Much More Than Trump, by Robert Gore
It started in Vietnam.
The men who chose to fight for America on Vietnam’s front lines did so for honorable reasons.
While
there was no immediate threat to the US, some were concerned about
falling dominoes and the march of communism. Some were animated by an
idealistic desire to secure democracy and liberty in a land that had
never known those blessings. Some went believing that if the leaders of
the country said this war was in America’s best interests, it must be
so. For those who were drafted, they did, perhaps reluctantly, what they
perceived to be their duty.
Whatever their motivations, those who fought found their idealism shattered.
Many
of the South Vietnamese they thought they were fighting “for” despised
the US as the latest in a succession of imperial powers using a corrupt,
puppet government as the cat’s paw for its domination. Short of total
immolation of both friend and foe—it was often impossible to
differentiate the two—there was no effective strategy against guerrilla
warfare waged by the enemy fighting on its home turf.
The
Viet Cong proved as difficult to vanquish as hordes of ants and
mosquitos at a picnic. The victory the generals and politicians insisted
was just another few months and troop deployments down the road never
came, and the soldiers knew it never would, long before reality was
acknowledged and the troops brought home.
Brutal disillusionment gave way to abject disgust when they returned stateside.
They
cynically, but understandably, concluded that the antiwar protests had
more to do with fear of the draft (there were no major protests after
Nixon ended it), and readily available sex and drugs than heartfelt
opposition to the war. That conclusion was buttressed by their reception
from the antiwar crowd. If they were expecting support and
understanding, they didn’t get it.
The
US victims of the war, those who fought it—the wounded, the physically
and psychologically maimed, the dead—were branded as subhuman thugs and
baby killers. It was the first time in the history of the US that a
substantial swath of the population turned on those who had fought its
wars. Those who fought regarded (or, in the case of the dead, would have
regarded) those doing the branding as preening, posturing, spoiled
children. A subterranean fault line split into a gaping fissure, since
widened to a yawning chasm.
The
idea that the elite—by dint of their education, intelligence, rarified
social circle, and moral sensibility— should rule had reached full
florescence during the New Deal, when FDR and his so-called brain trust
promised change that most Americans could believe in. Although the elite
failed, prolonging the Great Depression, it seemingly redeemed itself
directing World War II, leaving the US at an unprecedented pinnacle of
global power.
Forgetting
the failures of the Depression and basking in the hubristic glow, a
bipartisan coterie from Washington, Wall Street, industry, the military,
and the Ivy League set out to order the world according to their
dictates. The US would lead a confederated empire opposing the Soviet
alliance. The epochal nature of the struggle justified, in their minds,
whatever means were necessary to wage it, including propaganda,
espionage, subversion, regime change, and war.
While
the Kennedy assassination offered the American public a glimpse into
the heart of darkness, only a few independent-minded skeptics challenged
the Warren Commission whitewash. Vietnam was different; hundreds of
thousands returned knowing not just that the so-called best and
brightest couldn’t win the war, but that for years they had lied to the
American public.
In
the following decades, it had to have been especially galling for the
Vietnam veterans that the hippies, draft-deferred campus protesters, the
“fortunate sons” (google Credence Clearwater Revival) whose numbers
never came up, and the mockers of the values they held dear ended up
among the elite. The Clintons, of course, became the prime example.
Disaffected
veterans were the core of a group that would grow to millions, their
“faith” in government and the people who ran it obliterated by its
repeated failures and lies. Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number
of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors.
The
mainstream media is filled with vituperative, patronizing, and
insulting explanations of what’s “behind” the Trump phenomenon. It all
boils down to revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious
hypocritical, corrupt, prevaricating elite that presumes to rule this
country. It is, in a word, inferior to the populace on the other side of
the yawning chasm, the ones they have patronized and insulted for
decades, and the other side knows it.
Peggy
Noonan is one of the few mainstream writers who has tried to
understand, rather than insult or condemn, the Trump phenomenon. In a
widely cited article, she ascribed it to the split between the
“protected,” those who run the government and its allied institutions,
and the “unprotected,” the government’s and its allies’ victims (“Trump
and the Rise of the Unprotected, The Wall Street Journal, 2/25/16).
It
was a nice try, but Ms. Noonan is trying to straddle a chasm that
cannot be straddled. She writes for the Journal, an establishment organ,
some of whose writers have been either so clueless or disingenuous that
they have denied the existence of an establishment. And ultimately, the
protected-unprotected differentiation doesn’t fly.
Most Trump supporters don’t want the government to do something for them; they want the government to quit doing things to them.
They
viscerally revile the elite—it’s personal—and they want no part of that
class or its government. They know how to take care of themselves, and
many know the government hurts the most those whom it ostensibly
protects.
Elite sons and daughters have not been in the ranks of front line military that have fought the elite’s disastrous wars.
The
top and bottom of the service economy swell—lobbyists, political
operatives, debt merchants, Internet wizards, lawyers, bureaucrats,
waiters, bartenders, nurses, orderlies, sales clerks—while what used to
be the heart of the economy—manufacturing—shrinks.
The
bailouts from the last financial crisis went to Wall Street, not the
homeowners with underwater mortgages facing foreclosure. Whose pockets
were picked to fund those bailouts? And whose pockets were picked to pay
the higher insurance premiums necessary to fund the Obamacare disaster?
It
doesn’t take an Ivy League degree to know that the national debt, $19
trillion and counting, is a big, scary number, and that the unfunded
Social Security and medical care liabilities coming due are even bigger,
scarier numbers. It does, apparently, take an Ivy League degree to
believe that more debt is the answer to our economic problems, or that
microscopic or negative interest rates will do anything but fund
carry-trade speculators and screw those trying to fund their own
postponed retirements, or that the limping economy since the financial
crisis has “recovered.” Idiotic blather fills the elite, mainstream
media, while much truth is suppressed and debate stifled in the name of
political correctness.
Not much has changed since Vietnam.
The
decent besieged are taking fire from all sides, valiantly fighting
their way through it, while preening, posturing, spoiled idiots
congratulate themselves for running a once great country into the
ground.
It
is a mark of the decent besieged’s decency that they are turning to the
ballot box, the politically correct way to change a democratic
government. The idiot class should be grateful for their forbearance.
Instead,
it resorts to means fair and foul to subvert them and maintain its
power. Whether Trump does or does not make it all the way to the White
House, the wave he’s riding will only grow stronger, tsunami-strength
when the economy collapses and the world descends into war.
If
the idiot class and its rabble subvert him, a quote from John F.
Kennedy, recently featured on SLL, will surely come back to haunt them.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
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