The simultaneous ascendancy of two unpalatable candidates to the Presidential election in November leaves one party and one part of the populace in a conundrum. The Republicans struggle to assimilate a newly involved, no longer silent majority into a long tradition of go-along get-alongism. That population has been quietly grumbling underneath the surface since the message of Ross Perot’s candidacy failed to register with the tuskless elephants in Washington. The previously silent majority’s volcanic eruption in the candidacy and election of Trump in 2016 surprised all three parties, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Incumbents. Although the lava of that eruption has continued to flow white-hot, attempts were made to suppress it with initially a divide and conquer strategy involving intersectional identity politics requiring reparative repression of the assumed oppressors. This was amplified by riots advertised as “mostly peaceful” demonstrations along with a permissive pandemic of lifestyle crimes too minor to rise above benign neglect to formal accusation and trial unless you were a Republican. These were not property crimes, merely justifiable redistribution from the ill-gotten gains over centuries of the domestic colonial oppressors. The steam of an abrupt renouncement of assimilated American culture obscured but did not quench the lava, merely raising its temperature and expanding its spill. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practitioners became the new Dei-ists, focusing on the very loud but very minimal minorities and pandering to their understandable envy, self-doubt, and xenophilia by insisting on a forced repatriation of cultural status from the larger oppressor majority in philosophical, educational, religious, economic, and social venues. Those newly defined diversity groups were amplified into a politically entitled tranche who would now dictate the norms of American life for all. When the historically self-responsible populace of all parties began to recognize that their personal value was being forcibly extinguished and redistributed “from those who have to those who need” according to undemocratic imperatives imposed by others, their responses were eliminated by the introduction of Covid Pandemic controls shutting down any commonality amongst Americans.
We must remember that the WHO had long ago ruled out lockdowns of a population as a damaging and ineffective way to deal with a pandemic. Nonetheless governments were all too willing to subvert the rights of the individual and the rights of the population in favor of forced isolation, carefully restricted flows of information (much of which turned out to be false or not based in any scientific evaluation), and to forced treatment with a rushed, minimally evaluated, unproven genetic technology that, in basic research, had previously demonstrated notable toxicities. Our government then formally instituted discrimination by legal and social pressure based on “vaccination” status, added to its discriminatory practices based on behavioral as well as racial status. The inborn conservatism of many, based in trust of the principles of our Constitutional republic and the foundational principle of freedom of other individuals as well as oneself to lead life as chosen, led to compliance through cooperation. The belief in active enforcement of general welfare and societal “good” defined by themselves led others to a hysteria of compliance through suppression. But “truth will out,” as scientists not beholden to government and pharmaceutical grants gradually disemboweled the myths of isolation, social distancing, and masking against a respiratory virus that seems likely to have been produced rather than evolved. Danger signals of significant side effects of the genetic vaccine, predictable from past basic science studies, began to escape the careful restrictions of politically motivated public health authorities. Many remained true believers, more burned with indignation.
Indignation added to resentment at the vocal minority’s characterization of them as deplorables and supporters of insurrectionism and racism fanned the embers of populism alight once again. Mr. Trump, the resenter-in-chief, has taken advantage of legitimate fears. Those fears include forced replacement of American culture, redistribution of tools of acquisition to those judged by progressives to have been unjustly repressed and thus not needful of demonstrating merit, only existence at an arbitrarily defined intersection of race and/or belief and/or lifestyle. Add to this a governmental refusal to enforce existing laws to an even further extent with deliberate importation of massive quantities of unsupportable persons from other countries. Add to this the destruction of energy industries and transportation industries for the sake of taxpayer funded expensive technologies with no currently realized market of real demand, only the pseudo-demand created by subsidies and massive fiat currency/credit that further devalues lifestyle. None involves the clear consent of the governed, but rather the arbitrary actions of a “government that is here to help you.” Aside from any need for or desire for such assistance.
This cornucopia of creating a new world order inflames many and empowers a few. Those have turned up the melting pot slowly over decades with incremental change, often with the listless cooperation of Republican government officials whose prior conservative reluctance is now branded regressive. The parties have magically flip-flopped in the last sixty years. The Grand Old Party arose on realistic but ineffective methods to end slavery. That question was called in the Civil War. Reconstruction intended a remaking of the South and its Democrat institutions, but its effectiveness was blunted by compromises that ending in a Congressional Commission, not the people, electing a Republican President, Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1876. Jim Crow carried the day for the Democrats for a century. A few were, in areas other than racial repression, conservatives, called Blue Dog Democrats. One of these was a northern outpost, Senator Joseph Biden.
We elected him President, by legitimate vote, but genuinely endorsed by Congress as legally specified in our Constitution. He was to be oil on the water of our troubled seas. He did this by restoring a 19th century tradition wherein Presidential candidates did not campaign but relied on political allies while remaining respectfully remote. Biden used this to minimize his exposure to questions he could not answer coherently or without resorting to his frequent confabulation. He acquiesced to Covid restrictions, emboldening the importance of compliance with government dictates for future expansion by what he would lead as an extraordinarily activist government. An apparent majority of our voting public came to believe in his avowed status as a transitional and temporary President, denying the Republican revolutionary’s return and caretaking the country until a younger more suitable candidate arose. Conserving what existed without stirring the pot further. And so, we let Basement Biden out as our Chief Executive, to maintain our traditions and enforce our laws.
Instead, we elected a Commander in Chief. That role and title refers to an extremely limited part of any Presidency regarding use of our military with the advice and consent of our Congress. We have forgotten George Washington’s parting caveats. Ever since the first truly progressive President, Woodrow Wilson, who also became the Incompetent in Chief while in office, Presidents have expanded their authority over our country well beyond any Constitutional boundary, with the willing ignorance of Congress and the occasional interventions of the Supreme Court. While the “Chevron Deference” of the Supreme Court has given unlimited authority to administrative bodies under the Executive Branch, the cancer of Executive Orders has spread Presidential authority and power throughout the body politic. The foulest example is Executive Order 9066. Congress willingly accepts such broad-based usurpation of their powers by administrative agencies and the Presidency as it relieves them of responsibility to act in a meaningful and timely manner, or to actively deny action. Combine this with the arbitrarily absolute need to act quickly and effectively in combatting a pandemic as well as the social ills born out of 1619 and expanded upon by the absolute need for government-recognized and enforced new social identities and President Biden’s predilection for progressive power was recruited in a tsunami of intervention. The people exist to be benefitted by their government; those benefits defined by that government and paid for by the unborn.
And so, as Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” But he also is quoted as saying, “It isn’t over till it’s over.” And “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” This fork, however, may have three tines.
That third tine might be one of two shadow candidates for the Presidency. The ascendancy of either would depend on revisiting a republican form of democracy in our political convention of fifty years ago. Up until the 1970’s, the primary elections pitted members of each party against each other in the public arena, and one or two rose to the surface in time for that party’s convention. However, the semi-permanent bureaucracy of party bosses from the national and states levels controlled the nomination process, and often promulgated both a Presidential and Vic-Presidential candidate for the party not based on popular affirmation but on Machiavellian necessity. The “representatives” of the people in the party, Republican and Democrat, elected the candidates to run in the final general election. The populism of the late 1960’s in civil rights and the anti-Viet Nam war movement “reset” this process in favor of the primaries deciding the candidates. Party conventions, other than establishing the party platform in concert with the established candidate, became a “show and tell” extravaganza with little real meaning and rapidly disappearing viewership.
This year, the perceived incompetence of one candidate and the potential recklessness of the other candidate may lead or require one or both parties to abandon their anointed ones in favor of someone emerging from the turmoil of a newly invigorated party convention.
Mr. Biden has amply demonstrated a progressive onset of a type of senility. This may be based on age, as seen in later years with Ronald Reagan, or in combination with his prior serious traumatic brain injury due to a brain aneurysm causing subarachnoid hemorrhage. While his stumbling gait may be a sign of the physical frailty of age, it also resembles that seen with variations of Parkinsonism. Some of his stumbled statements can be ascribed to his lifelong history of stammer. Not so the frequent sentences fluidically slurred. For decades, the public has forgiven his frequent confabulations, stories about personal activities and accomplishments known to be false. They cannot overlook his repeatedly mistaking what office he is running for and what office he occupies, nor confusing the names of important international allies and opponents. He has mistaken his beloved spouse for his sister, and occasionally attempts to shake hands with phantoms present on his dais. He has often wandered aimlessly until brought into guidance by aides or family. He continues his prior political candidacy strategy of Basement Biden, but now hides out in Rehoboth or Camp David. Those unusual occasions when he is speaking forcefully, attentive to the teleprompters to the point of reading off the directions, look to be examples (to this physician of 40 years’ experience) of an impaired brain energized by pharmaceuticals, but with frontal lobes not completely in control, unleashing an inappropriate anger. While Edith Wilson could maintain Woodrow Wilson sub rosa after his stroke, and make decisions on his behalf, Jill Biden, E.D.D. is in no such position given the complexity of modern times and the massive structures of our government. Perhaps, as needed, a junta of experienced administrative and political officials deals with the daily Presidential fodder. With a tenuous hold, for now, on the Senate and almost de facto control of the House (thanks to a splintered Republican party), no Congressional Democrat will observe the emperor’s clothing. But some in the Cabinet, having proven their worth on the open market to be invited to serve, may yet have to admit what most see. Either an actual health event or the 25th Amendment, previously endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “not for this President (Trump) but for some future President”, may intercede in Biden’s intended second term either before or after the election. Will the Democrats really rely on Kamala Harris as their backup quarterback? Her babbling is not due to the cerebral decay of time, but due to intrinsic cerebral incoherence. Yet can the Democrats really afford to jettison their ultimate intersectional, inclusively diverse example of equity? The constant leakage of polls showing a decline in support matching the decline in President Biden’s mentation is generating an expanding public anxiety among party officials and their supporters in the infotainment and advocacy journalism industries. Besides all the logorrhea of worried empowered progressives, one small indicator that may be of great strength is the sudden arrival of SNL skits making fun of Biden’s foibles. He is their new Gerald Ford. Not a good sign.
We have seen the why, now who and how? The Democrat party would have to convince Mr. Biden to step aside, no mean feat after four years with full expectations of four more and winning all primaries without opposition (except in some states moderate voting for “other than Biden”). They cannot promote Kamala Harris beyond her demonstrated nincompoopery. If events, angst, or the kind of political courage discussed in the pages of JFK’s book (and demonstrated by Republicans with Richard Nixon) bring the Democrat party to that Rubicon, they may use a newly invigorated party convention to cross, under the generalship of Gavin Newsom. He is the Governor-President of the fifth largest economy in the world, with recent demonstrations of international diplomacy in both the East and the West. A staunch activist on behalf of democratic socialism, he has used his legislative supermajority to expand governmental control over every aspect of peoples’ lives in California. He is “nationalizing” state government by gradually eliminating local governmental control over land use, education, taxation, and the environment. His government has even proposed a wealth tax on corporations encompassing all their earnings anywhere in the world, not just in the U.S.A. He has been effective in forcing alternative energy sources onto a market that cannot clearly afford them without taxpayer subsidies, thus requiring consumers to pay twice for energy. He is gradually forcing all but EVs or hydrogen powered vehicles off the roads, again despite lack of market demand or fiscal capacity and only founded on necessary taxpayer subsidies. Planned road diets will no doubt force many, especially the substantial proportion of the population who cannot afford green vehicles, onto non-existing public transportation or onto bicycles or foot, thus improving public health through reduction in pollution and increased regular exercise. Improving public health by these indirect means is crucial given the giant step Newsom’s California is taking in providing full government-run universal health care, most recently by including “undocumented workers” (illegal aliens) in state health insurance. While welcoming and providing sanctuary, support, and health care for more fertile folks from other countries, he seeks to aide internal population control by importing and supporting any woman (person capable of pregnancy) for any desired abortion. These and other progressive credentials far exceed the limited visions of Washington’s Democrats. All this while vigorously supporting and defending President Biden’s policies, performance, and capacities and denying any possibility of error or insufficiency in Biden’s actions or abilities. Thus, he might arrive at the Democrat Convention this summer as the enthusiastically reluctant recruit, answering the draft with alacrity and humility.
The Republican Party faces a similar choice of different origin. Despite his continued popularity and continuous gain in polls against Biden, Trump remains the political antithesis of Ronald Reagan in the eyes of many conservatives and non-progressives. Reagan was known as the Teflon President—no adverse event or decision seemed to stick to him. He was implacably positive and cheerful, always focusing all the American people on world leadership through example and strength. Mr. Trump, for all his private and public successes, is a Magnet President who cannot seem to avoid sucking political and social dirt on to his persona which then adheres like a limpet mine, ready to explode at the most inopportune moments. As a billionaire populist he has somehow mastered the language, resentments, frustrations, and fears of a vast pool of Americans who desperately feel their ideal of an American culture is being deliberately destroyed by powers domestic and foreign. Mr. Trump is an expert at providing misquote-able comments to an inimical press. Not only does he frequently “put his foot in his mouth,” but he also often then “shoots himself in the foot.” The persistent increasing enmity of the infotainment and advocacy journalism industries, the federal elected and administrative government, as well as that of the Democrats and RINOS masquerading as Elephants, only seems to enhance his popularity with a large and growing portion of our population. These have an anxious subliminal sensation that our ship of state may be sinking, and that he captains the last lifeboat. But many quasi-supporters are queasy, and ready to jump ship if given sufficient reason. That reason may not be actual guilt of the violations criminal and civil of which he is accused, but rather the perceived un-electability should he be convicted of any charges. Additionally, there is the untrodden ground of how effective any President might be while continuing to aggressively defend himself or herself against charges and procedures that may continue past the election and inauguration. With conviction of any charge, his further reckless incitement of needless unproductive controversy, or even possibly the promise of a third impeachment by the Democrat party should they regain control of the House (a highly possible scenario due to Mr. Trump’s demonstrated slick and greasy coattails), the Republican Party may face a similar dilemma to the Democrat Party come summer convention time. Although the Republican National Committee has recently ridden itself of an ineffective RINO Chair, the new Co-Chairs, solid trumpeters of America First, may not be able to overcome the long-term regular members within the national party and thus a vape-filled room may come to a decision to push Trump aside. Unless Trump’s public support has evaporated for reasons above or others, that could be the death knell of a Republican Party that has long been unable to define the true borders of its conservatism. Nonetheless, unthinkable events have a way of occurring in our history. Who might the replacement be?
No Richard Nixon-like figure has been lurking in party affairs. Nixon returned for resumed kicking by the press after years of doing grass-roots retail politics for all Republicans who would have him. There is no previously competitive party stalwart to emulate him now. But Nikki Haley has important assets as a last-minute replacement for Donald Trump. National and international name recognition is helpful. The ability to independently (of the RNC) raise substantial campaign funds from broad sources is important. Her status as a strong variable from the “old white male” of classic Republicanism is especially important. Most important is her observation towards the end of her primary competition with Trump that many, even if not a majority, of likely Republican voters favored her over Trump, and in some cases, she defeated Biden with a greater percentage of polled voters than Trump. She, as do all failed primary candidates, has “suspended” her campaign, not ended it. Of course, this allows her to influence the Party and various races by using her remaining campaign funds on their behalf. But it also means that she is ready and willing to be drafted back to active service if so called. Her main drawback is her failure to appease the resentments, anxieties, and hopes of the new Republican base, previously composed of the well-off Greatest Generation and its ongoing offshoots of the Pax Americana but now expanded by Trumpistas of the disappearing middle class and the enlarging lower economic classes of all races, genders, and lifestyles. She has spoken to the Old Guard, and if drafted, or if returning in the future to try again, must learn at least some lessons in populism. Else her party may trundle on to that mythical Elephants’ Graveyard.