissembling, but no action in his Presidency comes close to matching the partisan viciousness of the Senate ambush of Brett Kavanaugh. These are today’s Democratic norms.

The other Democratic targets here are Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the conservative GOP majorities in Congress that have cut taxes, eased crushing regulations and confirmed a record number of appellate judges. Democrats claim to want to be a “check” on Mr. Trump, but good luck with that.

Their real goal is to retake Capitol Hill, roll back tax reform, expand the entitlement state, taunt Mr. Trump like a dancing bear, and set up 2020 for a return of the Obama agenda under the identity-politics leadership of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.


The media sometimes profess to be puzzled that more than 80% of Republicans across the country tell pollsters they support Mr. Trump despite his personal flaws. The Never Conservatives are the reason, and the assault on Judge Kavanaugh is the latest showcase of their methods. Republicans have figured out that if the left can willfully, even gleefully, destroy a man as distinguished as Brett Kavanaugh, they can and will do it to any conservative who threatens their grip on power.

Republicans are well aware of Mr. Trump’s excesses and falsehoods. But they have also come to understand that the resistance to him isn’t rooted in principle or some august call to superior character. They know Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite her history of deceit. Voters know this is about the left’s will to power by any means necessary.

Republicans across America can see, and certainly their Senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.