https://www.theepochtimes.com/will-republicans-ever-get-serious_4966828.htmlWill Republicans Ever Get Serious?by Jeffrey A. Tucker
January 6, 2023
Excerpts:The United States really is at the precipice. We can go the way of other empires before us: Rome, Aztec, Spain, Britain and watch global power shrink alongside reduced economic prospects and entrenched and corrupt bureaucracy. But there is no law of history that makes this inevitable. It is possible to turn it around by ending the foreign meddling, the outrageous spending, the legal sclerosis, the crushing bureaucracy and taxation.
One would hope that ideals at some point—especially given the obvious emergency conditions—would trump political interest and quid-pro-quo corruption. But so far, it is only a small minority within the Republican Party that seems to understand this. Voters send these smooth-talking politicians to Washington to make a difference but most often they bank their victories and go back to the swamp to do business as usual.
Meanwhile, the voters are increasingly furious at the system. Forget trust itself. Back when Eisenhower was president, trust in favor in government was 75 percent, as incredible as that seems. The assassination of John F. Kennedy began a long decline. Since 2008, trust in government has never been above 25 percent. Today it stands at 20 percent, which might as well be a polling error trending toward zero.
What are the implications of this? It means the end of the consent of the governed. Everything we know from history and political philosophy, from David Hume to Étienne de la Boétie to Thomas Jefferson, suggests that this is unsustainable. It is certainly unjust for a government of which hardly anyone approves to lord over a population of the unwilling.
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The last three years have shown us just how deep the corruption really is. The more we look at COVID relief funds, the more we see that it was not about virus mitigation. It was about using a pandemic to rob the public and pass out money to friends. And we look at the antics of the Federal Reserve to prop up the system and know for sure that what they did is directly responsible for the high inflation now. We further observe that there have been no apologies, no admissions of wrongdoing, and no real accountability.
How much anger is there right now among the rank-and-file? Plenty. Trump snagged the nomination in 2016 not because of the particulars of his program (how many voters were really demanding more tariffs, much less pandemic lockdowns?) but because he seemed to be the angriest and most reckless man on stage.
Trump’s victory should have sent a message that the tyranny of the status quo is not long for this world. In my view, he squandered the opportunity and instead of getting the government off our backs across the board, he fastened on even more (even if he accomplished some good in the regulatory realm). As a result of this experience, the rank-and-file have grown smarter, angrier, and more ferocious than ever. Whenever I travel and speak around the country, I’m always shocked to discover that I am the most moderate-sounding voice in the room.
Of course none of the mood of the public is being reflected in opinion on mainstream news. To listen to NPR and the New York Times, you would think that everything is going along swimmingly but for dangerous elements on the radical right. This is utter rot and people are starting to figure this out.
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