Whoa, excellent analysis of "Trumpism." Here's the full column (missing words and all) that appears
here. Both Republicans and Democrats will find something to complain about here.
Well, that's what I have to say.
Stephen M. Flatow
Trumpism and What it Says About Us
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman March 11, 2016
Oren Cass has a point when he writes in
City Journal that too
much effort is being expended explaining the Trump phenomenon. After
all, had the reality TV star not thrown his hat into the ring, the
Republican Party would likely be well on its way to nominating "a
conventional candidate like Marco Rubio or John Kasich, who would be
favored to win against a Democratic Party that could not muster an
option beyond a socialist punchline and a Clinton under federal
investigation."
Alas, Trump is still the Republican front-runner, and we must learn
what we can. In particular, the Republican Party would be well-advised
to focus on the visceral anger of Trump's core supporters – middle-aged
white males without college degrees – and where it comes from.
To say the least, this is not a group that is doing well or facing
the future with confidence. Though causality is hard to establish,
mortality rates are at least one reflection of general well-being. And
white males between 45 and 54 are experiencing rising mortality rates,
even as general mortality rates continue to fall. As Anne Case and Angus
Deaton of Princeton have documented, since 1998 mortality rates for
this group have risen by .5% per annum, after a twenty year period of
annual decline of 2% per year. That contrasts, remarkably, to 1.8%
decline in mortality per year over the same period for Hispanics and
2.6% for black Americans.
With manufacturing jobs declining and automation cutting into service
jobs, this group is having a harder time finding and holding jobs. With
traditional factory and big business employers shedding jobs, Walter
Russell Mead points out, small businesses will be the primary sources of
new jobs going forward. Yet government policy has made it harder, not
easier, for small businesses to obtain capital.
Big banks are making ever fewer loans to small businesses, even as
expensive hyper-regulation has favored the big national banks over
smaller community banks, ill-equipped to deal with the expense of
regulatory compliance. Small business lending by the ten largest banks
declined 38% from 2006 to 2014. Only 43% of loans up to one million
dollars in 2015 originated in banks, down from 58% in 2009, with the
rest coming from alternative lenders who charge substantially higher
rates.
Non-college educated whites (and minorities too for that matter, in
all but rhetoric) have very legitimate grievances against both parties.
The major parties have too frequently demonstrated their contempt and
lack of concern. In 2008, candidate Obama dissed at an upscale Bay Area
fundraiser poor whites taking solace for factory closings in "guns and
religion." At Mitt Romney's 2012 comment about the "47% who will never
vote for us" was interpreted in a similar vein.
While much of Democratic Party nomination battle has focused on
income inequality, in fact the Democratic Party has long since ceased to
care much about working class whites – one reason that so many Trump
supporters are traditionally Democratic voters. The big Democratic
donors are far more concerned with climate alarmism, and support
environmental measures that are mass job cutters – e.g. blocking the
Keystone Pipeline, raising energy prices by promoting non-economically
viable alternatives to coal, and opposing new nuclear energy facilities.
Most of the Democratic Party's signature issues, particularly social
issues, have nothing to do with the economy or jobs.
TRUMPISM, IT MUST BE REMEMBERED, is something of an international
movement that has affected almost every advanced democracy of late. And
the reason is the same: the governments of those advanced economies have
broken the most fundamental social contract with their citizens -- the
commitment to treat their own citizens' well-being as taking priority
over that of citizens of other nations. That is most obvious in Western
Europe, which has been moving away from national sovereignty for over
half a century, with power increasingly transferred from national
parliaments to European Union bureaucrats in Brussels.
Mass Muslim immigration may finally be the issue that causes large
number of Western Europeans – many of them drawn from the elements of
European society most likely to live adjacent to Muslim "no-go zones" to
which fire and police protection does not extend – to rebel. Leaders
such as Germany's Angela Merkel and the bureaucrats in Brussels fairly
leaped at the chance to admit millions of Muslims fleeing war-torn Syria
and various other Middle Eastern hellholes as a grand humanitarian
gesture, with little apparent consideration to what millions of new
unassimilable immigrants would mean for either the security of the
Europeans states from terrorism, or the safety of citizens, primarily
woman, from ravaging bands of immigrants, or for the national culture.
As a consequence right-wing parties, some with fascist histories, are
growing across the continent. Hostility to the pan-European project has
risen sharply, and not only in Britain, which may soon vote to withdraw
from the Common Market.
Immigration is also Trump's signature issue. Immigration, both legal
and illegal, is a complicated and multi-faceted issue, and I claim no
expertise. But it is one that is experienced very differently by working
and middle-class voters and the political and economic elites. Reihan
Salam writes, "For high-income Republicans, skilled immigrants are their
colleagues, neighbors, and friends, and less-skilled immigrants provide
them with low-cost child-care, restaurant meals, and other services
that allow them to lead comfortable lives."
They are not worried, as is Senator Jeff Sessions (R.-Ala.), the
Senate's leading immigration hawk, about immigrants driving down wages
of working and middle class voters, who already cannot afford anything
like the lifestyle or economic security their parents enjoyed. As Victor
Davis Hanson, who spends part of each week as a farmer in California's
once fertile central valley, points out, the children of the elites will
not sit in classes where a quarter of the children do not speak
English. And in the neighborhoods in which they live and jog, they are
not likely to be attacked by pit-bulls, whose owners have little desire
to speak English, much less cage, vaccinate, or license their dogs.
Mark Zuckerberg need not worry, like residents of rural Fresno
County, about being sideswiped or rear-ended by those who flee the
scene, leaving their wrecked cars without insurance and registration. "I
don't think," observes Hanson, "Mitt Romney has had a dead pit bull, in
ripe rigor mortis with a rope around its neck, dumped on his lawn, or a
beautiful Queensland Heeler, torn to shreds from dog fighting, thrown
into his vineyard."
BUT IF DONALD TRUMP SPEAKS to voters tired of being ignored and
condescended to, he is nevertheless a disastrous representative of them.
Nothing in his life until now has shown an iota of concern with those
who now salute him, and he has not offered one serious policy
prescription that would address their economic insecurities. All he
offers is his boastful self-promotion and a call for the power to make
American great again. However different in style he is to the polished
and fluent Barack Obama, he offers the same promise of being some sort
of miracle worker. (Remember when Obama pronounced his nomination as the
day the oceans cease to rise.)
Trump is not the antidote to thought-stifling political correctness,
as his supporters seem to think. Vulgarity and the lack of basic human
decency are not the opposite of political correctness.
Trump's rise is but one sign this political season of something
rotten in America. The Democratic Party battle between a woman with a
thirty-year history of boundless greed and deceit, who could never hope
to again gain a minimal security clearance unless elected president, and
a septuagenarian socialist, who appears to have become no wiser since
college, is, in its own way, fully as horrifying.
Both Trump and the Democrats attest to a decades' long failure of
civic education in America. Unschooled Illinois farmers once stood in
the sun for hours listening to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas
debate: Today more Americans can identify the name Kardashian than
Vice-President Biden. The Constitution and the Federalist Papers are
almost unknown. President Obama, supposedly a former teacher of
constitutional law, has not hesitated to resort to executive action to
achieve what he cannot through Congress.
And Trump threatens to go one better. He has betrayed no
understanding of the American system of checks and balances or three
co-equal branches of government. Recently, he boasted that he would gut
First Amendment protections of the press to make it easier for him to
sue, in the manner of Turkey's Erdogan, reporters and papers that get
under his tissue-thin skin.
Meanwhile college students tolerate, and even demand, limits on free
speech on campus (except concerning Jews and Israel) and the absence of
any semblance of due process in hearings that can have lifelong
consequences. The millennials flock to the banner of Bernie Sanders,
whose proposals would add trillions in new annual debt, apparently
oblivious to how their own futures are blighted by already incurred
government debt, which ensures they will not benefit from the social
security and Medicaid for which they will soon be paying, if they are
fortunate enough to find a first job. The trillions of dollars in
unfunded pension obligations at the local and state level would also be
news to them.
Major institutions have also failed. Trump is in part a phenomenon of
wildly disproportionate free media coverage – 76% of that given to all
the Republican candidates combined. That has not been just ratings
driven. The mainstream media has been only too happy to advance the only
Republican candidate Hillary could surely defeat.
ONE OF THE WISEST OF THE FOUNDERS, Benjamin Franklin predicted, "Only
a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and
vicious, they have more need of masters." And, as David French argues,
"Trump is running not for president of a constitutional republic but to
be the strongman of a failing state."
Trump, however, is, in Andrew McCarthy's words, "the effect, not the cause, of culture rot" – the
siman not the
siba
in Gemara terms. In the America of my youth, the fastest way to ensure
ostracism on the playground was bragging, and bragging about one's
wealth would have been the worst of all. The iconic "strong" man of
those days – the Marlboro Man or Gary Cooper at OK Corral – was one of
few words, not a voluble ignoramus. He was never boastful and did not
threaten others; he did not initiate violence or confrontation, but did
not back down in its face.
One by one, many at first inclined to hold their noses and vote for
Trump (and there is an argument for doing so) have determined that they
cannot, for he will further lower the standards of an already debased
culture. For some it was his casual dismissal of the courage of John
McCain during six years of torture in North Vietnamese captivity, which
left McCain permanently disabled.
For Andrew McCarthy, the lead government prosecutor in the first
World Trade Center bombing, it is Trump's boast that he will order
American troops to become war criminals and target the wives and
children of ISIS fighters. For Stephen Hayes of the
Weekly Standard,
it is the impossibility of explaining to his young children why someone
would mock the physical disability of a crippled reporter. For the
religious conservative David French, it is his pledge to keep funding
Planned Parenthood to the tune of millions of dollars, so that it can
continue killing hundreds of thousands of babies a year.
These thoughtful conservatives are shocked that Trump's supporters
rather than being appalled by his cruelty and malice are attracted by
it. They see him as the artifact of a society from which the civic
vitality catalogued by de Tocqueville has been lost and replaced by
vitriol and demagoguery.
"Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people," wrote
John Adams. "It is wholy inadequate for the governance of any other."
(Hat tip again to David French.) If so, America is grave danger on the
evidence of this election season.
