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Thursday, January 24, 2019

Patrick J. Buchanan: When Democracy Fails to Deliver...Because Elites Refuse To Accept Losing

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible ... make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy was right.

While populists have won elections and carried out peaceful revolutions, [Brexit & Trump's election] often the policies for which they have successfully worked are never implemented.

In the 1975 book "Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed," this writer sought to explore and explain the forces that so often deny the right the policy fruits of its political victories.

Foremost among these was "the New Journalism."

"The essence of press power lies in the authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others," this writer wrote. "The press determines what 'people will talk and think about' because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington."

Among the reasons for Trump's political success, such as it is, is that today's conservative media did not exist back then, nor did the new social media that he has mastered so well.

Yet still, the left's power over America's character- and culture-forming institutions remains overwhelming. It dominates public schools and teachers unions, mainstream churches, college and university faculties, media and entertainment, TV and film.

What is taking place in the West today might be described as a struggle between the capital and the country it rules. England voted to leave the EU; London voted to remain.

In the last analysis, Kennedy was surely right. People who see the policies they have voted for rejected again and again, by the very elites they defeated, will inevitably turn to other means to preserve what they have.
We may have to have a second American revolution. 

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