8/12/2016 -
Pat Buchanan Townhall.com
"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 overprivileged
children from Ivy League campuses.
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