The Progressive Synopticon

Victor Davis Hanson
Americangreatness.com
November 19, 2018

In the post-election aftermath, Republicans are wondering about how they can capture that missing 2-5 percent of the electorate that lost them the House of Representatives.
Could they pry away 40 percent of the institutionalized Democratic Latino vote on delivery of a full-employment economy of rising wages? Can they win over 20 percent of the African-American electorate on the basis of more jobs and less competition from illegal immigrants?

Can Trump tone down his ad hominem invective and tweeting to reassure an additional 10 percent of independent and middle-class suburban women that his national security agenda, free-market prosperity, traditionalism, law-and-order, and national sovereignty policies ensure greater tranquility, safety, and opportunity—even if they are not packaged in the manner of his more mellifluous and vacuous “presidential” predecessor?
No Escaping the Culture Wars

Republicans, in deer-in-the-headlights-style, appear shocked that they are increasingly prone to winning the vote on Election Day only to lose it in the ensuing weeks when absentee ballots and what-not filter in with astounding Democratic majorities. Someone is spending a lot of money to get the absentee voting ballot out, correctly marked, and returned. And whatever that “lot” is, it is killing Republican candidates

Yet there is a larger obstacle to achieving that long-term 51 percent Trump solution along with the shorter-term strategy of matching Democratic absentee ballots with Republican absentee ballots. Conservatives have lost entirely the culture and establishment wars. The result is that they are besieged by a circle of hostile progressive, but quite establishment institutions that are relentless.

Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon—a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers.

There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given.

The media has become an extension of the progressive movement, partly because its farm teams are the universities and the upper-middle class suburban professional classes. Journalists, such as Jim Rutenberg and Christiane Amanpour, concede they can no longer stay neutral in the era of Trump—“neutral” in the sense that old partisans of a bygone age like Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather were careful to mask their progressivism on the air.

Not now. The major networks and public affiliates are proudly overt in their efforts to oppose conservative traditionalism often defined (for now) as the agenda of Donald Trump—in 93 percent negative coverage fashion, as is the case with MSNBC/NBC and CNN according to the liberal Shorenstein Center.

Conservatives believe Fox is a powerful counterweight. It may be, but it is one that is surrounded and overwhelmed by liberal networks and state media. After all, Fox is only one of about six corporate conglomerates that control almost 90 percent of televised and print news.

The masters of our social media and Internet universe are the most insidiously partisan. Open your laptop or power on your smartphone, and you meet their shadow personas nonstop. It is not just that the smug class of Menlo Park and Palo Alto censor and disallow posts, podcasts, and messaging along partisan lines, or that a search engine’s headers and footers are advertisements for a new progressive America. It is that social media has also been on the vanguard of redefining the Democratic Party, from Hubert Humphrey’s old workers party to a pyramid of the very wealthy overseeing a government-subsidized underclass.

Never has the country seen wealth on the magnitude of the fortunes of Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, or Mark Zuckerberg—and an array of high-tech, finance, and marketing grandees. Many can spend $50 million in an election and either never miss the gift, or at least make it up in a few weeks. Their apparent long-term aim seems to be to change the conditions of America to ensure that others, and newer versions of their earlier selves, would do worse than they have done. The earth can only afford to allow so many hilltop estates, private jets, fleets of cars, and lavish playthings to so few green, open-minded, activist, wise, and committed progressives, who need all these exemptions to save us.

Escape! No Escape!

Popular culture—from rap and pop music to corporate advertising—is progressive hip, a sort of non-ending assumption that the Life of Julia and Pajama Boy are the way of America. Pick up a comic book, download a tune, or watch Ellen on airport TV: the messaging is all the same—the old creaking brontosauruses are heading for the tar pits, and being replaced by far cooler, better, and smarter youthful raptors—even as the society grows ever more callous, indebted, factional, and dysfunctional, from the now normal tarmac nightmares to going into the DMV. It is hard to find a TV sitcom, a song, or a billboard that is not in your face about something.

Maybe one can turn then to sports either to find at least an escape from 360-degree progressive surveillance? No luck there. If an NBA figure were to speak out as conservatively as the vast majority of owners, players, and coaches do progressively, his career for all practical purposes would be over—and so none do—even if there are any who are not genuinely progressive. Ditto the “take the knee” NFL. From the National Anthem pregame observance to the Super Bowl halftime show, professional football is now mostly politicized entertainment. It is only apolitical in the sense that everyone is assumed to be on the same progressive team. ESPN analysts talk as if they are MSNBC and CNN news anchor leftovers.

There is no real need to reference Hollywood. Its movies remain as banal as they are partisan. We know the usual script: a good looking social justice warrior ferrets out a polluting corporation, a cancer-causing drug company, a CIA orchestrated massacre abroad, an internal right-wing FBI-led coup, and then allies with crusading journalists, courageous environmentalists, or undaunted social activists. Usually their suit-clad corporate villains employ as hit men and foot soldiers the usual white-male goons, authenticated with Russian, South African, or southern drawl accents, and various fascist tattoos, scars, and missing teeth.

Both low-brow and high-brow children’s animation and cartoons are so frequently about a once smiley old tree choking on corporate-fed stinky air, a fishy swimming for his life in a climate-changed boiling sea, or some sort of beetle, mouse, or bunny trying to get home to protected green spaces or federal wetlands, as it dodges greedy clear-cutting ax-men, chain-sawers, psycho NRA hunters with assault weapons, or soulless huge corporate agriculture combines.

Parents have few options to the progressive university octopus. The campus’s explicit message is that hyphenated “studies” courses must correct the incorrect thinking that students bring with them, brainwashed as they are by their parents, families, churches, and communities.

If students learn nothing about the old dead white men of the Iliad, Latin, Descartes, the Renaissance, Beethoven, or Melville, apparently all the better, given that ignorance spawns arrogance. And arrogance is necessary to push one’s partisan ignorance on others.
The real tragedy is not that today’s professor is biased, but that he is incompetent (ranting is no substitute for learning, even as gender or ethnic studies are not real scholarly subjects). The English professor so often now does not know much Shakespeare, the classics professor does not always read Thucydides in Greek, and the art historian can have little idea what the Hudson River School is.

Indebted Futures

The university accepts that its huge administrative superstructure, swelled by “diversity” and “inclusion” six-figure fixers, ensures that federally subsidized tuition goes up higher than the rate of inflation, and that students leave (not always with diplomas) with massive debt. Their degrees cannot guarantee that encumbered students can even pay the interest on their educational debts.

No wonder that a generation will have to postpone marriage, put off child-rearing, and live as perpetual adolescents, and urban apartment-renters. Their bitterness over poverty, and their angst at being uncompensated for supposedly brilliant college degrees often translate into progressive solidarity.

Foundations—such as those established by the Fords, Guggenheims, Mellons, and Rockefellers—fund liberal groups and research almost exclusively. The subtext seems to be that the billions piled up in tax-free foundations should be used to ensure that no one else can make a million. A man worth a billion is deemed a valuable progressive, one worth a mere million more often a counter-revolutionary danger.

There are few reticent “wise men” left, senior veterans of politics and government who in their later years pop up to give the country non-partisan but sober advice on war and peace, economic pitfalls, or geostrategic warnings. So many seek legacies as progressives, given that creeping progressivism ensures a final PBS, NPR, or New York Times encomium.
Past presidents and first ladies? They no longer stay out politics, resting at the “ranch.” The getting-rich Obamas follow the Clinton model and are everywhere—he on the stump blasting Trump as a liar and taking credit for economic growth that he never achieved; she reminding the country of its culpability for Trump with the usual whining that even her global fame and multi-millions are somehow not compensation enough for what she suffered for all of us.

When you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night, you are on stage, and a progressive synopticon is everywhere around you.

Socialism: The Opiate of the Corrupt and Ignorant

Charles W. Calomiris
https://economics21.org/socialism-opiate-corrupt-and-ignorant-calomiris
November 14, 2018

The overarching message of “The Opportunity Cost of Socialism”—a study recently released by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—is that the advocacy of socialism cannot reasonably be based on policy preferences; its attraction has always been grounded in a combination of wishful thinking and ignorance. For example, the new CEA study shows that the socialist approach to “single payer” health care advocated by many on the left would cost much more and deliver much less, resulting in the significant worsening of mortality and morbidity, not just higher taxes and reduced economic growth.

One prominent opinion page editor described the CEA study’s conclusions to me as too obvious to warrant mention. That reaction reflects the problem the study seeks to remedy. Obvious facts about socialism are not discussed enough. Few people are willing to read 50-page studies like the CEA’s, and there has been very little media coverage of it—journalists or politicians who could summarize the CEA findings haven’t seen sufficient reason to do so (or may themselves be among the uninformed advocates of socialism). That is too bad because the ignorant advocacy of socialism is currently a significant threat to our democracy.

Socialism has existed in many forms which lie on a continuum, from the central planning nightmare of the USSR, to the Scandinavian democratic experiments of several decades ago. The idea that unites the various embodiments of socialism along that continuum is that economic freedom is counterproductive to the aspirations of humanity. It would be far better and fairer, socialists argue, for the state to distribute scarce resources rather than letting the market allocate goods and services by itself. Socialism seeks control of economic decisions, either through central planning or through expropriative taxation and regulation, in the interest of the common man.

Socialism’s appeal has always been its false promise to create wealth better than capitalism can.

The difference between market-based and socialist economies is not the presence of redistributive policies per se. For over a century, around the world, market-based economies have taxed and redistributed wealth, and provided a host of services such as public education and care for the poor, sick, and elderly. The difference is that in market-based systems taxation is regarded as an unfortunate burden, which is employed out of necessity to ensure that other priorities are achieved. In contrast, in socialist regimes, taxation is not regarded as an undesirable consequence, but as a means to prevent individuals from counterproductively controlling their collective economic destiny.

Socialism’s appeal has always been its false promise to create wealth better than capitalism can. Advocates of socialism promise great economic achievements, which they argue are worth the price of reduced individual economic liberty. It is worth remembering that Karl Marx regarded socialism as an economic necessity that would emerge out of the ashes of capitalism precisely because capitalism would fail to sustain wealth creation. Marx made many specific, and erroneous, predictions about capitalism, including its declining profitability and rising unemployment. His analysis did not consider permanent economic growth in a capitalist system to be a possibility. And his “historical materialist” view of political choice claimed the rich and powerful would never share power voluntarily with their economic lessers, or create social safety nets. Writing in the mid-19th century, Marx fundamentally failed to understand the huge changes in technology, political suffrage, or social safety net policies that were occurring around him.

Not only has socialist theory been wrong about the economic and political fruits of capitalism, it failed to see the problems that arise in socialist governments. Socialism’s record has been pain, not gain, especially for the poor. Socialism produced mass starvation in eastern Europe and China, as it undermined the ability of farmers to grow and market their crops. In less extreme incarnations, such as the UK in the decades after World War II and before Margaret Thatcher, it stunted growth. In most cases, socialism’s monopoly on economic control also fomented corruption by government officials, as was especially apparent in Latin American and African socialist regimes. The adverse economic consequences of socialism led the Scandinavian countries to dial back their versions of socialism in the past decades. If the United States had imitated Scandinavian-style socialism, the CEA study estimates that our GDP today would be 19% lower.

Socialism has been abandoned in virtually all of the developing world. Countries today do not seek to emulate the disasters of North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela. They also avoid high taxation of the rich. That reflects the recognition that countries compete with each other for capital. Expropriating the rich tends to make them leave, and when they leave they take their wealth with them.

This philosophical shift in the developing world is a major change since the 1980s when socialism was still fashionable among some. The shift away from socialist thinking was grounded in the growing body of empirical evidence about the kinds of policies that produced growth and poverty alleviation—that is, policies that used markets as a lever of economic development. Now developing countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, India, China, South Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia are known as “emerging economies,” a description that recognizes their need to emerge from state control of their economies through privatization, free trade, and the creation of viable private financial intermediaries to promote growth and poverty alleviation. All around the developing world, socialism is understood as a false promise, an ideological opium that repressive elites use to retain and expand power. Capitalism, in contrast, is seen as the force that has lifted over a billion people out of poverty worldwide since 1990.

Socialism has never conquered poverty. It has never competed with capitalism as a means of effectively allocating resources and promoting sustainable growth.

To historians, that was obvious long before the 1980s. Socialism has never conquered poverty. It has never competed with capitalism as a means of effectively allocating resources and promoting sustainable growth. Over the past half century, scores of economic historians have sought to explain the factors that produced the economic progress that Europe and some of its offshoots enjoyed in the 18th-20th centuries. This group of scholars, which includes Angus Maddison, Joel Mokyr, Eric Jones, David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey and Douglass North, tend to hold quite diverse political preferences, but they universally agree on the facts: Government policies that safeguard a combination of personal economic freedom, secure property rights, and the ability of individuals to gain personally by participating in markets have promoted the effort and innovation that conquered poverty and promoted growth through the ages.

The facts about socialism and capitalism may shock the young people of America, many of whom lionize Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialist who honeymooned in the USSR, as the new conscience of our nation—and many of whom, 51% according to Gallup, now have a positive view of socialism. Only 45% have a positive view of capitalism. That represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views about capitalism in just the past two years.  Many of these young people are thoughtful and intelligent—but they are also ignorant about the history and economics of the systems they favor or condemn. This is the main reason why they must read this important CEA study.

Charles W. Calomiris is Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. ​

Why Trump Is Owed Thanks On Climate Pact

Conrad Black
New York Sun
November 14, 2018

President Trump has not received adequately grateful recognition for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and effectively scuttling the Clean Power Plan. These measures, which reinforced each other and were an outright assault on American capitalism and economic growth, were, with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the nuclear giveaway to Iran, the core of Barack Obama’s effort to be a transformative president.

The whole basis of the Clean Power Plan and the Paris climate accord was false from the beginning, yet the premise on which they were based attained a tremendous level of momentum and effectively bulldozed opposition throughout the Western world and enjoyed an overwhelming preeminence in academic, journalistic, and public opinion.

Everyone is in favor of improved quality of air and water, but out of environmental and conservationist enthusiasm and even zeal, there abruptly arose the movement to reduce carbon use because of the miraculously conjured and promoted but unsubstantiated theory that the world was quickly warming and that carbon use was the reason. Failure to change radically how we lived and how our economies in the West functioned would lead to a catastrophe of rising water levels and skyrocketing temperatures.

An Old Testament fate was just around the corner. Historians of the future will wonder how our civilization could have been so thoroughly gulled that it began to undertake a profound economic self-dismemberment, and harried and ridiculed doubters as “climate deniers” as if they believed in a flat earth where stones fell upwards.

The warming argument has been nibbled at and not borne out by much evidence, and so has awkwardly largely given way to climate change — which is only a step from weather change, hardly a novel phenomenon — but which is now solemnly invoked by Bernie Sanders to explain Caribbean hurricanes (though they are not new and have not been unprecedentedly damaging or more frequent).

Governor Jerry Brown blames California forest fires on climate change, though there is no identifiable connection, much less anything linking any of these phenomena to human behavior. The human-generated global-warming theory was formally launched by the Willach (Austria) Conference of 1985, bringing together the leading figures of the United Nations Environment Project (an outgrowth of the Stockholm Conference of 1972, which was itself a product of the political machinations of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme) and the World Meteorological Organization.

The Willach Conference produced the assertion that there would be a rise in global temperatures in the first half of the 21st century “greater than any in man’s history.” Though alarming, the conference report was numerically unspecific.

Using British Meteorological Office figures, global temperature appeared to rise more quickly in the last 15 years of the 20th century than the first 15 years of this century, although 2016 and 2017 were relatively warm years. Almost all tentative conclusions are within reasonable margins of error, and the mass of data is too ambiguous to support any of the more emphatic claims of factions in the climate debate.

The genesis of the agitation for restrictions of carbon use was in the Swedish movement to promote the use of nuclear power as the cleanest energy. Nuclear energy offended the pacifistic movement that was generally composed of fellow travelers of the environmental movement, and so they transferred their flag to renewable energy. This caught fire in impressionable, erratic, Western Germany, especially after reunification left it with the eco-disaster of East Germany to clean up.

This is not the place for an analysis of the political vagaries of Germany, whose contribution to world instability and war is notorious, and which reigns yet in the German consciousness, afflicted by cross-currents of acute guilt for the monstrous crimes of the Nazis and the un-humanitarian militarism of the Prussians, in a country where the Nietzschean nihilistic and Marxist strains of opinion were born and flourished and are visible and audible yet.

In this political hot house, the greatest leaders of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, and Gerhard Schroeder knew that Germany was safest and most constructive in a cocoon of economic association and defensive military alliances with the Western Powers, especially the United States, Great Britain, and France, but including smaller and historically uneasy neighbors — the Dutch, Belgians, Austrians, Czechs, Scandinavians, and Poles.

Germany was susceptible to the appeal of an environmental and economic policy that was naturalistic, anti-materialist, and radically innocuous in international relationships. Angela Merkel, chancellor for 13 years, from East Germany, a chemist who studied in the Soviet Union but is the daughter of a Lutheran minister, the reconciler of all German contradictions, drastically cut back nuclear power, and drastically cut carbon emissions, but was caught red-handed promoting diesel automobile engines, which reduced carbon consumption but did savage violence to air quality, and is now walking that one back, blaming the automobile companies.

From Germany, the virus spread. Tony Blair, long-serving British prime minister, bought it entirely and became a passionate advocate of renewable energy. The old environmental organizations, the World Wildlife Federation, which opposed the killing of great beasts, and Greenpeace, which began in opposition to nuclear power and kept shifting focus with the times, moved to the banning of chlorine in drinking water. As this was one of the greatest steps forward in the history of public health, it didn’t work.

In 1989, Greenpeace, busy promoting a nuclear-free Europe, sold out altogether to the Kremlin, which deployed intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. Greenpeace deserted the environmental groups in Eastern Europe, but the INF treaty and the collapse of the Soviet Union drove Greenpeace into the arms of the renewables advocates. Solar panels and windmills were now the salvation of opportunistic choice. The defeated international Left emerged from the rubble of Communism and crowded aboard the anti-capitalist anti-industrial bandwagon. The acid-rain myth was a dress rehearsal for the global-warming myth.

What was not so well known about renewables was that recourse to them does not dispense with traditional energy sources and does drastically increase electricity bills for all consumers. The whole initiative for renewable energy was shortly seen as a disaster: Electricity that can’t be stored must be used as generated, so renewables, which are dependent on wind and sunlight (and they kill stupefying numbers of birds in their glare and their blades), have always to be backed up by non-renewable energy.

There were many jurisdictions for which this provided a painful lesson, and Greenpeace, like the World Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, and others which had begun bucolically and with memberships of lovable bird and butterfly watchers, metamorphosed into militants at the vanguard of environmental discontent. They succeeded, as one does with trendy left-wing causes, with the support of the great foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Pew) and then co-opted the NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) and then suborned the great corporations themselves, always eager to scatter their benevolent crumbs to take a bow and get the anti-capitalist militants off their backs.

The evolution of the environmental movement from a crusade for more nuclear power in Sweden into this Frankenstein Monster of economic stultification in the name of a complete fiction of man-made global warming that threatened all of us was unutterable nonsense. But as an environmental replay of Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” that elevated the whole eco-lobby from obsequious grovelers for aid in maintaining wetlands for ducks and discouraging the killing of big game to the moral and economic arbiters of superficial America, it was brilliant.

To varying degrees a simple hostility to capitalism itself entered and captured the mind of the West. China and India, ground down by centuries of primitive subordinacy, looked on in disbelief as the cuckoo-bird in the Western mind became a gigantic pterodactyl assaulting Western civilization.

The pledge of the Obama administration at Paris to reduce American carbon use by 28%, backing its Clean Power Plan, was the supreme encapsulation of what British commentator Malcolm Muggeridge called “the great liberal death wish.” It was a secondary issue in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump called global warming a “hoax,” and so complete was the revulsion of the Left against him, this was barely mentioned.

When he renounced American participation in the Paris accord, there were unctuous noises from Europe and Canada and the American Left, but proclamations of imminent disaster were difficult to formulate credibly. It was suddenly a formerly unquestioned quest for an absurd objective that no one could now explain. It was scarcely mentioned in the 2018 campaign and is unlikely to become revealed conventional wisdom again soon. America and the world owe much to Donald Trump for this alone.

Hillary Will Run Again

Reinventing herself as a liberal firebrand, Mrs. Clinton will easily capture the 2020 nomination

By Mark Penn and Andrew Stein
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/11/11/hillary-will-run-again-reinventing-herself-as-a-liberal-firebrand-mrs-clinton-will-easily-capture-the-2020-nomination-by-mark-penn-and-andrew-stein/
November 11, 2018

Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994. True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House.

It’s been quite a journey. In July 1999, Mrs. Clinton began her independent political career on retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm in upstate New York. Her Senate platform included support for a balanced budget, the death penalty and incremental health-care reform. It was a decisive break from her early-1990s self. Hillary Clinton 2.0 was a moderate, building on the success of her communitarian “It Takes a Village” appeals and pledging to bring home the bacon for New York. She emphasized her religious background, voiced strong support for Israel, voted for the Iraq war, and took a hard line against Iran.
This was arguably the most successful version of Hillary Clinton. She captured the hearts and minds of New York’s voters and soared to an easy re-election in 2006, leaving Bill and all his controversies behind.

But Hillary 2.0 could not overcome Barack Obama, the instant press sensation. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton held fast to centrist positions that would have assured her victory in the general election. But progressive leaders and donors abandoned her for the antiwar Mr. Obama. Black voters who had been strong Clinton supporters in New York and Arkansas left her column to elect the first African-American president. History was made, but not by Mrs. Clinton. Though she won more delegates from Democratic primaries, activists in caucus states gave Mr. Obama, who had called her “likable enough,” the heartbreaking win.

Licking her wounds, Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state while she planned her comeback. It was during this time that the more liberal Hillary 3.0 emerged. She believed she could never win a primary as a moderate, so she entered the 2016 primary as a progressive like Mr. Obama. Then she moved further left as Sen. Bernie Sanders came closer to derailing her nomination. This time she was able to contain her opponent’s support, crucially by bringing African-American voters into her camp.

But Mrs. Clinton’s transformation during the primaries, especially on social and cultural issues, cost her an easy win against Donald Trump. As Hillary 3.0 catered to the coastal elites who had eluded her in 2008, Mr. Trump stole many of the white working-class voters who might have been amenable to the previous version. Finally she had the full support of the New York Times and the other groups that had shunned her for Mr. Obama—but only at the cost of an unforeseen collapse in support in the Midwest.

Claims of a Russian conspiracy and the unfairness of the Electoral College shielded Mrs. Clinton from ever truly conceding she had lost. She was robbed, she told herself, yet again. But after two years of brooding—including at book length—Mrs. Clinton has come unbound. She will not allow this humiliating loss at the hands of an amateur to end the story of her career. You can expect her to run for president once again. Maybe not at first, when the legions of Senate Democrats make their announcements, but definitely by the time the primaries are in full swing.

Mrs. Clinton has a 75% approval rating among Democrats, an unfinished mission to be the first female president, and a personal grievance against Mr. Trump, whose supporters pilloried her with chants of “Lock her up!” This must be avenged.
Expect Hillary 4.0 to come out swinging. She has decisively to win those Iowa caucus-goers who have never warmed up to her. They will see her now as strong, partisan, left-leaning and all-Democrat—the one with the guts, experience and steely-eyed determination to defeat Mr. Trump. She has had two years to go over what she did wrong and how to take him on again.

Richard Nixon came back from his loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and won the presidency in 1968. He will be the model for winning again. Mrs. Clinton won’t travel the country in a van with Huma Abedin this time, doing small events and retail politics. Instead she will enter through the front door, mobilizing the army of professional women behind her, leveraging her social networks, and raking in donations. She will hope to emerge as an unstoppable force to undo Mr. Trump, running on the #MeToo movement, universal health care and gun control. Proud and independent, this time she will sideline Bill and Mr. Obama, limiting their role to fundraising.

The generation of Democrats who have been waiting to take over the party from the Clintons will be fuming that she is back and stealing their show. But they revealed themselves to be bungling amateurs in the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight, with their laughable Spartacus moments. She will trounce them. Just as Mr. Trump cleared the field, Mrs. Clinton will take down rising Democratic stars like bowling pins. Mike Bloomberg will support her rather than run, and Joe Biden will never be able to take her on.

Don’t pay much attention to the “I won’t run” declarations. Mrs. Clinton knows both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama declared they weren’t running, until they ran. She may even skip Iowa and enter the race later, but rest assured that, one way or another, Hillary 4.0 is on the way.

Trump Is Blessed with His Enemies

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/10/trump-is-blessed-with-his-enemies/
November 10th, 2018

At this point, the Democrats appear to have a lead in the House of Representatives of about 30 or 40 members, a relatively small edge in an undisciplined chamber, and the Republicans have purged the NeverTrumpers, led (with his customary uncertainty) by departing House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

In the Senate, President Trump has won enough, including the exit of leading NeverTrumpers Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), so the administration’s gain is greater than it looks. Specifically, the new Senate permits the elevation of an unemasculated attorney general who can take charge of the endless silent and irrelevant carnival of Robert Mueller’s investigation, partisan Democratic infestation and sinecure as it is.

It is to the president’s credit that through all the provocations and outrages, he saw the potential worth to him of the Mueller investigation. It has droned on for almost two years, enjoying full cooperation and gradually implicitly acknowledging that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. In the meantime, however, the atomic stink bomb of the Clinton-financed Steele dossier, an artless pastiche of defamatory falsehoods about candidate Trump, has been relentlessly exposed as the chief reason for this unutterably absurd canard of Russian-Trump campaign collusion. (No one ever nominated by a serious American political party would ever have had anything to do with mortgaging an American presidential campaign to a foreign power. The whole concept is almost unimaginably fatuous.)

Democratic supporters appear to have poured into the coffers at least three-fifths of the scandalous $5 billion that was spent on the midterm elections. The national political media continued to be 90 percent hostile, scrambling like muscular salmon completely out of the water to attack the president while he waged the most energetic midterm campaign of any president in history.

Now it is easy to see the disconcertion of the Democrats at their failure to derail Trump. What was left of the pretense that he was somehow not a legitimate president has been shredded, and what the Democrats have taken as their inviolable extra-constitutional right to keep the president’s hands tied while the Mueller-Inspector Clouseau charade carries on into its third year, has been debunked. The silent eunuch attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has finally gone. And now the Justice Department will have the ability to discomfit the Democrats who misrepresented the Steele dossier, used it to obtain false FISA warrants, and who lied to Congress under oath, or to federal officials. This prestigious group appears to include Hillary Clinton, agency chiefs John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey, and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. They are all vulnerable to grand jury indictments.

So shaken by the looming end of this one-way shooting gallery are the Democratic faithful that Antifa massed in front of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house threatening him, the ineffable Rachel Maddow called for demonstrations in favor of Mueller, and the serried ranks of deranged tele-Dem hacks started agitating noisily for protection of Mueller. CNN’s snappish little attack dog Jim Acosta, tested his constitutional right to turn a presidential press conference into a debate and a filibuster and his accreditation was suspended. For the approximately one-millionth time since the Washington Post started it with the imperishable myth-makers Woodward and Bernstein over Watergate, (they are still in our suffering faces after all these years), CNN issued the ritualistic pious statement about “standing by” Acosta. Mueller is now less than a side-show. He will have to wrap up his inquiry fairly soon and within his original scope, not looking into unrelated questions like whether Trump paid income tax on a gift of Trump-branded underwear in 1999, which seems to be the current level of sleuthing to which the de-Strzoked special counsel has descended.

Trump’s enemies, having not seriously considered a Trump victory two years ago, made the supreme effort to sandbag him this time. Just as they thought he would not be nominated, or elected, or able to escape impeachment for more than a year or so, they hoped to strengthen #TheResistance and NeverTrump coalition that dominated the House and made the Senate so unreliable that John McCain, out of mere spite, could sink health care reform.
Within 24 hours after the last polls closed they saw the departure of Sessions and the specter of their former leaders as the victims being turned on the spit of partisan justice. The Democrats lost no time going to their fallback position of trying to recount Florida ballots single-handedly. The rock was lifted on this skullduggery on Wednesday, as a convicted vote-rigger was discovered to be among those recounting Senate votes in Florida’s Broward county.

Pelosi can make a grand bargain and try to negotiate a compromise on infrastructure, health care, and immigration. The reciprocal temptation to impeach and imprison the other side that has, since Watergate, become the apogee of good clean good-natured partisan politics in the United States, can be de-escalated—though the justice and intelligence communities have to be taken to a fearsome woodshed of permanent depoliticization.
It is clear that in their distaste for Trump and overconfidence of a Clinton victory, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Justice department all crossed the double-white line into improper activity, confident that President Hillary Clinton would sweep it under the White House rug. More important than vengeance on the wrongdoers is institutional reform and safeguards to prevent a recurrence. The one step beyond the abuse of the justice and intelligence hierarchies is the politicization of the military, which the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, spared the country with the creation of West Point to provide the nation a non-political corps of officers. The Clinton campaign and Obama Administration strained the integrity of the entire constitutional system in a manner that is unprecedented in American history. That may not have been their intention, but real and not just vindictive steps must be taken to ensure that such dangers do not recur.

In terms of public mood, the two principal takeaways on the midterm elections are that the Democrats blundered badly when they put all their chips on stopping Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, and the president should modulate his message to be more accessible to suburban women. The Democrats cravenly gambled on #MeToo, and the country, including most women, rallied to the principle of the presumption of innocence, (a concept much beleaguered by rampant American prosecutors who win almost all their cases without trials by their manipulation of the plea bargain system).

The administration and the new attorney general can build on this to produce criminal justice reform, a subject where Trump, the Clintons, and Senator Sanders could all agree. While the Democrats made a mistake embracing radical feminism and conviction by unsubstantiated denunciation, the president will want to set out a better menu for the middle-of-the-road, sensible, successful majority of women. There may be a vital role here for retiring U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. She could do a star turn in the Trump reelection effort, which has already begun, and has had a promising start this past week, in this country of constant, increasingly nasty, and vertiginously expensive political campaigning.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT (Election night)

Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The Daily Dish
https://www.americanactionforum.org/daily-dish/about-last-night/#ixzz5WCsWkCp8 
November 7, 2018

(Full Disclosure: To avoid ex post rationalization or excess reaction to the results, this Eakinomics was written yesterday afternoon before the polls closed.)

There has been a lot of media huffing and puffing about the 2018 midterms. But from a policy perspective, there was not much at stake. The Trump Administration has little in the way of a legislative agenda that would be at risk of a Democratic takeover in the House. The only item that comes to mind is Tax Reform 2.0 — making permanent the individual provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and other provisions. That has some political significance — the president and the Ways and Means chairman committed to it in the weeks leading up to the election — but will matter little for the economic outlook. In the other direction, the takeover of the House by Democrats ostensibly would raise the odds of an infrastructure initiative, but the reality is that there is no budgetary room for a big spending bill, and the Democrats have blanched at the administration’s efforts at privatized financing.

Instead, for better or worse, the bulk of the policymaking will continue to be executive actions on trade, immigration, regulation, drug pricing, net neutrality, labor market rules, and the like.

Looking forward, the most significant economic elections are the governorships. Governors can be key allies in carrying states during the 2020 presidential election — and a switch from Trump’s pro-growth populism to the Democrats’ no-growth progressivism does matter.

The Left Is Trying to Steal the Midterm Elections

By Wayne Allyn Root
https://www.newsmax.com/wayneallynroot/midterm-elections-liberals-vote/2018/10/31/id/888822/
October 31, 2018

For two years now since President Trump’s election, I’ve chronicled the violence, threats of violence, and just plain hysteria and unhinged mental illness by Democrats with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

But the mainstream media continues to flood the airwaves with the narrative that President Trump and Republicans are "divisive" and "racist" and use "hate speech."

Well I now have proof of who the divisive party is. Somehow I wound up on the text message list for the Nevada Democratic Party and multiple liberal organizations looking to "get out the vote."

The texts I'm getting are so vile, hateful, and disgusting even I'm in shock. And it takes a lot to shock me. But even worse than the slander and hate speech is the fact that Democrats are clearly engaged in a voter fraud conspiracy.

Let me share the hate Democrats are sending out daily in texts to voters. I guarantee normal Americans will be revolted.

First of all, these Democrat “get out the vote” texts I am bombarded with all day, every day, seemingly arrived without ever asking for my permission. That’s a violation of the law.

Secondly, most of them arrive in Spanish. Which tells me that either Democrats assume the typical Democrat voter no longer speaks English... or they have me on a list aimed directly at foreign-born, non-English speakers. It is telling what they are saying to these foreign-born Democrat voters.

These texts seemingly directly from the Nevada Democratic Party and multiple liberal organizations claim that we must vote for Democrats, because Trump and Nevada U.S. Senator Dean Heller “will deport and jail your family. Trump and Heller hate Mexicans. Vote.”

Well since I can only be deported if I’m here illegally, Democrats are clearly aiming these texts directly at illegal aliens. But isn’t it a crime for illegals to vote?

Worse, isn’t it a serious crime for Democrats to be urging illegal immigrants to vote? But who else could they be targeting, if they are warning me and my family will be detained, jailed, and deported by Trump and Senator Dean Heller if I don’t vote Democrat?
But wait. It gets better.

These texts seemingly sent by the Nevada Democrat Party (they confirmed that’s who it was) and multiple liberal organizations trying to motivate Democrat votes actually said and I quote…

“F*** Trump. Stupid Republican retard. Trump is the anti-christ. Trump loves misery and hates Mexicans. Trump wants you to die. Trump wants to murder Mexicans.”

How’s that for divisive and hateful?

I am in possession of many texts that say "F*** Trump."

And here’s the most damning one of all — The Democratic Party and liberal organizations are seemingly urging their supporters to break the law. They say and I quote, “You can vote once early and once on election day."

Then they stress multiple times "NO ID REQUIRED" and you don't need to speak English.

Then they ask, "Do you need a ride to the polls?"

Those are quotes.

Folks this is organized voter fraud seemingly being urged by the Democrat Party and liberal organizations.

They also cheer for the illegal alien caravan and urge me to donate money to support the caravan. They want to help this illegal mob reach America.

They are proud to say #openborders at the end of each text.

This is today’s Democratic Party. Democrats and their liberal allies are apparently coordinating a conspiracy to steal elections through fraud and criminal actions. They clearly are helping illegal aliens vote by the millions. And they are seemingly urging them to vote multiple times — all while making the case they can’t get in trouble because no ID is required.

They are urging it all on with over-the-top hate speech.

It's clear these texts are all aimed at illegal aliens — who of course are prohibited from voting under the laws of the United States of America.

I have all the texts and phone numbers if any politician, or government agency, is actually interested in Democrats coordinating voter fraud and criminal activity.

CNN’s Existential War With Trump

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/11/05/cnns-existential-war-with-trump-by-victor-davis-hanson/
November 4th, 2018|


It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Naming Names

But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”

Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”

Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?

Why did CNN anchor Chris Cuomo falsely assert that only the media (i.e., outlets like CNN) could download the hacked email trove of John Podesta—as if it was illegal for anyone else to do the same (e.g., “Remember, it is illegal to possess these stolen documents. It is different from the media. So everything you learn about this, you are learning from us.”)? What CNN legal counsel gave him such absurd advice?

Why did CNN’s own “unnamed source”—namely Lanny Davis—later deny he had ever given CNN any information that Donald Trump had advance warning of a meeting between Russian interests and Donald Trump, Jr.? Why did not the authors of the false story, Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen, retract in full the allegation, or at least explain exactly why their not-so-anonymous source Lanny Davis was claiming that he never told the three that his client Michael Cohen had professed foreknowledge of the meeting on the part of Trump.

Why were Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, the supposed dream team of CNN investigative reporters, all forced to resign from CNN? Was it their collective but false report that Anthony Scaramucci was connected to a $10-billion Russian investment fund? What were the sources for that fake account? Did that news account hurt the Trump transition? Would they have been so fast and loose with the truth in the case of president-elect Hillary Clinton? Might they instead have reported at about the same time on the Clinton’s campaign funding of the Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele project?

CNN’s Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus, remember, also had erroneously reported that former FBI Director James Comey would in congressional testimony soon contradict President Trump’s prior assertion that he was told by Comey that he was not under investigation. That report proved false—and yet it too had helped to whip up anti-Trump hysteria on the eve of the Comey appearance. Why is it that one can easily predict the particular political slant of these fake news stories?

This Is CNN’s Shoddiness

Even in trivial matters, CNN has fudged the truth and always in a predictably biased direction—as, for example, in its selective viewing of a video that suggested Trump buffoonishly had preempted the Japanese Prime Minister and overfed fish during a joint photo-op (“Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.”). In truth, Trump simply followed the feeding model of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Earlier, CNN had reported that singer Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the music of her father Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”—a story of her purported anger that Sinatra denied. During the lead-up to the Neil Gorsuch nomination announcement, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny inaccurately announced that the Trump White House was purportedly “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest” by creating two “identical Twitter pages” for both possible nominees Justices Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman. Later Zeleny sheepishly retracted that falsehood.

The shoddiness in reporting about Trump and the occasional flat-out inaccurate new stories reflect a toxic network culture in which partisanship is now standard and apparently to be expected. A certain furor over Trump often erupts in repeated, obscene anti-Trump and unprofessional outbursts of CNN journalists, contributors, and anchors—whether Anderson Cooper trashing a pro-Trump panelist by profanely retorting, “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!” or CNN religious scholar Reza Aslan referring to Trump as “this piece of sh-t,” or perhaps the late CNN host Anthony Bourdain joking in an interview about poisoning Trump or CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin’s infamous photo-pose holding a facsimile of Trump’s severed head.

After a while, the pattern becomes undeniable. We saw such biased activism during the Ferguson drama when the entire newsroom of CNN panelists (on the supposedly straight news “CNN Newsroom”) in December 2014 adopted an on-air “hands up, don’t shoot” photo-op pose—an emulation of the false narrative surrounding the shooting death of Michael Brown that was proven fantastical by grand jury testimonies and an investigation by Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

Apparently, CNN has created a landscape in which not only are journalists likely to relax professional standards when it comes to reporting on Trump, but there is a sloppy environment of crude disparagement of the candidate and later president, and a general indifference to journalistic ethics.

The permeating ethos is perhaps best illustrated by the CNN staffers working with CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux during the campaign who were caught on a hot mic joking about the crash of Trump’s jet. CNN commentator Donna Brazile leaked a primary debate question to candidate Hillary Clinton, and then shamelessly lied that she had not done so. CNN panelist Julia Joffe (previously fired from Politico for tweeting that the president and his daughter Ivanka might have had an incestuous relationship) claimed that Trump had radicalized more people than had ISIS. CNN contributor and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has suggested that President Trump is being duped as if he was a de facto Russian asset, while another CNN contributor, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, on more than one occasion has compared Trump and his policies in various ways to Hitler, U.S. immigration enforcement to the Holocaust, and America under Trump to Nazi Germany.

CNN anchor Don Lemon recently asserted that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men”—another false assertion, given that radical Islamist terrorists have killed far more Americans in terrorist acts than have white men, whether left-wing or right-wing, and despite the fact that while “white men” constitute about a third of the U.S. population, Islamists constitute a mere fraction.

At least Christiane Amanpour (“I believe in being truthful not neutral”) was intellectually honest when she asserted—in some sense echoing the confessions of New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg—that journalists could not and should not be neutral reporters any longer, given their low opinion of Trump and their own belief that he is untrustworthy and a threat to the republic.

Welcome to the Echo Chamber

Given the fabrications and outright falsehoods that were critical to the selling of Obamacare, from those of Barack Obama to Jonathan Gruber’s, I doubt any credible journalist would have dared state that they could no longer stay neutral in reporting Obama Administration policies. What followed the fabrications of Obamacare were Ben Rhodes’ later admissions of creating an echo chamber by which he orchestrated all sorts of narratives among incompetent and compliant young reporters, or Susan Rice’s serial lies about the Benghazi deaths, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the complete removal of WMD from Syria, and denials that she had requested unmaskings of Trump associates swept up in the Obama Administration’s FISA warrant surveillance.

In fact, the duty of a journalist is to stay neutral and to report the truth, at least as it can be determined by testimonies, evidence, motive, and common sense—without worry whether such reporting injures or aids a particular politician or agenda.

In answer to both Cillizza and Acosta, unfortunately CNN has serially issued false reports, has had to fire hosts, contributors, and reporters, and has had its anchors and panelists engage in wild ahistorical attacks on Trump and traffic in racialist stereotypes and obscenity.

The names of those who have abused the journalistic ethos and the regrettable failure of CNN to uphold media standards are a matter of record.

The best way to stop the chronic Trump attacks on the veracity of CNN is not to unleash a rude and boisterous Acosta to argue endlessly with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but simply to ensure that CNN news reports are fact-checked and not in need of retractions or firings, that CNN hosts, contributors, and anchors do not stoop to profanity, scatology, racism, and ahistorical comparisons to Stalin and Hitler, and that CNN’s staff and hosts do not joke about the president being killed through plane crashes an

A Truly Transformative Presidency

Trump’s Winning Demeanor

By Conrad Black

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/29/trumps-winning-demeanor/

October 29th, 2018

The problem with all the advice to the president urging him to change his demeanor is that it is given for the wrong reason and at the wrong time.

As I have often recounted, since Donald Trump attacks the entire political system and almost everyone in or near it in both parties (including former presidents), it was never going to be possible for him to lower the ferocity of his barrages until it was clear how successful his effort to dislodge or reorient the entire political establishment had been.

Obviously, if he had not won the nomination, or lost the election, he would be, in political terms, a trivia question like Michael Dukakis (Democratic presidential nominee in 1988). He has expelled the NeverTrumpers from the Republican congressional delegations with Senators Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and others headed for the exits. But if he loses control of the Congress next week, gridlock will reimpose itself, and we will have trench warfare until the next presidential election. In those circumstances, Trump might likely be disposed to be more placatory, and behave more like a contestant in a great national debate, with little realistic hope of changing the system he has attacked much more than he already has.

A Truly Transformative Presidency

This was the lot of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who put in their tax increase and health care, respectively, in their first two years, and then were severely defeated at their first mid-terms and never moved more than a Christmas card through Congress thereafter. Republican congressional leaders Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole frustrated Clinton, and John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell drove Obama to attempt government by questionable executive regulation, leading to the extreme politicization of Supreme Court nominations.

Trump has revoked almost all Obama’s executive orders, gutted the coercive part of Obamacare, and got his two conservative nominations onto the Supreme Court. Obama’s lasting effect—apart from having admirably smashed the color bar on eligibility for the presidency—has been minimal, as has been Clinton’s. So much for the loudly proclaimed ambitions of both of them to be “transformative” presidents. At transformation, they were a bust. Trump is already ahead of them. America and the world are waiting to see if this president can hold the momentum past the midterms.

The polls consistently have underestimated him, and I don’t believe the polling organizations are unbiased. Nor have they adjusted their echelon of opinion-sampling to allow for the phenomenon of tens of millions of fervent Trump voters largely from demographic groups not in the habit of voting in such large numbers, at least not since the Reagan years. There is also the widely noted phenomenon of the resistance of Trump voters to reveal their preferences, so called “shy Trump voters”—they mistrust anyone who telephones them at home, especially on a robo-call, asking their voting opinion.

Given the polling experiences of the 2016 election, I believe that the 30 toss-up House of Representatives elections and the five toss-up Senate seats are really at least 20 Republican congressmen and four Republican senators, and that Trump gets to hurl himself at the throat of the political class he set out to dispossess for another two years. The Republican gain in the Senate will balance the reduction of the Republican majority in the House, and there will be no remaining credibility for the monstrous fraudulent confection of the Trump-Russian collusion canard that distracted the country for more than a year.

Beyond the Harsh Discourse

But whatever happens in the election, the claim that the harsh political discourse, and especially that the president by his forceful words and acts, has incited and encouraged public violence, is bunk. A number of very reputable and fine commentators have bewailed the nasty and belligerent tenor of public discourse and many estimable people have said and written that it is up to the president as the chief of state and government and in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s phrase, “the head of the American people,” to lead the way to greater civility, and that this would have a halcyon effect on the country, including those elements of American society with any disposition to violence.

It is true that President Trump is a much higher and more important officeholder than anyone else in the country, but he has never said anything remotely as conducive to sociopathic behavior as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and others have regularly spewed out. But they haven’t influenced the public much either, and the media and the elected officials should understand that they have almost no influence on the great American people’s behavior.

Americans and their commentators are going to have to realize that in a country of 325 million people with practically unlimited access to sophisticated firearms and a generally proud national ethos of self-reliance and resistance to an overbearing state, the vagaries of public mental health in so spontaneous and fluid a society as America will assure a good deal of violence. If the country wants an end to violence, it will have to gather in the guns held by the public, and triple the police presence throughout the urban part of the country. These are completely unacceptable measures, legislatively and constitutionally.

No extent of even sincere hand-wringing about the lack of gentility in public discourse had anything to do with the near assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the ineffective and easily intercepted pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, or the massacre of worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The expertise of the police response in each case was very high and professional.

Such a huge and comparatively free society has no shortage of well-armed violent criminals and lunatics. They have nothing to do with Donald Trump, Maxine Waters, or Cory Booker. As the economic life of the whole country continues to improve, violence will decline, and, as the president has said, the National Rifle Association can be rolled back a little. Republicans need not fear the NRA—as Trump has also said, they have nowhere else to go politically, and as they stand on the Second Amendment to the Constitution, they can’t be pushed very far.

The fact is, scores of millions of Americans kit themselves out every week in battle fatigues, go to the firing ranges and paintball parks, and get ready if need be to kill the IRS on their front lawn. Their individualist determination should not be despised and will sustain the country long after the Quislings of Hollywood and the poseurs of Silicon Valley and Wall Street have been put back in their places.

America will not be a civil society any time soon, and almost no Democrat calling for it will take a step to make it happen. But the chances for better government are promising.

Trump’s Republican Populism

Why he succeeds where Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura failed.

By William McGurn
Wall Street Journal
November 6, 2018

Long before he was president, Donald Trump was a celebrity, a walking, talking jumble of political incorrectness who rode his billionaire populism all the way to the Oval Office.

But a funny thing happened to Mr. Trump once he became president. At some point he understood that if he was not to fizzle out like so many populists before him—think pro wrestler turned governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura in Minnesota or Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger in California—he would need to tether his populism to the Republican policy agenda. And, mostly, he has.

This record is easily lost amid the Trumpian tweets and excesses. Even so, it remains a record most Republicans cheer: a major overhaul of the tax system that has brought the economy roaring back to life, two stellar jurists seated on the Supreme Court and a record number of nominees confirmed for the district and appellate courts, a thoroughgoing regulatory overhaul courtesy of what had been the largely unused Congressional Review Act, not to mention a long overdue defense buildup.

These are precisely the kind of victories that losing even one chamber of Congress would render next to impossible going forward. Judging from the president’s many rallies—and his new bromances with old opponents—he knows it too.

Take Ted Cruz, a rival in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. During the primaries Mr. Trump routinely referred to the Texas senator as “Lyin’ Ted.” At one point, he embraced a National Enquirer report claiming Mr. Cruz’s father had associated with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald not long before the shooting.

As president, Mr. Trump now appreciates that in a tight Senate he can’t afford to have a Democrat take Mr. Cruz’s seat. That’s why the president was in Houston last week holding a monster rally for the senator he now calls “Beautiful Ted.”

It could have turned out much differently. After the Senate failed to repeal ObamaCare in 2017, finger pointing was the order of the day, with Mr. Trump complaining about Mitch McConnell’s Senate leadership. No one on the GOP side was getting anywhere—until the Senate changed the focus by pushing through something that did pass, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Likewise in the House. Mr. Trump can boast about “so much winning.” But without the considerable legislation Speaker Paul Ryan and his Republican caucus have sent to the president’s desk for his signature, the winning words would remain hollow.

Give the president his due as well. Yes, he’s stocked his White House with gadflies (Steve Bannon), troublemakers (Omarosa Manigault), loudmouths (Anthony Scaramucci), and appointees with Pat Buchanan-like hostility to free trade (Robert Lighthizer). But he’s also filled key Trump administration posts with strong conservatives who would have been equally at home in a Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio White House (Larry Kudlow at the National Economic Council, Don McGahn as White House counsel, John Bolton at the National Security Council).

Mr. Trump has likewise known where to look for advice. In 2016, Sen. Cruz challenged him on Supreme Court picks, saying Mr. Trump was likely to chose a nominee like his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a Clinton appointee to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals whom Mr. Cruz described as a “hard-core pro-abortion liberal judge.” Mr. Trump responded by having Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society come up with what conservatives regard as a dream team list of jurists from which Mr. Trump said he would choose. Again, he has.

In other words, for all the talk about how Mr. Trump’s populism is changing the Republican Party, his most significant achievements have come when he’s hitched his populism to traditional conservative priorities and then worked with his fellow Republicans to make good on his promises.

That’s why the stakes are high Tuesday. Losing the House may not be the end of the world for the president—Mr. Trump may even regard a Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a gift in the run-up to 2020—but it would almost surely mean an end to the big legislative achievements like those we’ve seen these past two years.

Losing the Senate would be even worse. Democrats are still smarting from Mr. McConnell’s decision two years ago not to hold hearings for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, during a presidential election year. If Democrats get control, they will use it to thwart many of Mr. Trump’s nominees, whether for the federal courts or his own cabinet. And if a Democratic House manages to impeach the president, Mr. Trump will want as large a GOP majority as possible in the Senate.

For all the bumps and bruises, the Trump-Republican collaboration has yielded large achievements for the American people. But if these midterms take their normal historical course, the GOP will lose one or both chambers of Congress. And that in turn would test how effective Mr. Trump’s populism can be without his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill driving the agenda.