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The Disuniting States Of America

The fruits of a decadent and incompetent leadership class -- and things ain't so great with the followership class either
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The Federalist‘s Ben Domenech says if Trump loses, don’t look for major changes at the top of the GOP. Excerpts:

It’s notable that all the voices calling for a grand post-Trump reunification and rethinking are the same ones calling for internal reform of the Republican Party for years. They were largely ignored up to now, and provided the leadership of the party remains the same, they’ll be ignored after November 8th as well. There is no current movement afoot to challenge Mitch McConnell, even after the agenda he pushed through the Senate proved so unpopular among Republican voters. The expectation is that things will stay the same – the Republican agenda, safely ensconced in amber, starts again once Trump departs the stage.

More:

The Republican Party is about to be torn from two different directions. Trumpists will abandon it because they believe it was insufficiently pro-Trump. Anti-Trumpists will abandon it because it nominated Trump. And the fact that the party is not interested in sending an obvious clear message that it is changing – that it ought to accept responsibility for the failure at Klendathu – means that visually and practically there will be no significant shift in leadership, no dramatic change in policy, and above all, no new personnel.

Imagine David Cameron stayed [after Brexit]. That’s where the Republican Party will be after November 8th. And that’s how it’s likely to remain heading into a midterm that will have more fractious primaries than ever.

I would remind everyone that Trump did not come from nowhere, and he did not steal the GOP nomination. Tucker Carlson explained back in January why the failures in the leadership class of the GOP gave rise to Trump. If the Republican Party had changed in meaningful ways at any time after the Bush administration, it might not be in this miserable place today.

In a powerful piece in today’s WSJ, Peggy Noonan denounces the nation’s political leadership class as “decadent”. She brings up the corrupt deal among Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Russian uranium magnates. Excerpts:

While it was under consideration the Clinton Foundation received more money from Uranium One. Bill Clinton got a $500,000 speech fee. Mrs. Clinton approved the deal. The Russian company is now one of the world’s largest uranium producers. Significant amounts of U.S. uranium are, in effect, owned by Russia. This summer a WikiLeaks dump showed the State Department warning that Russia was moving to control the global supply of nuclear fuel. The deal went through anyway, and the foundation flourished.

Peter Schweizer, who broke the Uranium One story, reported in these pages how Mrs. Clinton also pushed for a U.S.-Russian technology initiative whose goals included “the development of ties between the Russian and American people.” Mrs Clinton looked for U.S. investors and found them. Of the 28 announced “key partners,” 60% had made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation. Even Russian investors ponied up.

She’s brutal, and rightly so, on the snotty conversation among John Podesta and Hillary insiders regarding conservative Catholics — lines that came out in this weeks Wikileaks dump:

Here’s what you see in the emails: the writers are the worst kind of snobs, snobs with nothing to recommend them. In their expression and thoughts they are common, banal, dumb, uninformed, parochial.

I don’t know about you but when people look down on me I want them to be distinguished or outstanding in some way—towering minds, people of exquisite sensibility or learning. Not these grubbly poseurs, these people who’ve never had a thought but only a sensation: Christians are backward, I saw it in a movie!

It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s what I see happening after November: a further, and faster, decline in public trust in our nation’s leaders and institutions. Political, media, academia, military, ecclesial — find one that you can really put your confidence in. The military is the most solid of them all, but it’s transforming itself into a force of Social Justice Warriors. Besides, who has confidence that hawkish President H.R. Clinton can be trusted to use her powers as Commander in Chief responsibly, and not run off involving the United States in wars we have no business fighting?

In the extremely unlikely event he were to be elected, Donald Trump, that notorious immoralist and narcissist, will not be able to arrest this trend, and will in fact exacerbate it as much and maybe more as Hillary Clinton would.

And let’s not even get started on the followership class.

We are disuniting, and nobody seems to know how to stop it.

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