Is a Jeffersonian “Little
Rebellion” at Hand?
Published in Marietta Daily Journal Aug. 30, 2015
The
barbarians are at the gates. The
peasants are headed toward the palace with their pitchforks.
Not really. What has actually happened is ordinary people
have found a megaphone, a new national leader.
Many of them, not all, are Tea Partiers.
This doesn’t mean that every Tea Party group supports that national
leader. It only means the sentiments
that birthed the Tea Party are strikingly similar to those held by the
supporters of Donald Trump.
True, the first modern Tea Partiers
in 2009 focused on taxes and the nation’s profligate spending, while this new
leader has made illegal immigration his chief issue. Even so, many Tea Partiers and those who have
joined their ranks appear determined to dump some more tea and stir things up.
The barbarians and peasants are
actually normal middle class folks. But to
political party echelons, high paid consultants, big donors, special interests
and lobbyists, they are still riffraff.
Sooner or later every pot needs to
be stirred. Sometimes you have to fire
people. Sometimes Jefferson’s notion of
“a little rebellion” needs to take place. New wine cannot stay in old wineskins.
Neither
can freedom remain for too long on any one vehicle, because freedom likes to
flow. Political parties, contrary to
George Washington’s fears, have served for over 200 years as America’s
mechanism for choosing leaders. But
today one of those parties is being tested like never before. Its leadership has been tone deaf. The
riffraff are unwilling to take it anymore.
“It”
is government intrusion, government regulation, government expansion, IRS
excesses and an elitist media/political complex. “It” is the timidity of political leaders
whose fathers successfully defeated the evil ideologies of Nazism and Communism
but who are skittish about even acknowledging the evil ideology of Islamic
terrorism.
How far we have come from President Clinton’s
famous words just after his midterm shellacking in 1994. “The era of big government
is over,” Clinton declared in his state of the union address. The riffraff thought it might finally be so.
But a few years after that platitude came No Child Left Behind, Dodd-Frank,
TARP, executive orders and Obamacare, not to mention Benghazi, ISIS, loss of a
nation we helped stabilize, loss of national prestige and flattened wages.
Elites are not only squirming, they
are showing fear on their faces and in their words. Network and cable news anchors appear nervous
every time they interview the supposedly “buffoonish” Trump. George
Will, ordinarily one of the nation’s best thinkers and communicators, says
there is reason to “voice robust disgust” with the riffraff’s new leader. An intellectual if there ever was one, Will
has served the cause of conservatism well, yet when it comes to the present
turmoil, he still prefers old wineskins.
Bill Kristol, son of the father of
neo-conservatism, Irvin Kristol, says he’s finished with the riffraff’s new
leader. He, too, prefers old
wineskins. Karl Rove has cast aspersions
and gloom on the riffraff. Tethered to
old line alliances and unmindful of who the riffraff really are, Rove continues
to tout the establishment.
This upending of the Republican
Party (and eventually the Democratic Party that must deal gingerly with its own
avowed socialist candidate) is concurrent with two other social upheavals. One is the cracking of religious denominations
as evidenced by countless unaffiliated churches – most of them with cutesy
names – sprinkled across the nation. The
other is the fading of the old media or television networks that have fallen to
cable and the internet. What’s changing
is delivery systems and what the riffraff are angry about is the current
system’s failure to deliver.
The current system has failed to
deliver candidates who are not beholden to donors. The candidates it has produced have, instead
of representing voters, become members of a buddy club who should be fighting
each other on behalf of their constituents instead of chumming it up.
The riffraff have found in their new
leader a candidate who acknowledges their love of flags and fetuses, who
rightly rejects the notion that the 14th amendment grants
citizenship to children of illegal immigrants. (It really doesn’t. Read it.) In 1866 illegal immigration was not
an issue. The amendment was intended for
former slaves.
Finally, the riffraff have a
candidate who doesn’t bore them to death and who has the ability to ignite
Jefferson’s call for occasional, legitimate rebellion. That spirit of rebellion is much deeper than
our political leadership and media stars realize. They best beware and the rest of us best
prepare for surprising political re-alignments of all stripes in the next
decade.
Politically, the planets are shifting. All because regular folks and a city boy
billionaire found each other. I, for
one, will stay tuned.
Roger
Hines
8/26/15
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