(Trump takes the oath, Jan. 20, 2017)
I support Trump with reservations. I opposed him in the primaries but voted for him, with reluctance, in the general. I retain my doubts. My observations aren’t those of a Trump zealot nor those of the rabid left. Clearly put, his election was a gathering of middle-America in opposition to the growing ascendancy of an insular, self-anointed elite.
By “middle-America”, I mean those people not graced with membership in one of the fashionable victims’ groups. It’s “middle” also geographically. As a glance at the election map indicates, Trump’s success was founded on a citizenry not privileged with residence on the trendy coasts, nor in a densely-packed urban agglomerate, nor a college cocoon.
If America is divided, the growing gulf lies between the insular places of swank values and their pet issues and the aspiring social middle scattered in “flyover country”.
Those outside the bubbles aren’t enamored by the chic but smothering outlook of the “beautiful people”. Inside the bubbles, lefty progressivism is the catechism.
The “Lefty” part of the reigning dogma in the blue archipelagos is a single-minded belief in the Marxist dictum of material conditions being all-determining in human relations. Thus the lefty fixation on equalizing material conditions, and almost everything else. Surprise, that requires mammoth government.
The alliance of the left with government is a natural one. The left needs power to transform people and society. They need a cadre of enforcers and self-proclaimed “experts” to meddle into lives and shape a new society. It’s what Obama and the Democrats tried to do while constrained by the limits of republican government.
Those of the left are totally oblivious of the Orwellian trap depicted in Animal Farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the pigs’ new maxim, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In the Soviet Union it was called the “nomenklatura”. In America, today, it’s called the administrative state. It’s a metastasizing power base increasingly shielded from democratic accountability.
The “progressive” element is the conviction that government is the most important agency for the achievement of a person’s highest potential. For progressives, power is ensconced in a self-anointed class of elites – those so-called “experts”. In reality, their grasp on wisdom is highly suspect. Many are corrupted by progressive ideology and excessive self-confidence. It’s the reason that “climate change” fits so neatly into their platform.
Furthermore, “potential” is left nebulous – tailor-made for the accretion of power into the state. The state becomes isolated, unaccountable, and far removed from the vast middle of the country, where we find the sort of people who pay and receive little benefit.
Trump’s constituency is the real forgotten man and woman not so privileged by the adoring gaze of lefty progressives and their shock troops of “experts”. The real forgotten American is only a target for social engineering.
Funny thing about this isolated elite: they don’t know themselves to be so parochial. They’re completely unaware. Self-reflection isn’t one of their strengths. They were blinkered by an ideology – leftist progressivism – that was ever-present in their environs, and few other places. In the end, they were blindsided by an election.
Interesting turn of events.
RogerG