By Patrick J. Buchanan
Information Clearing House
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump
told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News.
And that hit a nerve.
“Dangerous,” “toxic,” came the recoil from the media.
Trump is threatening to, “delegitimize” the election
results of 2016.
Well, if that is what Trump is trying to do, he has no
small point.
For consider what 2016 promised and what it appears
about to deliver.
This longest of election cycles has rightly been called
the Year of the Outsider.
It was a year that saw a mighty surge of economic populism
and patriotism, a year when a 74-year-old Socialist Senator
set primaries ablaze, with mammoth crowds that dwarfed
those of Hillary Clinton.
It was the year that a non-politician, Donald Trump, swept
Republican primaries in an historic turnout, with his nearest
rival an ostracized maverick in his own Republican caucus,
Senator Ted Cruz.
More than a dozen Republican rivals, described as the strongest
GOP field since 1980, were sent packing.
This was the year Americans rose up to pull down the establishment in a peaceful storming of the American Bastille.
But if it ends with a Clintonite restoration and a ratification of
the same old Beltway policies, would that not suggest there is
something fraudulent about American democracy, something
rotten in the state?
If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment’s
hegemony is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious
solidarity — for the preservation of their perks, privileges
and power.
All the elements of that establishment — corporate, cultural,
political, media — are today issuing an ultimatum to Middle
America:
Trump is unacceptable.
Instructions are going out to Republican leaders that either they
dump Trump, or they will cease to be seen as morally fit partners
in power.
It testifies to the character of Republican elites that some are
seeking ways to carry out these instructions, though this would
mean invalidating and aborting the democratic process that
produced Trump.
But what is a repudiated establishment doing issuing orders to
anyone?
Why is it not Middle America issuing the demands, rather than
the other way around?
Specifically, the Republican electorate should tell its discredited
and rejected ruling class: If we cannot get rid of you at the ballot
box, then tell us how, peacefully and democratically, we can be
rid of you?
You want Trump out? How do we get you out?
The Czechs had their Prague Spring.
The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring.
When do we have our American Spring?
The Brits had their, “Brexit” and declared independence
of an arrogant superstate in Brussels.
How do we liberate ourselves from a Beltway superstate
that is more powerful and resistant to democratic change?
Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver
away for, “regime change” in faraway lands whose rulers displease
us.
How do we effect, “regime change” here at home?
Donald Trump’s success, despite the near-universal hostility of the
media, even much of the conservative media, was due in large part
to the public’s response to the issues he raised.
He called for sending illegal immigrants back home, for securing
America’s borders, for no amnesty.
He called for an America First foreign policy to keep us out of wars
that have done little but bleed and bankrupt us.
He called for an economic policy where the Americanism of the
people replaces the globalism of the transnational elites and their
K Street lobbyists and congressional water carriers.
He denounced NAFTA, and the trade deals and trade deficits with
China, and called for rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
By campaign’s end, he had won the argument on trade, as Hillary
Clinton was agreeing on TPP and confessing to second thoughts on
NAFTA.
But if TPP is revived at the insistence of the oligarchs of Wall
Street, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
backed by conscript editorial writers for newspapers that rely on
ad dollars — what do elections really mean anymore?
And if, as the polls show we might, we get Clinton — and TPP,
and amnesty, and endless migrations of Third World peoples
who consume more tax dollars than they generate, and who
will soon swamp the Republicans’ coalition — what was 2016
all about?
Would this really be what a majority of Americans voted for
in this most exciting of presidential races?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make
violent revolution inevitable,” said John F. Kennedy.
The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of social revolution in
America, and President Nixon, by ending the draft and ending
the Vietnam war, presided over what one columnist called the,
“Cooling of America.”
But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on
her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in
the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising.
And the new protesters in the streets will not be over privileged
children from Ivy League campuses.
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