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Trump Alone at the Top


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Good read.

 

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON THE TRUMP PHENOMENON AND OUR DYSFUNCTIONAL POLITICAL CLASS:

 

 

What makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem unusually clueless these days.

 

The great American post-Cold War project of seeking peace and security through the construction of a New World Order based on liberal internationalism and American power doesn’t seem to be working very well, and it’s not hard to conclude that neither the neoconservatives nor the Obama-ites really know what they are doing.

 

When it comes to the economy, it’s been clear since the financial crisis of 2008 that something is badly awry and that the economists, so dogmatic and opinionated and so bitterly divided into quarreling schools, aren’t sure how the system works anymore, and have no real ideas about how to make the world system work to the benefit of ordinary voters in the United States.

 

With the PC crowd and the Obama administration hammering away at transgender bathroom rights as if this was the great moral cause of our time, and with campus Pure Thought advocates collapsing into self parody even as an epidemic of drug abuse and family breakdown relentlessly corrodes the foundations of American social cohesion, it’s hard to believe that the establishment has a solid grip on the moral principles and priorities a society like ours needs.

 

Trump appeals to all those who think that the American Establishment, the Great and the Good of both parties, has worked its way into a dead end of ideas that don’t work and values that can’t save us. He is the candidate of Control-Alt-Delete.

 

His election would sweep away the smug generational certainties that Clinton embodies, the Boomer Progressive Synthesis that hasn’t solved the problems of the world or of the United States, but which nevertheless persists in regarding itself as the highest and only form of truth. . . .

 

Myself, I don’t think the system is quite as corrupt as some Trump supporters believe or, perhaps more accurately, I lack their confidence that burning down the old house is the best way to build something new. But it would be equally wrong and perhaps more dangerous to take the view that there is nothing more fueling his rise than ignorance, racism and hate.

 

The failure of the center-Left to transform its institutional and intellectual dominance into policy achievements that actually stabilize middle class life, and the failure of the center-Right to articulate a workable alternative have left a giant intellectual and political vacuum in the heart of American life. The Trump movement is not an answer to our problems, but the social instinct of revolt and rejection that powers it is a sign of social health. The tailors are frauds and the emperor is not in fact wearing any clothes: it is a good sign and not a bad sign that so many Americans are willing to say so out loud.

 

Those of us who care about policy, propriety and the other bourgeois values without which no democratic society can long thrive need to spend less time wringing our hands about the shortcomings of candidate Trump and the movement that has brought him this far, and more time both analyzing the establishment failures that have brought the country to this pass, and developing a new vision for the American future.

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LOL! Just like Filthy Harry claiming he heard Romney didn't pay any taxes?

 

Harry Reid. Now there's a man of the people! Well, actually, we hear he's a man of the little boys.

 

Did he ever explain why that one eye went bad for a while? Oh, yeah, a treadmill accident, right?

 

Yeah. Sure, Harry. Treadmill. Wink, wink.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-the-welfare-king/2016/05/23/154310f4-2121-11e6-aa84-42391ba52c91_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

 

 

Great, Trump probably does not pay any taxes! He is part of the 47%

 

Man of the people who doesn't pay taxes

 

Because he may very well take advantage of every legal tax avoidance strategy he has access to. If that's the case would you have a problem with that?

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Because he may very well take advantage of every legal tax avoidance strategy he has access to. If that's the case would you have a problem with that?

He paid what he owed according to THE LAW. The problem is not Trump or people like him, it's THE LAW. I wonder if Hillary will do anything about it if elected?

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Because he may very well take advantage of every legal tax avoidance strategy he has access to. If that's the case would you have a problem with that?

 

I have a problem with the $19T national debt , so yes

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Because he may very well take advantage of every legal tax avoidance strategy he has access to. If that's the case would you have a problem with that?

Oh, I don't care. You know me, I just want to stick the knife in and twist it. He is a welfare, freeloading blow hard and that's just another avenue of attack.

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Oh, I don't care. You know me, I just want to stick the knife in and twist it.

 

So much anger and violence within you. You want to stab people, laugh when Americans die, wish for mass shootings of Republicans. Seriously, you should really talk to a mental health professional.

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