Donald Trump and the Dictates of Prudence

For years -- arguably even decades -- the craven Republican establishment, often called the GOPe, has submitted to the Democrats and betrayed its own conservative voters in the process. Many of those conservative voters have concluded, based on no small evidence, that the GOPe is either too stupid to understand the nature and stakes of the battle it and this nation are in -- a to-the-death battle with the statist Left -- or it is complicit in the nation’s betrayal. In either case, Donald Trump emerged to fill a leadership vacuum at the top and attracted a following large enough to kick the buggers blocking the Freedom Road the hell out of the way. Some significant numbers of conventional Republican voters have already made it clear that they intend to defect from Trump either to vote for Hillary or some unknown third-party or write-in candidate, or not to vote at all. There is no implicit by-your-leave to any of this; it is simply a self-regarding act of what they deem to be virtue, for which they congratulate themselves for either ignoring or not even seeing the drain around which we in this nation are circling.

Meanwhile, as the Republican cohorts carry on the clanging show -- a reality show, be it noted -- the Democrats already in control of the government are carrying on with their un- and anti-Constitutional subterfuge, at least some of which is carried out through making receipt of appropriated federal funds contingent upon obedience to the impositions. They do it not quite in secret, but below much of the media radar’s notice. Here are three examples from among many action fronts: (1) States’ and U.S. Territories’ attorneys-general -- in the event, under the leadership of the U.S Virgin Islands attorney-general -- are preparing to prosecute organizations, businesses, and individuals who are both skeptical of the global warming phenomenon and the fraudulent science behind it. This action is being undertaken to silence criticism of the international environmental movement’s efforts to control activities said to produce such warming. There is no law mandating this action, and it is almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause. (2) The U.S. Justice Department has given the governor and other officials of North Carolina until May 9, 2016 to pledge that they will no longer enforce the state’s legitimately passed law requiring people to use public restrooms in accordance with their biological genders. This action is being undertaken under the guise of stopping a purported violation of the 51-year-old 1964 federal Civil Rights Act. (3) In July of 2015, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development began working aggressively to impose the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. This rule is designed to impose massive social engineering on American suburban neighborhoods, irrespective of either private ownership or primary state and local government-level jurisdiction. HUD claims its authority from the 47-year-old Fair Housing Act of 1968. Those are just three examples of many tyrannical moves the federal bureaucracies, currently under Democrat executive control, are making in the absence of legitimate Congressional laws stipulating their imposition or enforcement. The vacuum at the top of the Republican leadership into which Donald Trump has moved has failed to aggressively and loudly counter any of them. Most members of the anti-Trump cohorts unite in calling his supporters “low-information” and impugn their motives, their methods, and their high-profile visibility. The anti-Trump cohorts are particularly vehement that Trump’s supporters are too stupid to know what they are doing. But here’s the thing: First of all, these people are not stupid. They are at a minimum smart enough, and many are well enough educated, to recognize that their interests are being belittled and smashed without any defense from, and in some cases with the help of, the people they charged via their votes to represent those interests. Second, every one of us should note well and remember long that this government was designed with the intention of having it affect the lives of citizens in a minimal fashion. The American people were not supposed to have to pay attention to every move they made in constant evaluations of those moves’ legalities. “Reformed Trombonist,” a commenter at the Instapundit blog, recently had this to say on the matter: Before government was the 500-lb gorilla in the middle of every aspect of American life, your neighbor’s politics didn’t really matter that much. When business, family, and church mattered more than politics, we minded our own business. But now that government has seeped its way into every aspect of human existence, when you can’t eat a Twinkie or let your kid play in his own backyard by himself without providing probable cause to the Gestapo, then politics matters more and people care more. You like government’s overweening size, power, and expense, or you hate it. There’s no mystery here. Now, I leave it to the reader to consider whether or not the imposition examples cited above match some key words from the Declaration of Independence. When recalling the Declaration of Independence, most Americans -- particularly those whose formal educations have focused on only the two opening, and then the final, paragraphs -- turn to the self-evident truths, the unalienable rights, and the free and independent states that the Declaration affirms the original colonies have become. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are specified as being among the certain unalienable rights within the Declaration’s framework, suggesting that there remain undetailed others. The second paragraph of the Declaration contains a less-frequently cited but nevertheless indispensable pair of sentences. These sentences find implicit application in many contemporary political conditions in the United States of America. They describe the circumstantial context and perspective from which a putative revolution might be expected to arise, and provide its simultaneous justification. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. These two sentences itemize, among other things, the fact that stability and custom comprise most people’s preferred condition. People will lie down for a good deal of abuse before they will rouse themselves to reject any of it forcefully. But there is a limit. The limit is reached when abuses multiply, and when the tyrannical forces imposing them are motivated by the evidently oppressive, controlling, and singular goal of despotism. In such a case, these two sentences in the Declaration prescribe action that can be distilled down to a single word: revolt As matters are now, a great many of the American people have, at long last, been roused to stand on their own behalf. The propriety of selecting Donald Trump as a new guard for their future security can be argued, and the question will be answered in due course. But the fact that they have, at that same long last, been so roused is by itself significant. They may not be ready to settle back into stability and custom immediately. For if Donald Trump does not answer to their demands, they may well be sufficiently roused to replace him with someone else who will. They are about to be in command now, and they will be watching quite closely.