Trump was just a messenger. The message?
When ideology supplants reality, bad things are bound to happen
You'd be fabulously wealthy now had you'd invested in the oceans of ink used to cover Donald Trump since 2016 - most of it without explaining what actually fueled his rise. I have maintained since the moment that Trump was elected that his ascendancy was a message to the powers that be. Trump was a figurehead and a messenger. The message was “screw you.”
I just recently came across a piece in Common Sense, the Substack feed of former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, from Swedish newspaper columnist Paulina Neuding: Two Bombings in One Night? That's Normal Now in Sweden. I cannot possibly recommend enough Ms. Neuding's column. It's eminently worth 10 minutes of your life.
Although Ms. Neuding writes specifically about issues surrounding recent immigration to Sweden and deleterious social outcomes, she does so in a manner that illuminates an unfortunate consequence using ideology as a cudgel no matter how much it flies in the face of reality. It turns out, as Ms. Neuding illustrates, that doubling down on Utopian concepts in the face of inconvenient realities generally does not end well.
Sweden is a long way from the USA in terms of both distance and social mores, but the problem outlined in Ms. Neuding's column could have been written about any number of issues facing us here.
In the 21st century USA, we have two major political parties in the embrace of ideologies that are almost polar opposites. Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of eschewing reality for ideology. Both sides view politics as a vehicle for imposing their views on others by force of government. And both sides are invariably amazed as they get tossed through the front door of the saloon into the street when the electorate has had enough of their particular brand of BS.
A very good recent example of this was the ascendancy of Donald Trump from TV shyster/real estate huckster to POTUS. Sorting through how this happened is still a work in progress among both Democrats and Republicans. The reason they haven't figured it out yet is that they're focused on the postmortem when they really need to just wake up.
Despite the information bubbles promulgated by liberal and conservative media, a majority of Americans are reasonably well-informed about current events. The fact that they don't much care for how things are going is not the same as not understanding what's going on.
Right now, for example, our southern border is a sieve - allowing waves and waves of migrants to enter this country illegally. Estimates are in the millions since President Biden took office in 2020. The vast majority of these people would probably make wonderful additions to the American melting pot. I've long maintained that those willing to walk thousands of miles (often in families) to get here ought to be welcomed.
But not everyone crossing our southern border is upstanding. And we ought not allow illegal immigrants crossing our southern border to shortcut the line of legal immigrants from around the world. There needs to be an orderly process to sort this out. The fact that we don't have one has many progenitors.
One indisputable responsibility of our Federal government is border security - and they happen to suck at it. This is something that's completely obvious to anyone who's paying attention. The more that current Democratic leaders insist that the Southern border is secure the more foolish they look. It just isn't true.
I support what Governors Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Ron Desantis (R-FL) have been doing to force blue cities and blue states to confront this issue, i.e., transporting some illegal migrants to sanctuary cities in blue states. Let the residents of Martha's Vineyard proselytize all they want about progressive immigration policies as long as they have to live and deal with the consequences of their own wishes while doing so.
What we've discovered, however, is that evidently it's bad to transport illegal immigrants from San Antonio to a wealthy sanctuary city in a blue state, but it's absolutely OK to transport them from there to anyplace else. It's also OK for Democratic administrations to fly illegal migrants in the dead of the night to some Podunk in the middle of nowhere.
The hypocrisy, of course, is huge, but most Americans see through it. And the more they see the more they are going to object to those using an ideology, sans reality, as an impetus to get, administratively, what they can't get legislatively or at the ballot box.
Another current example of ideology versus reality involves the proposed administrative changes by the Biden administration to Title IX, a part of The Education Amendments of 1972, a bill enacted by Congress. Title IX was originally passed to prevent discrimination against women and girls in any educational institution receiving Federal funds. I literally do not know a single soul who disagrees with this. Embracing the idea of leveling the playing field for women in education is a political lodestone.
But strengthening this act is not what's on the table. Democrats are proposing to amend Title IX, by administrative fiat, to reduce due process, to return to a single investigator model for addressing complaints (a single individual serves as advocate, judge and jury) and to include gender identity, rather than biological sexual identity, as a protected class.
Not only will the gender identity part of this, if brought to fruition, actually harm the very class of people that Title IX was originally drafted to protect, women and girls, it happens to be wildly unpopular outside of a few progressive enclaves - none of which is slowing down the Biden administration in the least bit.
In every national election since the last century we've been forced to choose between two ideologies that many of us reject. Do we want the right and their obsession with Christian values, authoritarianism and bad science, or do we want the left and their obsession with wokeism, bad economics, bad energy policies and even worse science?
Even when candidates from the left and the right assure us that they know that their base is crazy and that they'll actually govern from the middle, they don't. See candidate Joe Biden's positions vs President Joe Biden's positions.
So we don't have great or even trustworthy choices. But that's too bad, because that's what's out there. And that is precisely the appeal of a character, albeit a flawed one, like Donald Trump.