Will we keep our republic?

Bruce Thornton writes in FrontPage Magazine,

...Since the election of Donald Trump, we have been watching one of the most serious assaults on the Constitutional Republic in our history. With the current efforts of the Democrat-controlled House to engineer public support for impeachment, this three-year attack is intensifying. The climactic battle will be fought on November 3, 2020 when America goes to the polls to select the president. On that day will be decided not just which party will take the White House, but which vision of government will rule us: The Constitutional order of popular sovereignty, federalism, and divided powers; or a technocratic oligarchy of centralized and concentrated power.

Or to put it more starkly: Can we keep our nation of free citizens, or will we become one of managed clients?

This competition of political philosophies is not about Donald Trump’s alleged violations of mythic “democratic norms” or “presidential decorum.” In fact, the bipartisan evocation of such codes of political manners reflects the preference for the technocratic oligarchy that has ruled and misruled the country since the Second World War. Its roots go back even farther than that. The first progressives of the late 19th century were frankly technocratic, disdainful of separated and balanced powers, and advocates of the new “human sciences” that they claimed had made obsolete the wisdom of the Founders, the guidance of tradition, and the lessons of history.

Starting with Woodrow Wilson, and continuing through FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society programs, and Barack Obama’s further expansion of entitlement programs and take-over of the health care industry, the country has been moving relentlessly toward more and more centralization of federal power, expansion of the federal regulatory regime, and encroachment on the freedom of states, civil society, families, and individuals.

...Apart from that hard evidence casting doubt on the narrative, we can challenge the assumption that Russia would prefer Trump over Hillary. Hillary had a public record of supporting Obama’s “reset” with Russia, which featured his infamous hot-mic promise of “flexibility” on granting Putin’s wish for the US to stop missile-defense installations in Eastern Europe after Obama’s reelection––an example of actual collusion with a foreign power in order to affect the outcome of the imminent 2012 presidential election. And Hillary herself, through Russian donations to her foundation and her help in transferring 20% of our uranium stocks to a subsidiary of a Russian company, had raked in millions of dollars. Why wouldn’t Putin prefer this known appeaser and grifter over the volatile and unknown Donald Trump, who has in fact been much tougher with Putin than Obama and Clinton ever were?

...The Mueller investigation having come a cropper, now we have the even more transparently contrived and dishonest “Ukraine” scandal to provide the media fuel for impeachment. The media are in a frenzy, and their Republican NeverTrump allies are contributing to the effort. Mitt Romney and other Republican preemptive cringers are piling on. The Dems think that even if the Senate doesn’t vote to convict, they’ll have thrown enough mud on the president that a critical mass of voters will turn against him. And if the economy slows down enough, that could turn out to be a smart strategy.

...If the Dems win, and they succeed in abolishing the Electoral College, making the Senate proportionately representative, eviscerating the First and Second Amendments, and transforming the United States from the exceptional Republic and indispensable champion of unalienable rights and freedom it is, to just another client of a supranational, technocratic empire like the EU––then Obama’s aim of “fundamentally transforming” America will have been achieved.

And that will be the moment, after more than two centuries, we failed to keep our Republic.

Read more here.

"What goes around comes around."

Pat Buchanan writes in The American Conservative about the hysterical reaction in the media to Trump's comments about whether or not he will accept the election results.

What explains the hysteria of the establishment?

In a word, fear.

The establishment is horrified at the Donald’s defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.

It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.

Trump is “talking down our democracy,” said a shocked Clinton.

After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment installed “democracy” as the new deity, at whose altars we should all worship. And so our schools began to teach.

Half a millennia ago, missionaries and explorers set sail from Spain, England, and France to bring Christianity to the New World.

Today, Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes send soldiers and secularist tutors to “establish democracy” among the “lesser breeds without the Law.”

By suggesting he might not accept the results of a “rigged election,” Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy, and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots.

For none of the three—diversity, equality, democracy—is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the pledge, we are a republic.

The establishment also recoiled in horror from Milwaukee Sheriff Dave Clarke’s declaration that it is now “torches and pitchforks time.”

Yet, some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in “Points of Rebellion”: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.”

Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America that they love, elitist enthusiasm for “revolution” seems more constrained.

What goes around comes around.

Read more here.