Many attribute Donald Trump’s recent political ascendancy as a reaction to the elite establishment of the Republican party showing a distaste for conservatism and its own conservative voters. While it’s true that disaffected Republican voters are strong Trump supporters, as Peggy Noonan seems to have just now realized to her shock and amazement, Angelo Codevilla [Standing up to the ruling class and The Ruling Class: How they corrupted American and what we can do about it] has a different view based not on conservatism but recent turns in liberalism. In a statement attributed to him by Steven Hayward [I can’t find the actual Codevilla piece] Codevilla says:
I have a different explanation for ascendant Trumpism. It isn’t the result of conservatism but of liberalism. Thanks to unrelenting demands by the left for increasingly preposterous levels of political correctness over the past decade, people are simply fed up. Trump survives — nay, thrives! — because he is seen as the antidote, bravely and unimpeachably standing athwart political correctness. [emphasis added]
The new era of liberal political correctness — in which colleges designate “free speech zones,” words like “American” and “mother” are considered discriminatory, and children are suspended from school for firing make-believe weapons — has reached critical mass. If not for the loony sensitivities foisted upon us by the left, someone like Trump would be immediately dismissed as unprofessional and unserious, an incoherent blurter. Instead, he’s the equally extreme response to extreme correctness — if everything is offensive in Liberalville, then nothing will be offensive in Trumpland.
I like the idea of Trump as “standing athwart political correctness.” It’s reminiscent of William Buckley describing the mission statement of National Review November 19, 1955, “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
Republicans told voters they would stop Obama if voters gave them the Senate. In 2014 the voters gave Republicans the Senate because they want Obama stopped. But Republicans now, having gotten what they wanted from voters, have headed off in a different direction, forgetting all about the promises they made. The voters feel double crossed. They still want Obama stopped. Trump speaks to that.
Elite establishment Republicans are a curious lot. They wanted, they understood they needed, lots of people to vote for them in order to get what the wanted, which was to keep the House and retake the Senate. The voters delivered for them, gave them what they ask for. If the voters had not done that these elite bastards would not be running the Senate, and might not even still have the House. A lot of the voters who did what Republicans ask are conservatives, and a lot of others were not conservatives. Not just a few were disaffected Democrats who had never before voted Republican. They all want the same thing; they want Obama stopped.
The number of conservative voters were enough to have denied victory to the Republicans if they had not voted last November. Yet these foggy-brained elite jackasses now want to rid conservatives from their party. Jeb Bush infamously declaimed that he intends to win the Republican nomination without the Republican base voters, the conservatives that is. He’ll do it, he thinks, by lapping up all the money rich Republican donors have to give.
Right now some of those donors are having second thoughts about supporting Jeb while he seems to remain near the bottom of recent polls.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy, I’d say.
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