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. 

Welcome to the New Class Warfare

Steven Allen in American Greatness:

The Democratic Party was once considered the home of working people. That changed as mainstream liberals of the 1960s such as Hubert Humphrey, John and Bobby Kennedy, and AFL-CIO leader George Meany were replaced by radicals and their ideological offspring.

A key moment in that transition came during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Before a group of wealthy supporters in California, Obama spoke condescendingly of people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest where “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. . . . And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In 2011, Thomas Edsall wrote in the New York Times:

(P)reparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment—professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists—and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

After the 2014 election, in which 64 percent of “white” voters without college degrees favored Republicans, political analyst Ronald Brownstein said of such voters: “You’re talking about people who are deeply alienated from American life, both culturally and economically.”

Soon, those “alienated” people had a candidate. In August 2015, the British newsmagazine The Economist called Donald Trump’s base “relatively uneducated supporters who don’t have much disposable income, are relatively unlikely to volunteer on his behalf, and who may not even show up at the polls on primary day.”

Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (and a regular contributor to American Greatness) wrote in National Review:

Thanks to Donald Trump, American elites are finally paying attention to blue-collar, white America. They do not like what they see.

Racist. Bigoted. Irrational. Angry. How many times have you read or heard one or more of these words used to describe Trump’s followers? Whether they are the academic, media, and entertainment elites of the Left or the political and business elites of the Right, America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it.

Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, noted that “America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.”

Indeed, rabidly anti-Trump Republicans shared Democrats’ disdain for Trump supporters. Kevin Williamson of National Review wrote, “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

From there, it was a short walk to Hillary’s Clinton’s description of half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”

What you’re seeing now, played out every night on the news, is class warfare.

America’s privileged elites refuse to accept Trump as president and support any effort, no matter how absurd, to bring him down. (Impeach him! He’s a Russian spy!)

Trump may be a New York billionaire, but to the elites, he’s a man of Queens—the Queens of working-class history and Archie Bunker stereotype—rather than a sophisticated Manhattanite, who would be fit for the presidency.

Worse, he is a stand-in for his supporters. Too many of them are the kind of folks who work on farms or in factories or on construction projects. Too many are the sort who take showers after they get home from work rather than before they leave for work.

It’s a pattern repeated throughout history: Members of one group—say, the British aristocracy, or the Bourbon planter class in the South—come to dominate members of another group—the peasantry, or poor African-Americans and white farmers. In the minds of the elites, the advantages they experience must be the result of their innate superiority; they are more moral, more sophisticated, more intelligent than the lower classes. They’re just better.

We’re the Type of Americans They Want to Go Away

John Hawkins

I am the type of American they want to go away.

I get along with cops, soldiers, preppers and country boys -- the sort of guys who know how to shoot, know how to take care of themselves and would watch your back in a fight if it came to that. I don’t much like the government, but I do like small town government better than government in D.C. If someone has to be in charge, better the sort of guy you can run into at the grocery store who will give you an answer when you want to know why the potholes on your street haven’t been fixed. D.C.’s different. I know the Democrats there hate me because I’m a straight, white, Christian, Southern conservative and the people that run the Republican Party today would only care what I think if I had hundreds of thousands of dollars to give them. That’s why if I can make trouble for either group, I’m game.

[snip]

I like church-going people. I like the NRA. I like the sort of parent who won’t tolerate her kid acting like a brat in public, the sort of person who flies a flag on his porch, works two jobs, owns his own business or who just takes responsibility for himself and his family. I don’t much care for people who are lazy, dependent on the government or who want others to do what they should be doing for themselves. Unfortunately, we live in a country where the government takes the first group for granted and uses it like a piggybank for the second group.

That’s not good, but it might be tolerable if our government at least did the basics well. But, is our border secure? Are we balancing the budget? Are politicians being responsible with our money? Do we have great public schools? How good of a job are they doing with healthcare? Are they protecting Social Security and Medicare for future generations? Are we taking care of our soldiers at the VA? Is the government staying out of our business?

We live in a country run by politicians and bureaucrats who can’t do anything right and yet they think the solution to that problem is to give them even more power over our lives. You feel the same way I do? Then you’re one of the Americans the elites in D.C. want to go away.

Why Trump won

... the elite in Washington and Menlo Park appreciate the fresh grapes and arugula that they purchase at Whole Foods. Someone mined the granite used in their expensive kitchen counters and cut the timber for their hardwood floors. The fuel in their hybrid cars continues to come from refined oil. The city remains as dependent on this elemental stuff—typically produced outside the suburbs and cities—as it always was. The two Palo Altoans at Starbucks might have forgotten that their overpriced homes included two-by-fours, circuit breakers, and four-inch sewer pipes, but somebody somewhere made those things and brought them into their world.

In the twenty-first century, though, the exploitation of natural resources and the manufacturing of products are more easily outsourced than are the arts of finance, insurance, investments, higher education, entertainment, popular culture, and high technology, immaterial sectors typically pursued within metropolitan contexts and supercharged by the demands of increasingly affluent global consumers. A vast government sector, mostly urban, is likewise largely impervious to the leveling effects of a globalized economy, even as its exorbitant cost and extended regulatory reach make the outsourcing of material production more likely. Asian steel may have devastated Youngstown, but Chinese dumping had no immediate effect on the flourishing government enclaves in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia, filled with well-paid knowledge workers. Globalization, big government, and metastasizing regulations have enriched the American coasts, in other words, while damaging much of the nation’s interior.

Few major political leaders before Trump seemed to care. He hammered home the point that elites rarely experienced the negative consequences of their own ideologies. New York Times columnists celebrating a “flat” world have yet to find themselves flattened by Chinese writers willing to write for a fraction of their per-word rate. Tenured Harvard professors hymning praise to global progressive culture don’t suddenly discover their positions drawn and quartered into four part-time lecturer positions. And senators and bureaucrats in Washington face no risk of having their roles usurped by low-wage Vietnamese politicians. Trump quickly discovered that millions of Americans were irate that the costs and benefits of our new economic reality were so unevenly distributed.

As the nation became more urban and its wealth soared, the old Democratic commitment from the Roosevelt era to much of rural America—construction of water projects, rail, highways, land banks, and universities; deference to traditional values; and Grapes of Wrath–like empathy—has largely been forgotten. A confident, upbeat urban America promoted its ever more radical culture without worrying much about its effects on a mostly distant and silent small-town other. In 2008, gay marriage and women in combat were opposed, at least rhetorically, by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their respective presidential campaigns. By 2016, mere skepticism on these issues was viewed by urban elites as reactionary ignorance. In other words, it was bad enough that rural America was getting left behind economically; adding insult to injury, elite America (which is Democrat America) openly caricatured rural citizens’ traditional views and tried to force its own values on them. Lena Dunham’s loud sexual politics and Beyoncé’s uncritical evocation of the Black Panthers resonated in blue cities and on the coasts, not in the heartland. Only in today’s bifurcated America could billion-dollar sports conglomerates fail to sense that second-string San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protests of the national anthem would turn off a sizable percentage of the National Football League’s viewing audience, which is disproportionately conservative and middle American. These cultural themes, too, Trump addressed forcefully....

Trump, the billionaire Manhattanite wheeler-dealer, made an unlikely agrarian, true; but he came across during his presidential run as a clear advocate of old-style material jobs, praising vocational training and clearly enjoying his encounters with middle-American homemakers, welders, and carpenters. Trump talked more on the campaign about those who built his hotels than those who financed them. He could point to the fact that he made stuff, unlike Clinton, who got rich without any obvious profession other than leveraging her office.

Wesley Pruden: How could everybody get it so wrong?

The Ruling Class lost touch with the Country Class.  The Country Class got tired of being told to shut up, sit down and when we want your opinion, we'll give it to you. 

... David Remnick, the editor of the precious and erudite New Yorker magazine, told his readers last summer that Mr. Trump was such an ignoramus, who knew nothing about politics, that his “whole con might end well before the first snows in Sioux City and Manchester.”

They’re still shoveling snow in New Hampshire — the last of it is expected to melt in time for the Fourth of July parade — and Mr. Remnick is still puzzled about why and how it happened.

He told Politico, the political daily, that he was shocked and sad. What he sees now, with the Donald well on his way to the Republican nomination, is “beyond belief” to a man of tender experience and training, and reflects an “ugliness” that appeals to “every worst instinct” of the nation beyond the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Mr. Remnick has a lot of distinguished company, even if most of it has not learned a lot from the experience. The smart set discounts experience, valuing only theory. Politico surveyed several of his colleagues, who have mostly taken to fainting couches in recovery rooms across the precincts of the mainstream media, so called.

James Fallows, who has spent three decades as national correspondent of Atlantic magazine, was even more confident than Mr. Remnick when he wrote early in the campaign cycle that “Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of the United States. Nor the 46th, nor any other number you might name. The chance of his winning the nomination and election is exactly zero.”

Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post was certain as early as last July that “Donald Trump is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016.” Nate Silver, who successfully applied higher math to presidential politics four years ago and made a name for himself as the guru who got it right, told his colleagues in November to “stop freaking out” about the Donald’s poll numbers. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Everyone “knew” that the Donald didn’t have “a ground game” (every political correspondent regrets that he is not a sportswriter in the toy department of the newspaper), and he would finally say something to attract the fire of the Gaffe Patrol and down he would go in flames. What few of the pundits could get their heads around was why Mr. Trump found such a receptive audience, how he could please so many conflicting parts of that audience. How on earth could he, a hard-cussin’ much-married man of vulgar worldly tastes, become such a hero of the evangelicals, usually so quick to disown one of their own for stepping out of line?

The lions of the legacy media have never understood the barely controlled rage of the Bible-believing unwashed at being scorned, disdained and despised, and along comes a man with a club and an eye for someone to hit with it. Grandma Grundy would forgive him a little cussin’. Some of the lions pretend to have learned a lesson, but it’s not that they were wrong, it was the people who were wrong and stubbornly unwilling to be educated. Some of the pundits are clinging to the hope that the Donald will be stopped and punditry will be redeemed.

Chris Wallace of Fox News is one of the truly contrite. “I think one of the things you learn is that you don’t know as much as you think you know, that for anyone foolish enough to think they’re an opinion maker or opinion shaper, this has been a lesson that the American people will make their own decision for themselves.” Now that hurts.

National Review Weenie on Trump - and the Horrible Fix the Republicans are in.

Donald Trump is running amok in the GOP china shop and gleefully tearing the place up.

They see no way out:

The key to Trump’s strength, which buttresses all his outrageousness, is that his supporters want someone to blow up the system. So there's almost nothing he can say or do that will discredit him in their eyes, and the least destructive scenario for his defeat — Trump blows himself up — will take some doing on his part.

What Lowry still doesn't get is that Trump is his creation, and the rest of the Republican Ruling Class.  You can only have so much contempt for the well-being of the Country Class before they pick up their pitchforks and storm the castle.  You sided with the Country Class in the culture war ... and lost.  At the same time you were destroying their economic base.  You were exporting their jobs and sacrificing their future on the alter of "comparative advantage."  It was a pain you never felt as economic powerhouses - like Wal Mart - were built on the basis of importing stuff all labelled "Made in China."  

The truth will only dawn when columns can be written by cheap labor in Asia and Lowry is given the pink slip.

Pat Buchanan: Donald Trump’s Rise Is Rejection of a Quarter Century of Bush Republicanism

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East.

“In the GOP nomination race, the chickens of a quarter century of Bush Republicanism have come home to roost,” Buchanan told Breitbart. “Trump’s triumphs to date are due to his recognition of, and identification with, the Middle American revolt against Bush family ideology and policy, and what it has produced.”

Buchanan explained that “America is rejecting the Bush immigration policy,” which has “proffered amnesty” to “12 million illegals… because it said the United States is helpless to do anything about their presence here.”

“America’s establishment has failed America,” Buchanan said, “The single clearest message in the presidential campaign of 2015-2016 is that the American people would like to cleanse our capital city of its ruling class.”

Buchanan exemplifies the strain of American culture that identifies with Middle America, populism and nationalism. The Bush family is part of the Ruling Class, Trump (despite his wealth) is part of the Country Class.  Trump is the beneficiary of the vision Pat articulated in 2008. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

By a margin of nearly five-to-one, the American people believe these so-called free trade deals lower wages rather than raise them, according to Pew polling data.

Read the whole thing.

Republicans Have Overestimated the Conservatism of the Base

David French at National Review:

I live in Donald Trump country. Maury County, Tenn. — like much of the South — was dominated by the Democratic party until just a few short years ago. Tennessee’s legislature didn’t flip red until 2008, and my own legislative district in my own “conservative” county was blue until 2010. Tennessee didn’t change dramatically between 2004 (when Democrats were in total control of state government) and 2011 (when control flipped to Republicans), but national politics changed. And — as Donald Trump is proving — they can change again.

If there is a consistent refrain among former Democrats (and there are lots in the South), it echoes Ronald Reagan: They didn’t leave the Democratic party; the Democratic party left them. That means many things, but it does not mean that they’re small government, constitutional conservatives. It means that while they may have been attitudinally “Tea Party,” they were never on board with the core substance of the movement.

So, what do my Trump-supporting neighbors prioritize? It’s a reasonable approximation of the “three-legged stool” of Reagan Republicanism, but with important philosophical distinctions from true movement conservatives. First, there’s patriotism, but it’s not a patriotism that implies or mandates a particular foreign policy or national-security philosophy. It’s embodied in a deep love for this country and a desire to defeat its enemies, but no particular commitment either to intervention or isolationism. They’re repulsed by the Left’s mindless multiculturalism and elite’s disdain for America, but they’re foreign-policy pragmatists. Fight when it’s smart, and don’t let political correctness get in the way of national defense. As the New York Times noted, a significant portion of Trump’s support comes from “a certain kind of Democrat.”

Next, there’s cultural conservatism, but it’s not the cultural conservatism of the evangelical Right. In other words, they don’t really care what anyone else does with their lives, but they’re unwilling to join the sexual revolution either personally or politically. They’re not crusaders in either direction, but they perceive the Left as attempting to draft them into a movement they find personally distasteful. When Bill Clinton said abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” he was tapping into this mindset — speaking to those who dislike abortion but aren’t willing to place it at the centerpiece of their politics.

Finally, there’s a commitment to economic opportunity, but it’s not embodied by intellectual devotion either to free markets or to small government. You won’t hear former Democrats crying out for social-security reform or changes to Medicare — unless those changes make the system more stable and reliable. And southern voters have proven that they’re more than willing to hand out generous, targeted tax breaks and subsidies to pull manufacturing out of the North or to welcome Japanese automakers to their new, union-free homes in Dixie. Call it “corporate welfare” all you want, but these new Republicans simply don’t care.

Immigration is a potent political issue because it hits each of these concerns. The patriot worries about the impact on national security. The cultural conservative is concerned about assimilation and contemptuous of the Left’s reassuring multicultural platitudes. And a flood of low-skill workers depresses wages and limits economic opportunity and stability. Combine these concerns with the South’s (and industrial North’s) longstanding willingness to embrace colorful, larger-than-life political figures, and it’s easy to see why Trump’s support map looks like this:

Indeed, as the New York Times noted, a significant portion of Trump’s support comes from “a certain kind of Democrat,” and he currently stands ready to pull up to 20 percent of Democratic support from Hillary Clinton.

The GOP underestimated Trump in part because it overestimated the conservatism of its own southern, rural northern, and Midwestern base. It underestimated the extent to which many of its voters hadn’t so much embraced the corporate conservatism of the Chamber of Commerce or the constitutional conservatism of the Tea Party as much as they had rejected the extremism of the increasingly shrill and politically correct Left.

And, yes, the size of this population calls into question the very process of building a national Republican electoral majority, but it also threatens Democrats who seem intent on drumming every blue-collar white male straight out of the party. At present, Donald Trump’s greatest electoral danger (at least in the GOP primary) is that his supporters are so alienated from both parties that they disproportionately choose to stay home. But if they turn out, and he can escape with a win in Iowa, the early primary calendar is largely a march through Trump country. America may end up with three distinct ideological movements: the progressive Left, the constitutional Right, and populist core that will now say of both political parties: I didn’t leave you. You left me.

Nikki Haley and the Republican Civil War

By this time Nikki Haley's State of the Union "rebuttal" is all over the news.  You can read the whole thing or watch the video below.  A rousing call to arms it is not.  It does not inspire one to go out and vote Republican.  In fact it's theme was not to talk about Obama and the Democrats but about "good" Republicans and "bad" Republicans.  

It points out the fact that there is a not-so-civil war going on for the Republican Party and her comments were shots fired in that war. She chose her side, which is a shame because this election is not going to be a slam dunk for Republicans. This was an opportunity to draw a sharp distinction between Republicans and Democrats even as the country turns against Obama. Instead, she chose, unwisely in my opinion, to fight the populist wing of her own party. That shows poor judgement. It also highlights the disdain that the Republican establishment has for the "country class" and the fear it has of losing control of the narrative.

This election marks a critical tipping point in the history of our country. We are either going to try to recover our former respect for individual freedom and self-reliance, or we are going toward the kind of soft socialism characteristic of Europe. The kind of culture that leaves them helpless in the face of invasion from the third world. Cultural suicide is fairly painless for a long time.

An analogy can be drawn between the "radicalism" of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin some 250 years ago, versus the desire of so many good British subjects in His Majesty's American Colonies to apply to King and Parliament for better understanding and compromise. The radicals won in part of North America but another part, named Canada, took the gentler approach. The rest is history.

US News thinks the unthinkable: Trump Could Win It All

A new survey shows a sizable number of Democrats ready to defect from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.

Trump's appeal is not to the traditional Conservative wing of the Republican Party. He's appealing to the Country Class who are rebelling against the Ruling Class.

Deluded Obama and the 'shrinking island"

Yesterday President Obama riffed in front of a Democratic audience, attacking the only enemies he cares about–Republicans. He described Republicans as “extreme,” and said, among other things, “Washington Republicans are alone on their own shrinking island.”

One of America’s parties is turning, increasingly, into a Washington, D.C.-based island that has alienated most voters. But that describes the Democrats, not the Republicans, and Barack Obama is a major reason for the Democrats’ downhill slide. But neither self-knowledge nor contact with reality has ever been a strong suit for President Obama.

This is what's so frustrating about the clamor for Republicans to "reach out" to groups that have never given them even close to a majority of their votes.   it's good to be inclusive but it only works if you are not pandering; something that alienates your base even as it fails to get votes from the people that don't like you.