Here we are, less than two weeks away from a new year and the rumblings of great tumbles, and even temblors, to come are already evident to this observer. Both domestically and overseas, the many polarizations of our age are now being thrown into bold relief across the landscape of the planet’s surface. In Syria, Iraq, the Egyptian Sinai, the streets of Paris and San Bernardino, the harsh swords of Sunni Islamist terror madness have been busily hacking off all civilized norms of human behavior and threatening the peaceable enjoyment of life for increasing multitudes of people.
In that wanton mass murder has taken place so very brazenly in France and America by young radicalized fanatics, the stage has now been set for a multinational conflagration of “gi-normous” proportions. IS/Daesh, boldly on the recruitment march, has no doubt been invigorated by the West’s effete reluctance to trench on the supposed civil rights of privacy, worship, and equality of anyone professing “the Muslim faith.” And, Islamist Iran scored a major advance in July on its path to regional hegemony–and global menace–by suckering America and its major West European allies into enlivening its drive to develop a nuclear military force to eventually launch total war against its perceived enemies. All of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan are, in various measures, quaking at the possibilities. Eventually, America and most of Europe will be in the crosshairs as well.
Until a profound ken can be developed among the West’s political elites that Islam is, at core, an uncompromisingly supremacist, expansionist totalitarian theocratic ideology that worships death, the following will continue to burgeon among our nation’s hoi polloi: (1) a realization that most nations’ governments are not acting effectually (either at home or abroad) to identify, isolate, and neutralize threats before they erupt in murderous violence against their citizens, (2) anxieties at the growing threat of encroachment against all key civil liberties of the peaceful and law-abiding, viz., (i) restricting free speech and free press rights (“one mustn’t speak or write in any way that offends Muslims; after all, to do so would be ‘un-American’”), and (ii) erecting legal bans and perhaps confiscations of privately held firearms (supposedly, but disingenuously, in the name of reducing the occurrence of violent “tragedies”), and (3) a vaulting erosion of trust in some basic institutions of civil society, viz., the police, courts, and federal agencies charged with protecting the national and internal security. Americans, and ever more West Europeans, are developing a mindset to become more vigilant, self-reliant, and widely self-protective. As the stability of civil societies goes historically, these are not promising portents of the future.
On the eve of 2016, therefore, the West finds itself at an early tipping point of existential crisis. In America’s current presidential sweepstakes, there is happily some outspoken awareness of how acute this conspicuous crisis is becoming. GOP candidate Ben Carson opined in the fall as how he would not ever like to see a Muslim president in America; more recently, lead candidate Donald Trump has declaimed that he wants no further Muslim immigration into America until “we can get this mess sorted out.” Predictably, the elite liberal cohorts, including the major print and broadcast media, were aghast at such arrant political incorrectness: It is “un-American”, “not who we are”, and “unconstitutional.” The irony of this sanctimonious posturing in the face of the almost certain specter of losing more innocent lives in the homeland, and even our culture and nation ultimately, is appalling.
In every event, though, America’s political establishment is in quiet consternation about Trump because (a) be cannot be controlled/manipulated because of his Croesus-like wealth, (b) his talent for populist bombast and throwing “red meat” to the rank and file of the Republican Party, who are now chronically angry and frustrated at unresponsive conventional politicians, and (c) his overall charismatic appeal. Apart from being a superbly entertaining showman, however, Trump’s entry into the top national political race this year bodes ill for America in the coming year.
Regardless of his real motives for running for president, Trump is an authoritarian personality, brash, arrogant, egotistical, and infallible. He has acknowledged from the debate stage that he “buys” other people’s cooperation, is an ace negotiator (read bullying arm-twister), and brooks no disagreement, childishly castigating anyone who opposes him–an American Mussolini with great hair and boss suits, but the scowls are the same. Is this truly the best man for conservatives to get behind and rally around as a champion protector of the Constitution, our traditional civil liberties, and private property rights? When opposed on any issue to come, will Trump exceed even Obama in his petulance, arrogance, self-importance, and contempt for the rule of law and the separation of powers?
What are Trump’s true core convictions and motivations for running? We are left to ponder in uncertainty. Trump has been a registered Democrat for most of his life and has donated in the past to the electoral campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. He has orchestrated aggressive use of eminent domain, not for public use but for private financial objectives. Could he possibly be not just a raging narcissist with a high sense of personal entitlement, but a Trojan horse for Hillary Clinton? Could his real goal be to displace any genuine conservative (such as Senator Ted Cruz) from attaining the GOP presidential nomination? Or, if he is not successful in doing so, “go third party” and thereby split the national popular vote, either winning in his own right as an independent on a plurality vote or throwing the race to the Democrats’ presumptive candidate, Hillary Clinton?
As 2016 dawns, the only perceptible benefit of Trump’s candidacy thus far has been to brashly, and at stentorian volume, march America’s national political conversations both staunchly and compellingly to the right, where unquestionably it has long needed to go. This, too, of course, is solid anathema to what Senator Ted Cruz aptly calls “the Washington cartel”, America’s political elites–undivided by their nominal party affiliation–whose members have long profited from the chronic, covert cronyism and self-aggrandizing careerism that the Democrats pioneered starting in the mid-1960s. As the authors of an endless train of Big Government “solutions” to all issues (real and imagined); open borders; immigration amnesty; regulatory overreach and interference; and taxation tyranny, they are loath to have their iron grip on national governance derailed by a supremely wealthy, irascible, independent-minded interloper with populist notions and a capacity for grandiosity.
While Islam–the original Nazism–is now quickly metastasizing around the world, Trump can be counted on to parlay the crisis to his electoral advantage: Rightly calumnize all who refuse to screw up the courage and cajones to protect us from this medieval scourge, and show himself to be the “man on a white horse” to save our nation. Americans will reap both the benefits and the curses of those events. 2016 will be one very tumultuous year both in and for America, indeed.
William Pippin
The Rational Empiricist