September 5, 2015
Why Conservative Pundits Despise TrumpBy James LewisA lot of conservative pundits are spittin' mad about Donald Trump's spectacular rise in the polls.
Mad to the point of unreason. But the same folks claim to admire the
founder of Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke, who placed his trust in the intuitive good sense of everyday people.It was Burke who first identified the ideological insanity of the French Revolution, when fantasy-prone intellectuals grabbed absolute power to destroy a whole social class through the Terror, fully intending to keep killing until all the enemies of the Revolution were dead. The same kind of murderous ideologues have been pursuing total Revolution ever since, under the heading of Marxism and now Islamofascism, which also seeks to revolutionize the world by hook or by crook. Obama grew up in that part of the left.
Against the French Revolution Burke placed his faith in the moral intuitions of ordinary people.
Well, you can't get more ordinary-sounding than Donald Trump. That's what seems to bug the intellectual right. It's a sort of class snobbery. But it's also a failure to see how cleverly Trump is playing the game.
Trump plays the part of a narcissistic blowhard, and his fans enjoy the joke. But when push comes to shove Trump is a very smart businessman who does know how to negotiate tough deals. He has faced business failure more than once, and managed to come back. Obama is a narcissist who has never experienced failure and who lives in his head; but it is failure that can turn narcissists into realists. The business world is all about reality. Trump's obnoxious habit of naming every phallic building he owns into Trump X is also a PR gag.
But whereas Obama is a grim and ruthless narcissist who really wants to run the world, Trump has a sense of humor.And he has enough common sense to ask,
“Why in the world are we giving hard-earned money to countries who hate America and want to hurt our citizens?” The answer is “Because the Left hates America and wants to bring us down.” Trump doesn’t have to say that. All he needs is to ask the question. So far Jeb Bush has not been able to say those commonsense words.
Take the Jorge Ramos incident, when Ramos interrupted Trump's press conference by shouting down other journos. Ramos has appointed himself as the spokesguy for all Hispanics (who come from totally different cultures). Ramos does his own macho schtick by proclaiming that he votes illegally both in the U.S. and Mexico. When Ramos tried to take over Trump's press conferences, Trump appropriately had him escorted out. Our political class was shocked, shocked. But it was just a mano-a-mano game. Trump invited Ramos back into the presser, gave him his chance to talk if he followed the rules, and then spent private time making friends with Ramos. I'm willing to bet that Trump got on the phone to Ramos' boss Carlos Slim and talked the whole thing out.
Trump isn't in business to make enemies, but he will play the confrontation game when it suits him. Dealmakers have to operate on two levels, but the shared goal is to come to a deal that benefits both sides. You don't alienate the big players. The Republican elites are afraid that Trump will alienate "all" Hispanic or "all" blacks, but that is not [how]Trump made his money. He doesn't just provoke. He also makes friends and allies. His show biz career is all about walking a thin line between provocative headlines and showing himself to be a good guy. Trump's black and Hispanic fanbase must be in the millions.
In U.S. history the closest precedent is Teddy Roosevelt, who was also a boastful blowhard. Americans loved the theater of Teddy charging up San Juan Hill and his hunting jaunts to the West. In the end, Roosevelt wasn't the worst of the lot. Arguably it was Woodrow Wilson who came after Teddy who was the liberal fascist, as Jonah Goldberg has argued; Wilson was a sly and deceptive, humorless ideologue, much like Obama, and a governmental control freak with globalist pretensions.
Conservative pundits don't recognize the Burkean answer, which is to appeal to the "mighty oak" of intuitive common sense, ignoring the leftist "insects of the hour." Trump does that by openly challenging the PC witch hunters who harry this nation 24 hours a day.
Trump pulls Alinsky tricks on the Left. I admire conservative writers like Will and Krauthammer. But on Trump they have forgotten their basic Edmund Burke.
More successfully than anyone else, Donald Trump is tapping into a deep popular unease about the moral and intellectual sleaziness of the ruling Left. The Left has turned the country into a daily freak show, with Obama and Hillary smashing the constitutional furniture just because they feel like it. They are a national disaster.
Worse than that, Alinskyites like Obama and Hillary are extremely dangerous, as Obama's surrender to a nuclear Iran shows. Historically American statesmen aim for stability: Obama opts for revolution -- like the "Arab Spring" that was supposed to bring the fascist Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt. Today, Obama is pulling another revolutionary move by flipping American support to the fanatical priests of Tehran.
Nobody believes Obama's barefaced lies anymore, except the U.S. media and their mind-numbed voters.In his "community agitator" fashion Obama has betrayed every U.S. ally whose defense depended on us, including the Saudis, Egypt, the Sunni Gulf states, and Israel. Libya was simply destroyed and its ruler executed. Why? Because NATO decided to do so. But NATO is just the United States under Obama.
For whatever bizarre and indeed criminal reason, Obama decided to push Libya into a civil war that is still raging today. These are the actions of a revolutionary sociopath, not a normal American president.Obama's actions go totally against American tradition. Syria, Libya, and Iraq, are still burning. Real people are dying. ISIS is rising with the aid of Obama's allies, Turkey, Qatar, and the Ikhwan. Russia is now intervening directly in the Syrian war. The examples of Obama's overreach are endless, and the next U.S. government will face a huge job to recover from the mess Obama made.
What's the answer to eight years of Obama fanaticism, both domestically and in foreign policy? It's normal American pragmatism. Almost all our presidents have been practical people who didn't follow some radical script to coerce human perfection. When you look past all the pizzazz, Trump has a long history of being practical.
And unlike any Republican candidate I can remember, he is genuinely popular. He has Burkean common sense.Will and Krauthammer don't seem to see that a popular conservative movement for these times may look more like Liberace than Mozart. They think Trump is a wild man, when he is in fact cleverly appealing to the side of us that feels constantly violated by the aggressions of the Left.
Trump has a talent for challenging those insane puritanical strictures. When you think about the freak show of Bill's Monica affair, about the impeachable sale of U.S. missile secrets to China, about Hillary's endless, vulgar, and blatant lies, about Michelle's wacky food faddism, and most of all, about Obama's out and out corruption of the IRS and the Justice Department -- we are overwhelmed by endless violations of deeply valued American laws and customs. The results are so bad that people don't know how to cope.
Would I vote for the Donald? I don’t know. So far, Ted Cruz looks very competitive. I like Ben Carson, who could reverse the entire radicalized black narrative of ethnic hatred and revenge. We are lucky to have a good field.
But the Republican panic against Donald Trump is just silly.
Get over it, and let’s see the candidates strut their stuff.
Read more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/why_conservative_pundits_despise_trump.html
