Another Shocking GOP Upset is Coming Tuesday: Wayne Allyn Root, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 3, 2018— This is my final column before the midterm election.
The Issues That Tore Us Apart: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Nov. 6, 2018— Slavery was the issue that blew up America in 1861 and led to the Civil War.
There’s No Going Back. The G.O.P. Is Trump’s Party.: Daniel McCarthy, New York Times, Nov. 1, 2018— Donald Trump’s conservative critics have one last hope: defeat.
In Defence of the Nation-State, and Democracy: Barbara Kay, National Post, Nov. 6, 2018— Although not on the ballot, America’s midterm elections were all about Trump.
On Topic Links
Both the Media and Trump Have a Responsibility to Tone it Down: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Nov. 3, 2018
Is the Senate in Play?: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Nov. 5, 2018
Is the GOP’s Trumpian Realignment Permanent?: Noah Rothman, Commentary, Nov. 2, 2018
As Moderates Are Crowded Out, Democrats and Republicans Both Have an Antisemitism Problem: Ian Cooper, Algemeiner, Nov. 5, 2018
ANOTHER SHOCKING GOP UPSET IS COMING TUESDAY Wayne Allyn Root
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 3, 2018
This is my final column before the midterm election. This former Vegas oddsmaker turned national political commentator has a few predictions and commonsense observations to make. Back in 2016, I predicted a Donald Trump victory when no one else dared. Every poll showed Trump would lose the presidency to Hillary Clinton by a wide margin. So how did I know?
First: Size matters. You could see it in the rallies. Trump would attract eight-hour lines and overflow attendance at wild, intense rallies all over America. Meanwhile, the attendees at Hillary’s rallies could have fit in my living room. The same held true across America. That was my first clue that Trump was going to pull a huge upset that few saw coming. Second: Trump was “the whisper candidate.” Everywhere I went, people whispered in my ear, “I’m with you. I’m for Trump.” They wouldn’t tell pollsters. They wouldn’t put up yard signs. No bumper stickers on their cars. But they whispered to me.
Don’t look now, but it’s all happening again. Nate Silver says Democrats have a greater than 80 percent chance of winning the House. The Cook Political Report says Democrats will win the House by 40 seats. All the experts say it’s over: Democrats will win. I’ll go out on a limb and disagree again.
I see Andrew Gillum, Florida’s Democratic candidate for governor, holding a rally with Bernie Sanders, and the place is empty. Barack Obama could not fill a high school gym in Milwaukee. I saw Joe Biden and Obama at separate events here in Las Vegas playing to small crowds. Meanwhile, I was opening speaker for President Trump’s event in September at the Las Vegas Convention Center — with thousands waiting in line for hours. Does that sound like the GOP is losing 40 seats? Dream on, delusional Democrats. Nothing has changed. Trump has fulfilled almost all of his campaign promises. And those same voters are whispering to me again. They love Trump, now more than ever.
Third: Common sense. The Trump economy is booming. The latest results are out: 250,000 more jobs last month, far above what was expected. The lowest unemployment in half a century. The number of employed Americans is the highest ever. Wages grew by a remarkable 3.1 percent year over year, the most in almost a decade. Who in their right mind would vote against that? That could be why Trump’s approval rating among blacks is now 40 percent, according to Rasmussen Reports.
Most importantly, Trump brilliantly has kept the emotional issue of illegal immigration front and center. He wants to block the caravan, end birthright citizenship and make it much harder for illegal aliens to claim asylum. A poll from NumbersUSA says 65 percent of likely voters in swing districts across the country agree with Trump. The middle class will come out in record numbers for Trump. Bet on it….[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link]
THE ISSUES THAT TORE US APART Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, Nov. 6, 2018
Slavery was the issue that blew up America in 1861 and led to the Civil War. But for the 85 years between the nation’s founding and that war, it had seemed that somehow America could eventually phase out the horrific institution and do so largely peacefully.
But by 1861, an array of other differences had magnified the great divide over slavery. The plantation class of the South had grown fabulously rich — and solely dependent — on King Cotton and by extension slave labor. It bragged that it was supplying the new mills of the industrial revolution in Europe and had wrongly convinced itself that not just the U.S. but also Britain could not live without Southern plantations. Federal tariffs hurt the exporting South far more than the North. Immigration and industrialization focused on the North, often bypassing the rural, largely Scotch-Irish South, which grew increasingly disconnected culturally from the North.
By 1861, millions of Southerners saw themselves as different from their Northern counterparts, even in how they sounded and acted. And they had convinced themselves that their supposedly superior culture of spirit, chivalry, and bellicosity, without much manufacturing or a middle class, could defeat the juggernaut of Northern industrialism and the mettle of Midwestern yeomanry. Something similar to that array of differences is slowly intensifying America’s traditional liberal–conservative and Democratic–Republican divides.
- Globalization: Globalization is accentuating two distinct cultures, not just economically but also culturally and geographically. Anywhere industries based on muscular labor could be outsourced, they often were. Anywhere they could not be so easily outsourced — such as Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the entertainment industry, the media, and academia — consumer markets grew from 300 million to 7 billion. The two coasts with cosmopolitan ports on Asia and Europe thrived.
Perhaps “thrived” is an understatement. Never in the history of civilization had there been such a rapid accumulation of global wealth in private hands as has entered the coffers of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and hundreds of affiliated tech companies. Never have private research marquee universities had such huge multibillion-dollar endowments. Never had the electronic media and social media had such consumer reach. Never has Wall Street had such capital.
The result has been the creation of a new class of millions of coastal hyper-wealthy professionals with salaries five and more times higher than those of affluent counterparts in traditional America. The old working-class Democrat ethos was insidiously superseded by a novel affluent progressivism. Conservationism morphed into radical green activism. Warnings about global warming transmogrified into a fundamentalist religious doctrine. Once contested social issues such as gay marriage, abortion, gun control, and identity politics were now all-or-nothing litmus tests of not just ideological but moral purity.
A strange new progressive profile supplanted the old caricature of a limousine liberal, in that many of the new affluent social-justice warriors rarely seemed to be subject to the ramifications of their own ideological zealotry. New share-the-wealth gentry were as comfortable as right-wing capitalists with private prep schools, expansive and largely apartheid gated neighborhoods, designer cars, apprentices, and vacations.
For the other half of America, cause and effect were soon forgotten, and a new gospel about “losers” (deplorables, irredeemables, crazies, clingers, wacko birds) explained why the red-state interior seemed to stagnate both culturally and economically — as if youth first turned to opioids and thereby drove industry away rather than vice versa. Half the country, the self-described beautiful and smart people, imagined a future of high-tech octopuses, financial investments, health-care services, and ever more government employment. The other half still believed that America could make things, farm, mine, produce gas and oil — if international trade was fair and the government was a partner rather than indifferent or hostile.
- Clustering: Cheap transportation and instant communications paradoxically made the country far more familiar and fluid, even as local and distinct state cultures made Americans far more estranged from one another. The ironic result was that Americans got to know far more about states other than their own, and they now had the ability to move easily to places more compatible with their own politics. Self-selection increased, especially among retirees. Small-government, low-tax, pro-business states grew more attractive for the middle classes. Big-government, generous-welfare, and high-tax blue states mostly drew in the poor and the wealthy. Gradually, in the last 20 years, our old differences began to be defined by geography as well.
In the old days, the legacy of frontier life had made Idaho somewhat similar to Colorado. But now immigration and migration made them quite different. East versus West, or North versus South, no longer meant much. Instead, what united a Massachusetts with a California, or an Idaho with Alabama, were their shared views of government, politics, and culture, and whether they shared (or did not share) bicoastal status. The Atlantic and Pacific coasts were set off against the noncoastal states; Portland was similar to Cambridge in the fashion that Nashville and Bozeman voted alike. As was true in 1861 or 1965, geography often intensified existing discord.
III. Open Borders:The old consensus about immigration eroded, namely that while European and British commonwealth immigration was largely declining, it mattered little given that immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa would be diverse, meritocratic, measured — and legal. The old melting pot would always turn foreigners into Americans. No one seemed to care whether new arrivals increasingly did not superficially look like most Americans of European descent. After all, soon no one would be able to predict whether a Lopez or a Gonzalez was a conservative or liberal, any more than he had been able to distinguish the politics of a Cuomo from a Giuliani on the basis of shared Italian ancestry.
Indeed, the professed views of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid before 2009 about illegal immigration were identical to those of Donald Trump in 2018: Secure the border; ensure that immigration was legal and meritocratic; deport many of those who had arrived illegally; and allow some sort of green-card reprieve for illegal aliens who had resided for years in the U.S., were working, and had no arrest record — all in exchange for paying a small fine, learning English, and applying for legal-resident status. The huge influxes of the 1990s and 21st century — 60 million non-native residents (citizens, illegal aliens, and green-card holders) now reside in the U.S. — destroyed that consensus, once shared across the racial and ideological spectrum, from the late civil-rights leader and Democratic representative Barbara Jordan to labor leader Cesar Chavez.
Instead, a new opportunistic and progressive Democratic party assumed that the Latino population now included some 20 million illegal residents, and about that same number of first- and second-generation Hispanics. The 2008 Obama victory raised new possibilities of minority-bloc voting and seemed to offer a winning formula of galvanizing minority voters through salad-bowl identity-politics strategies. Purple states such as California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico gradually turned blue, apparently due to new legions of minority-bloc voters.
One way of making America progressive was not just winning the war of ideas with voters, but changing the nature and number of voters, namely by welcoming in large numbers of mostly impoverished immigrants, assuring them generous state help, appealing to their old rather than new identities, and thereby creating a new coalition of progressives committed to de facto and perpetually open borders…[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link] Contents
THERE’S NO GOING BACK. THE G.O.P. IS TRUMP’S PARTY.
Daniel McCarthy
New York Times, Nov. 1, 2018
Donald Trump’s conservative critics have one last hope: defeat. If Republicans suffer humiliating defeats in the midterm elections, they suggest, President Trump will get the blame. Influential donors and grass-roots Republicans will turn on him, and the party will get back to normal. Not so long ago this was the party of Paul Ryan and free trade. This was the party of George W. Bush and compassionate conservatism. This was a party whose self-performed autopsy after the 2012 election called for more minority outreach. After Mr. Trump, why can’t the Republicans be that party again?
The ranks of anti-Trump Republicans grow thinner by the day. They’re retiring from Congress. They’re writing memoirs blasting their former friends. But they hold out hope for the future. If the Republican Party could undergo such a profound change in personality and policy thanks to just one man in a mere three years, who’s to say it can’t change back? The Trump coalition seems so impermanent, after all, a motley mix of Southern evangelicals, businessmen who think like the Chamber of Commerce and disaffected white voters from the Rust Belt. Throw in foreign-policy hawks and anti-interventionist America Firsters, and Mr. Trump’s Republican Party looks like an impossible contradiction. It can’t last. Can it?
Yes, it can. In fact, the party that President Trump has remade in his image is arguably less divided and in a better position to keep winning the White House than it has been at any time since the 1980s. What Mr. Trump has done is to rediscover the formula that made the landslide Republican Electoral College victories of the Nixon and Reagan years possible. Mr. Trump’s signature themes of economic nationalism and immigration restriction are only 21st-century updates to the issues that brought the Republican Party triumph in all but one of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.
Some of the parallels are obvious. President Trump talks about crime and left-wing agitation in much the same way that Richard Nixon once did — and Ronald Reagan, too, especially during his time as governor of California. Mr. Trump’s combination of force with an aversion to large-scale military interventions and nation-building also bears a resemblance to the policies of Republican presidents past. Dwight Eisenhower and Mr. Reagan also preferred to build up military strength without engaging in the kinds of prolonged wars for which Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush are remembered. And while Mr. Nixon was mired in Vietnam, he ran as a candidate eager to find an exit.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to deal with even as repellent a dictator as Kim Jong-un has a precedent in the creative diplomacy pursued by Mr. Nixon with Mao Zedong. If Mr. Trump is mocked for saying that he fell in love with Mr. Kim after an exchange of letters, Mr. Reagan was once mocked, too, and by conservatives at that, for his love affair with Mikhail Gorbachev. The foreign leaders may be very different, but the strong Republican’s openness to negotiation is not.
But the most important ways in which Mr. Trump recapitulates the winning themes of earlier Republicans are less direct. Throughout the Cold War, Republicans presented themselves as the party of greater nationalism in the struggle against a global threat. If the United States was to survive in a world that seemed increasingly subjugated by international Communism, the country would have to embrace the party that was most anti-Communist. The Soviet Union is long gone, but our national distinctiveness — the American way of life — is perceived to be under threat by new global forces, this time in the form of competition from China and international economic and regulatory bodies that compromise national sovereignty. Many voters see immigration as part of this story. They want America to control its borders by political choice, not to admit more immigrants because a global labor market insists that more must come for the good of all.
Even in the area where Mr. Trump seems most different from Republicans past, on trade, he has really returned to an older style of politics. Mr. Reagan was an economic nationalist, too, not just because he protected a company like Harley-Davidson against competition from Japan but more important because his pro-growth policies of deregulation and tax cuts were themselves the appropriate forms of economic nationalism for the 1980s. In the decades before the rise of China as an industrial superpower, economic nationalism was chiefly a matter of keeping the American economy entrepreneurial — defending it against red tape and business-unfriendly policies at home rather than the predatory economic strategies of foreign governments…[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link] Contents
IN DEFENCE OF THE NATION-STATE, AND DEMOCRACY Barbara Kay
National Post, Nov. 6, 2018
Although not on the ballot, America’s midterm elections were all about Trump. Not his policies or unique personality, but the trend throughout the West — loosely defined as populism — that he symbolizes. This was the topic of last Friday’s Munk Debate between David Frum and Stephen Bannon: “Resolved that the future of Western politics is populist, not liberal.” As expected, the uncontroversial, anti-Trump Frum — a chattering-class favourite with a hometown advantage — handily won the numerical vote. But he failed to land a knockout intellectual punch. Bannon, relaxed and emollient in tone, proved an effective debater.
Bannon’s claim is that the argument isn’t whether populism is the future — he considers that question settled — only whether a nationalist or a socialist form of it will triumph (“the rest is just happy talk”). That brought to mind Stephen Harper’s parallel understanding, in his new book, Right Here, Right Now, of broad tribal divisions in the Western world today as the “somewheres” (nationalists) and the “anywheres” (internationalists), neologisms already in circulation, but my first encounter with them.
The “anywheres” are left-leaning elites, representing about a quarter of the population, but disproportionately influential in their dominance of cultural institutions: urbanites steeped in the ideals of globalism, multiculturalism and the free movement of people. They travel a lot. The “somewheres” are rooted in geographical identity — those the philosopher Edmund Burke described in this often-cited text: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoons we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.” Justin Trudeau, an unabashed anywhere, calls himself a “post-nationalist.” Donald Trump is his dialectical opposite. His “America First” mantra offends progressives, but got him elected. The European Union is of course the very model of the anywheres spirit.
Bannon asked a legitimate question: “Why is the nation-state so scorned and demonized (by the post-nationalists)?” Are all nationalisms the same? Are there good nationalisms and bad nationalisms? These are questions Yoram Hazony asks and answers in his new book, The Virtue of Nationalism, in which he sets the particularism of good nationalism against what he calls the new “liberal imperialism” of the universalists. According to Hazony, nationalists believe that their own religion, language and bloodlines have forged them into an extended family, a greater platoon, which is a nation. The bright line between nationalists and liberal imperialists, Hazony says, is that nationalists seek self-determination, while imperialists seek conquest.
Nationalists do not believe that a single universal way of life is right for everyone. A democratic nation-state can live next door to a monarchy or autocracy, without wishing to impose its way of governance. Imperialists, Hazony maintains, feel compelled to extend their vision outward, whether it is the Pax Romana, the Caliphate, or the European Union, which has benign ideals, but imposes its will in far from democratic ways. (Are not universities today a microcosm of left-wing imperialism?)
Hazony proposes Israel as the avatar of a successful nation-state. For all its faults, he says, Israel takes “a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.” This is the only way for peoples to truly live and let live in ways that optimize the well-being of all distinctive groups, while preserving and safeguarding liberal democracy.
One section of Hazony’s book is called “Anti-Nationalism and Hate.” Europe and American campuses are ablaze with anti-Zionism. It used to be understood that Jews could never be safe without their own nation-state. But Europeans decided nationalism had caused the bloodbaths on their soil, and the only safeguard against repetition of those enormities was assimilation of individual nation-states into a superstate. The refusal of Israelis to think and behave like liberal imperialists infuriates them, Hazony says. (It would also explain why Trump admires Israel, and why 75 per cent of Israelis admire Trump.) Israel’s success, Hazony says, is a rebuke to the European Union and to its failure to live up to its own utopian goals…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link]
On Topic Links
Both the Media and Trump Have a Responsibility to Tone it Down: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Nov. 3, 2018— With Tuesday’s election touted as the most important in modern memory, morning-after scenarios run the gamut of possibilities. President Trump will be vindicated by a GOP sweep, weakened by a split decision or endangered if Democrats win both houses of Congress.
Is the Senate in Play?: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Nov. 5, 2018—I just received an email from the always interesting and often contrarian Bruce Gyory, a longtime New York Democratic strategist.
Is the GOP’s Trumpian Realignment Permanent?: Noah Rothman, Commentary, Nov. 2, 2018— You can never turn back the clock. About that, Modern Age magazine editor Daniel McCarthy is right.
As Moderates Are Crowded Out, Democrats and Republicans Both Have an Antisemitism Problem: Ian Cooper, Algemeiner, Nov. 5, 2018— If it was not apparent already, the Tree of Life mass murder has made clear that antisemitism is alive and well in America. As American Jews weigh their options in Tuesday’s mid-term elections, they should be worried that antisemitism is being aided and abetted on both ends of the political spectrum.
