[This is my first post. So, I hope I'm doing it right. Although this dates back to last August, I searched and didn't find it here.]
Trump Stands for Socialism, Competently Imposedhttp://barbwire.com/2015/08/12/0800-trump-stands-for-socialism-competently-imposed/by Dr. Alan Keyes
on 12 August, 2015 at 08:00
On Sunday I sent out the following tweet:
"The Clintons are my friends." "I only supported Democrats for business reasons." Conservative credentials? In a Trump's eye!
--Alan Lee Keyes @loyaltoliberty 10:39 AM - 9 Aug 2015
This led one of the people who saw the tweet to comment:
Desperate circumstances require harsh methods. We don’t need merely to upset the apple cart- the apples all have to be tossed. That won’t happen through political correctness. A bit of unapologetic brashness is exactly what is needed in DC.
I replied:
Desperation that leads you to appoint your enemy as your Commander-in-Chief isn’t harsh to anyone except yourself. Trump isn’t politically correct in his speech AT THE MOMENT. But everything else about him makes clear that he’s a leftist Democrat, like his good friends the Clintons (who also started out bidding to win back support from Reagan Democrats, remember.)
He’s saying what conservatives want to hear in tone perhaps, and anger against the GOP quislings. But in substance he is not now nor has he ever been a conservative — in principle or in the policies of the candidates he has supported. I just hope true conservatives (i.e., not the ones who apply the term to the Bushes) wake up before they learn the truth of what I say in the way that will be harshest for our country.
This led the reader to ask “What, of the positions he [Trump] has put forth as a presidential candidate, do you find so “leftist democrat.” In reply I made it clear that I think it’s pointless to “put much stock in what he reads from his script as a candidate.” We must look at his real life, not the political persona he’s fabricating for political effect.
As far as I can tell most of the self-professed “conservatives” cheering Donald Trump are drawn to him because of his willingness to speak out against the GOP quislings who collaborate in Washington’s wholesale failure to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws. They’re so mesmerized by the fact that Trump is “outspoken” against the quislings that they’re not bothering to take a look at what he has actually said and done. For example, take the issue Trump has most exploited to build a conservative façade for his candidacy. When you get past his raw “red-meat” rhetoric, it turns out to be a warmed over Mike Pence/ Gang of Eight stew.
If elected President on that basis, the only difference between Trump and the GOP leaders he pretends to oppose would be that the conservatives who help to build up his credibility will be implicated along with him as he pursues the very agenda for which they now vociferously condemn the GOP leadership. Trump doesn’t oppose the quislings’ policies. He opposes their incompetent salesmanship as they advocate those policies. He’s out to prove that many of the people in the GOP’s “conservative” base are so shallow that, by offering them a little emotional satisfaction, he can get them to swallow what they have thus far refused. I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t just the sort of thing he and Bill Clinton chuckled about when Trump called Clinton for the conversation in which they did not discuss Trump’s Presidential campaign (or so they would have us believe.)
In a similar vein, Trump has been outspoken in his criticism of the incompetent launch of Obamacare. But that’s not because he opposes socialist healthcare. He has in fact repeatedly said that he’s “a liberal” on healthcare. He has long favored a single payer system. During the GOP’s recent mock-up of a debate (more like overdone personal bickering than debating) he was clear about his position, going so far as to claim that “It works well in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland.” Trump doesn’t oppose socialism. He opposes what he sees as the incompetent administration of socialism.
He goes on to say that the main obstacle to its success in America is the existence of the State governments. So, let’s see, conservatives (who profess to believe in reasonably decentralized government that respects the residual sovereignty of the States of the Union) are supposed to be enthusiastic about someone who thinks that the residual sovereignty of the States is the chief obstacle to achieving the incredible success of a competently imposed socialist health care system?
I’m tempted to believe that no self-respecting conservative could possibly be that thoughtless, but then I remember that many “conservatives” who still accept the GOP delusion are self-professed, not self-respecting. If they were the latter, they would cast aside the elitist faction’s sham two-party con game, and devote all their energy to building an authentically conservative political vehicle, compatible with the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and the liberty of the American people. They would also reject, out of hand, whichever candidate the elitist faction sham sends forth to beguile us into surrendering it. Donald Trump is such a candidate. So in fact are all the men and woman who have “made their bones” in either of the elitist gangs now masquerading as opposing political parties.
I’ve often told people that the only thing worse than the incompetent socialism we’ve seen around the world would be socialism, competently imposed. As someone like Solzhenitsyn well understood, the real objection to the socialist ideology isn’t just its failure to deliver “the goods.” It’s the fact that it invites people to understand those goods in strictly materialistic terms. By doing so socialism denies the spirit God shares with humanity, thereby endangering our living souls.
But exactly what significance do spirit and soul have for someone like Donald Trump, who professes to be a Christian, yet frankly admits that he has never seriously sought God’s forgiveness. Instead, he says, if and when he has sinned, he just fixes it himself. This is precisely the delusion that lies at the heart of the socialist ideology– the delusion of God-denying self-sufficiency that obscures the intangible essence of human being, so that people may be regarded as nothing more than complex arrangements of soulless matter, no more intrinsically significant than the dust. The literally atrocious aspects of the socialist regimes of the 20th century were not a function of the incompetence with which they were administered. They were the inevitable result of the degraded view of human personality the socialist ideology entails and inculcates.
How can it be “conservative” to implement socialist solutions when humanity itself is not thereby respected and conserved?
