Last year
Tom Ross wrote a piece in the Examiner in which he quoted William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts and the 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate, as claiming that data showed that 75% of LP voters would have voted for Trump rather than Clinton. As a result, Trump would have won a net majority in the absence of minor parties.
I am one of the culprits who did not vote for Trump. Until recently, I tended not to vote in presidential elections. When I did, I supported the Libertarian candidate. However, I served on my county Republican committee, worked for the Republican Party locally, and voted during the three nonpresidential years. I have opposed the evident corruption in the GOP both locally and nationally, but I have also contributed to GOP candidates.
As a libertarian, there were three features of Trump's candidacy that turned me off: his proposed wall, his animus toward immigration, and his suspicions about free trade. These are anti-libertarian positions, and I still oppose them.
However, there are two areas in which Trump has demonstrated valuable instincts: his attitudes toward political correctness and the media. Political correctness is a polite name for the totalitarian control and authoritarianism that have always been associated with socialism, communism, and the left in general. One does not advocate a strong government because one is shy of control; one who desires control is as likely to desire it with respect to civil as well as economic matters.
The left's thoroughgoing and consistent authoritarianism is seen in its rationalization architecture. Scholars like Adorno call all who oppose left-wing authoritarianism "authoritarian"; meanwhile, Herbert Marcuse advocates intolerance. A movement that claims to be intolerant in the name of opposing authoritarianism is a spinning top capable of anything. Indeed, the left, when it gains power, has accomplished every horror imaginable, beginning with mass murder in the nine digits.
Accelerating left-wing totalitarian patterns have been evident to me since I entered higher education in the early 1990s, and they continued to escalate up to the point when the Obama administration began to prosecute professors for expression of views that had no connection to teaching or the campus. Laura Kipnis was accused of creating a hostile environment at Northwestern University simply
because she wrote two articles in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
These rules have now changed. The Trump administration is the first in my lifetime to reverse the march toward totalitarianism in American universities. The exclusion of Republicans from leading universities,
which I have studied, is symptomatic of Democratic Party-subsidized groupthink. In turn, the subsidization reflects a historical impetus from corporate-linked foundations, which were eager to homogenize education and eject Christianity from American colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The media has a similar history. It was consolidated by investment banking interests, and the centralization and left orientation received subsequent support from the Democratic Party, which censored libertarian positions
during the New Deal. The centralization and homogenization of higher education and journalism converge on the needs of large financial institutions and one of their twin handmaidens, the Democratic Party.
Trump is the first elected official to threaten the status quo. Perhaps this was a ploy to gain votes--but perhaps Trump understands that the media, the universities, the so-called deep state, and especially the Democratic Party have interests that are as really aligned with the interests of ordinary Americans as the interests of Septimius Severus were really aligned with the ordinary Romans who received free bread.
By coincidence I have recently been listening to a
lecture series about Roman history, and the thought occurred to me that a parallel might be made between the decline of Rome and the sissification of American culture, especially in the Democratic Party. I googled a related combination of words and came across
a series of news items that tell a story similar to the dumbed-down attacks I have suffered at the hands of the fake-news media.
In 2011 the Italian historian
Roberto de Mattei, based on a lifetime of study of Roman history, concluded that the decline of Rome was caused by a parallel process. De Mattei, who was head of the Italian Research Council, was treated to threats and calls for his sacking by Mussolini's fascio descendants, the Italian left wing.
America's dumbed-down journalists are tools of globalist financiers who delight in American indebtedness, decline, authoritarianism, and socialism. The delight about the indebtedness part ends when Republicans follow the same destructive policies as the Democrats, but it holds when the Democrats are in office
American journalists worry endlessly about their supposed freedom of the press, which is constrained to the point of zero by centralized credit, centralized financial controls, regulated cable television monopolies, regulated airwaves, and dumbed-down journalists, who are economic and historical illiterates trained by ideological, totalitarian institutions.
The Internet, which was originally thought to be a decentralizing force, is increasingly concentrated on social media that has proven even more authoritarian and subject to centralizing control than television.
Trump's use of Twitter turns this dynamic on its head. Bless him.
