MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-05-18 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout of NYLXS] The rising shoutdown of the electorate
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http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/removing-trump-wont-solve-americas-crisis/
Removing Trump Won’t Solve America’s Crisis
The elites are the problem.
By Robert W. Merry • May 18, 2017
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Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock
America is in crisis. It is a crisis of greater magnitude than any the
country has faced in its history, with the exception of the Civil War.
It is a crisis long in the making—and likely to be with us long into the
future. It is a crisis so thoroughly rooted in the American polity that
it’s difficult to see how it can be resolved in any kind of smooth or
even peaceful way. Looking to the future from this particular point in
time, just about every possible course of action appears certain to
deepen the crisis.
What is it? Some believe it stems specifically from the election of
Donald Trump, a man supremely unfit for the presidency, and will abate
when he can be removed from office. These people are right about one
thing: Trump is supremely unfit for his White House job. But that isn’t
the central crisis; it is merely a symptom of it, though it seems
increasingly to be reaching crisis proportions of its own.
When a man as uncouth and reckless as Trump becomes president by running
against the nation’s elites, it’s a strong signal that the elites are
the problem. We’re talking here about the elites of both parties. Think
of those who gave the country Hillary Clinton as the Democratic
presidential nominee—a woman who sought to avoid accountability as
secretary of state by employing a private email server, contrary to
propriety and good sense; who attached herself to a vast nonprofit “good
works” institution that actually was a corrupt political machine
designed to get the Clintons back into the White House while making them
rich; who ran for president, and almost won, without addressing the
fundamental problems of the nation and while denigrating large numbers
of frustrated and beleaguered Americans as “deplorables.” The
unseemliness in all this was out in plain sight for everyone to see, and
yet Democratic elites blithely went about the task of awarding her the
nomination, even to the point of employing underhanded techniques to
thwart an upstart challenger who was connecting more effectively with
Democratic voters.
At least Republican elites resisted the emergence of Trump for as long
as they could. Some even attacked him vociferously. But, unlike in the
Democratic Party, the Republican candidate who most effectively captured
the underlying sentiment of GOP voters ended up with the nomination. The
Republican elites had to give way. Why? Because Republican voters
fundamentally favor vulgar, ill-mannered, tawdry politicians? No,
because the elite-generated society of America had become so bad in
their view that they turned to the man who most clamorously rebelled
against it.
The crisis of the elites could be seen everywhere. Take immigration
policy. Leave aside for purposes of discussion the debate on the merits
of the issue—whether mass immigration is good for America or whether it
reaches a point of economic diminishing returns and threatens to erode
America’s underlying culture. Whatever the merits on either side of that
debate, mass immigration, accepted and even fostered by the nation’s
elites, has driven a powerful wedge through America. Couldn’t those
elites see that this would happen? Did they care so little about the
polity over which they held stewardship that their petty political
prejudices were more important than the civic health of their nation?
So now we have some 11 million illegal immigrants in America, a rebuke
to territorial sovereignty and to the rule of law upon which our nation
was founded, with no reasonable solution—and generating an abundance of
political tension. Beyond that, we have fostered an immigration policy
that now has foreign-born people in America approaching 14 percent—a
proportion unprecedented in American history except for the 1920s, the
last time a backlash against mass immigration resulted in curtailment
legislation.
And yet the elites never considered the importance to the country’s
civic health of questions related to assimilation—what’s an appropriate
inflow for smooth absorption. Some even equated those who raised such
questions to racists and xenophobes. Meanwhile, we have “sanctuary
cities” throughout Blue State America that are refusing to cooperate
with federal officials seeking to enforce the immigration laws—the
closest we have come as a nation to “nullification” since the actual
nullification crisis of the 1830s, when South Carolina declared its
right to ignore federal legislation it didn’t like. (Andrew Jackson
scotched the movement by threatening to hang from the nearest tree
anyone involved in violence stemming from the crisis.)
Then there is the spectacle of the country’s financial elites goosing
liquidity massively after the Great Recession to benefit themselves
while slamming ordinary Americans with a resulting decline in Main
Street capitalism. The unprecedented low interest rates over many years,
accompanied by massive bond buying called “quantitative easing,” proved
a boon for Wall Street banks and corporate America while working
families lost income from their money market funds and savings accounts.
The result, says economic consultant David M. Smick, author of The Great
Equalizer, was “the greatest transfer of middle-class and elderly wealth
to elite financial interests in the history of mankind.” Notice that
these post-recession transactions were mostly financial transactions,
divorced from the traditional American passion for building things,
innovating, and taking risks—the kinds of activities that spur
entrepreneurial zest, generate new enterprises, and create jobs. Thus
did this economic turn of events reflect the financialization of the
U.S. economy—more and more rewards for moving money around and taking a
cut and fewer and fewer rewards for building a business and creating jobs.
And, though these policies were designed to boost economic growth, they
have failed to do so, as America suffered through one of the longest
periods of mediocre growth in its history.
All this contributed significantly to the hollowing out of the American
working class—once the central foundation of the country’s economic
muscle and political stability. Now these are the forgotten Americans,
deplorable to Hillary Clinton and her elite followers, left without jobs
and increasingly bereft of purpose and hope.
And if they complain they find themselves confronting the forces of
political correctness, bent on shutting them up and marginalizing them
in the political arena. For all the conservative and mainstream
complaints against political correctness over the years, it was never
clear just how much civic frustration and anger it was generating across
the country until Donald Trump unfurled his attack on the phenomenon in
his campaign. Again, it was ordinary Americans against the elites.
The elites also ran American foreign policy, as they have throughout
U.S. history. Over the past 25 years they got their country bogged down
in persistent wars with hardly any stated purpose and in many instances
no end in sight—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya. Many elites want
further U.S. military action in Ukraine, against Iran, and to thwart
China’s rise in Asia. Aside from the risk of growing geopolitical
blowback against America, the price tag is immense, contributing to the
country’s ongoing economic woes.
When Trump, marshaling this anti-elite resentment into a powerful
political wave, won the presidential election last November, it was
noted that he would be a minority president in the popular vote. But
then so was Nixon; so was Clinton; so was Wilson; indeed, so was
Lincoln. The Trump victory constituted a political revolution.
Now comes the counterrevolution. The elites figure that if they can just
get rid of Trump, the country can return to what they consider
normalcy—the status quo ante, before the Trumpian challenge to their
status as rulers of America. That’s why there is so much talk about
impeachment even in the absence of any evidence thus far of “high crimes
and misdemeanors.” That’s why the firing of James Comey as FBI director
raises the analogy of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” That’s why the
demonization of Russia has reached a fevered pitch, in hopes that even
minor infractions on the part of the president can be raised to levels
of menace and threat.
Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, even suggests
the elites of Washington should get rid of Trump through the use of the
Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the
president if a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is
“unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and if a
two-thirds vote of Congress confirms that judgment in the face of a
presidential challenge. This was written of course for such
circumstances of presidential incapacity as ill health or injury, but
Douthat’s commitment to the counterrevolution is such that he would
advocate its use for mere presidential incompetence.
Consider the story of Trump’s revelation of classified information to
Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the United States. No one
disputes the president’s right to declassify governmental information at
will, but was it wise in this instance? Certainly, it was reckless if he
exposed sources and methods of intelligence gathering. But did he?
The president and his top foreign policy advisers, who were present
during the conversation, say he didn’t. The media and Trump’s political
adversaries insist that he did, at least implicitly. We don’t know. But
we do know that when this story reached the pages of The Washington
Post, as a result of leaks from people around Trump who want to see him
crushed, it led to a feeding frenzy that probably harmed American
interests far more than whatever Trump may have said to those Russians.
Instead of Trump’s indiscretion being confined to a single conversation
with foreign officials, it now is broadcast throughout the world.
Instead of, at worst, a hint of where the intelligence came from,
everyone now knows it came from the Israelis. Instead of being able to
at least pursue a more cooperative relationship with Russia on matters
of mutual interest, Trump is once again forced back on his heels on
Russian policy by government officials and their media allies—who,
unlike Trump, were never elected to anything.
Thus is the Trump crisis now superimposed upon the much broader and
deeper crisis of the elites, which spawned the Trump crisis in the first
place. Yes, Trump is a disaster as president. He lacks nearly all the
qualities and attributes a president should have, and three and a half
more years of him raises the specter of more and more unnecessary tumult
and deepening civic rancor. It could even prove to be untenable
governmentally. But trying to get rid of him before his term expires,
absent a clear constitutional justification and a clear assent from the
collective electorate, will simply deepen the crisis, driving the wedge
further into the raw American heartland and generating growing feelings
that the American system has lost its legitimacy.
There is no way out for America at this point. Steady as she goes could
prove highly problematic. A push to remove him could prove worse.
Perhaps a solution will present itself. But, even if it does, it will
rectify, with great societal disquiet and animosity, merely the Trump
crisis. The crisis of the elites will continue, all the more intractable
and ominous.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and publishing
executive, is editor of The American Conservative. His next book,
President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, is due out from
Simon & Schuster in September.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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