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Never Trump Republicans: Spoilers or Saviors? If enough of them decide that Hillary’s corruption is too much to take, she could be finished, at last. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441688/print

Will there be an eleventh-hour Never/Against/No Trump Reconsideration?

The question gains new relevance as a Hillary Clinton landslide, widely predicted until recently, now seems unlikely.

We are back to the razor’s edge, a likelihood of a close one- to three-point victory either way, and an even closer vote in the Electoral College. Once again, eyes focus on the Never Trump camp. It is at a crux, no doubt feeling schadenfreude that in extremis Donald Trump would beckon to them, of all people, with his “come home” campaign, while they are uneasy that his home-stretch themes, despite all the scary talk of a new exclusionary nationalism, nonetheless reflect most of the positions of their own mainstream conservatism.

The more inept Clinton, Inc. — shrill, ad hominem, and conspiratorial — becomes on the stump, oddly, the calmer Trump finally campaigns — again, prompting the question of whether enough Never or Against Trumpers will have second thoughts that might help Trump win close swing states such as North Carolina, Colorado, or Nevada. In other words, will watching the spiraling Clinton criminality and shamelessness finally drive some anti-Trump conservatives to hold their nose and vote Trump? Will enough conclude that a conservative in a swing state sitting out or voting for a symbolic candidate is a de facto sanction of an agenda that they have spent most of their lives opposing?

RELATED: The Case for Trump

Trump and Pence both have recently given impressive issues-orientated speeches. In contrast, an exasperated Hillary Clinton keeps resorting to Jimmy Carter’s 1980 tactic of demonizing the Republican nominee as dangerous, ill-tempered, and existentially reckless — without much interest in reminding supporters of the supposed benefits of her own progressive agenda. Her campaign is being reduced to unimaginative but familiar Clinton boilerplate: Trump is a bad guy, and the formerly sterling FBI director, James Comey, is now a corrupt Trump partisan. At the end, who thought that Trump would be subdued and campaigning on the issues, and the supposedly cool professional politico Clinton reduced to frenetic smears and conspiracies? Otherwise, Clinton apparently believes that, after her motor blew up this past weekend, the Democratic campaign boat can still coast to shore just ahead of a rapidly closing Trump. She could be right.

For all the talk of buffoonery versus criminality, the divide, at least in November 2016, is over issues and ostensibly could not be clearer for both conservatives and liberals.

On the Supreme Court, Obamacare, the debt, rebuilding the military, the Second Amendment, school choice, abortion, reforming the tax code, reexamining regulation, energy exploration and production, illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, and a host of other issues, the Republican ticket is the antithesis of Clinton/Kaine — and is recognized as such by nearly all progressives. Unlike the Democratic prospect, the conservative message oddly still has the chance of being empowered by both Houses of Congress and eventually a Supreme Court.

WikiLeaks, the DNC revelations, the FBI investigations, the Podesta trove, etc., all remind voters in this lowball campaign that Clinton is not a more moral and ethical candidate than Trump, whatever his flaws and shortcomings. And the world we glimpse in John Podesta e-mails is an accurate reflection of the values and interests that created and enriched the Clintons and that would continue their insidious influence in a second Clinton presidency. Remember that the Clinton remorse, such as it is, is not over graft and sabotage of the law and high office but merely over having their habitual corruption exposed. The weird case of Anthony Weiner’s e-mails completed the Clinton circle from immorality to farce, as hubris earned Nemesis — who, remember, always arrives late and in strange incarnations.

It is said that the election poses risks. In fact, in the sense of uncertainty, it does not, at least in the case of Hillary Clinton: There is no mystery at all. Her long record, campaign, published platform, and solidarity with Barack Obama would ensure a twelve-year era of continuing left-wing court appointees, as well as a likely single-payer rescue for the failed Obamacare, more debt incurred for entitlements, a shrinking and more politicized military, more efforts to prune the Second Amendment, no to school choice, expansion of abortion opportunities, more hidden higher taxes on the middle classes and more overt higher taxes on the upper-middle classes, more regulations on small business, more tribal divisiveness, open borders, sanctuary cities and amnesties, crony-green capitalism, and a continued war on fossil fuels. And, of course, there will be endless investigations, more ruined lives of obsequious subordinates, more attacks on prosecutors and the FBI, plea bargains, and scandals as leaks just keep leaking — and always more white lies like her recent false assertion that James Comey wrote his reinvestigation letter only to Republicans.

Clinton’s only remaining advantage is Democratic unity in comparison with the minority party’s fragmentation. Strangely, the supposedly idealist Bernie Sanders, who is the victim of deliberate Clinton-inspired sabotage and subterfuge, in a way that was not paralleled during the Republican primaries, has no compunction about rallying his base to support Hillary. In contrast, Trump’s uncouthness has turned off his rivals and their supporters, who still in large part insist that they will not support him despite the transparency of the primaries and the long-ago oath of fealty of the Republican candidates to the eventual nominee.

The election could depend on how many center-right Republican moderates and independents decide that Hillary’s left-wing visions of a 21st-century America and her innate criminality finally become too much to endure, and how many at last demand her retirement from politics.

If 300,000 to 400,00 apostates in three or four swing states feel that way over the weekend, and come home, she would be finished.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

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The Clinton E-mails Are Critical to the Clinton Foundation Investigation Why is Lynch rushing the search for classified e-mails but blocking the pay-to-play corruption probe? By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

The Wall Street Journal’s report that, for over a year, the FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for potential financial crimes and influence peddling is, as Rich Lowry said Monday, a blockbuster. As I argued over the weekend, the manner in which the State Department was put in the service of the Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary is shocking. It is suggestive of a pattern of pay-to-play bribery, the monetizing of political influence, fraud, and obstruction of justice that the Justice Department should be investigating as a possible RICO conspiracy under the federal anti-racketeering laws.

The Journal’s Devlin Barrett buries the Clinton Foundation lede in the 14th paragraph of his report. Even more astonishing are his final three paragraphs:

In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.

Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.”

Not long after that discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau’s leaders about the Weiner laptop, prompting Mr. Comey’s disclosure to Congress and setting off the furor that promises to consume the final days of a tumultuous campaign.

Let me unpack this.

Readers are unlikely to know that the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn is not just any United States attorney’s office. It is the office that was headed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch until President Obama elevated her to attorney general less than two years ago.

It was in the EDNY that Ms. Lynch first came to national prominence in 1999, when she was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton — the husband of the main subject of the FBI’s investigations with whom Lynch furtively met in the back of a plane parked on an Arizona tarmac days before the announcement that Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted. Obama reappointed Lynch as the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 2010. She was thus in charge of staffing that office for nearly six years before coming to Main Justice in Washington. That means the EDNY is full of attorneys Lynch hired and supervised.

When we learn that Clinton Foundation investigators are being denied access to patently relevant evidence by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, those are the prosecutors — Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors — we are talking about.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Netanyahu’s Critical Foreign Tour Israel’s strategic repositioning. Caroline Glick

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trips to Australia, Singapore, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan might be the most significant diplomatic visits he makes in his tenure in office. The trips will take place against the backdrop of two major international shifts that cast Israel into uncharted waters as a small state with a dizzying array of strategic threats arrayed against it. The states that he will visit are all well-positioned to help Israel navigate its next moves.

The first shift is the US’s political crackup.

Next week American voters will choose their next president. The major candidates, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, are the weakest candidates to have ever stood for the highest office in the land. Their rise is a testament to the weakening, if not the unraveling of the glue that has held America together since the Civil War.

The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power. The US’s multi-trillion dollar investment in inconclusive if not failed wars in the Middle East over the past 15 years has come at the expense of military modernization. The F-35 program has sucked up the majority of the remaining research and development funds.

And it has yet to produce a reliable airplane.

Worse, the F-35’s long and problematic gestation period has given Russia and China the time and opportunity to develop air defense systems capable of neutralizing the F-35’s stealth systems.

Those systems were supposed to be its chief advantage as the next generation fighter for the US and its allies.

The deterioration of the US’s military capabilities has gone hand in hand with the US’s apparent loss of strategic rationality.

This is apparent worldwide, but is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East.

President Barack Obama’s decision to effectively abandon the US’s major allies in the Middle East in favor of cultivating ties with Iran has made the region far more dangerous to the US and its spurned allies than it was eight years ago.

True, in theory, Obama’s decision to prefer the Shi’ites to the Sunnis makes sense given the totalitarian and imperial nature of Sunni jihadism. But in light of the genocidal, totalitarian and imperial nature of the current Iranian regime, his move made no sense and its impact has been massively destructive.

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Will James Comey Change the Outcome of the Election? Is this the game-changing October surprise that many hope for — and others dread? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails has roiled once more the presidential election. Donald Trump has called the decision “courageous” and “bigger than Watergate.” Clinton, the DOJ, Democrat Senators, and their media flying monkeys are all having conniption fits over their quondam champion’s defection, calling the announcement “appalling,” “absurd,” “strange,” “deeply troubling,” an “attack,” and “unprecedented.” The bigger question is whether it will move enough voters over to Trump’s side and put him in the White House.

There’s no doubt that Comey’s announcement eleven days before the election is mystifying. Not because it is “unprecedented” as the Democrats keep squealing. They had no such qualms when the weekend before the 1992 election, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh indicted a poll-surging George H.W. Bush for his alleged involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. No, the mystery is Comey’s motives. Is Comey like Conrad’s Lord Jim, now sacrificing his FBI career––sure to be over if the notoriously vengeful Clinton is elected–– to atone for having besmirched his office, reputation, and the principle of equality before the law in service to careerist self-interest? Or was he facing a mutiny and leaks from disgruntled FBI investigators? To quote one of our candidates, “At this point, what difference does it make?”

The real question is whether it will make a difference to the voters. Right now we don’t know if the content of the 650,000 emails from the conjugal laptop used by serial sexter Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Clinton vizier Huma Abedin, will reveal something damning like, say, classified materials. But we already know that Clinton passed classified information over an unsecured server, which didn’t bother Comey back in July. So what could be in these new emails that rises above Comey’s sophistic “extreme carelessness,” and reaches the statute’s “gross negligence”? Or has Comey found new evidence of Hillary’s “intent,” his other exculpatory sophistry that had little to do with the law? There had to be something that made Comey subject himself to the scorched-earth wrath of the Democrats.

Whatever is found on the Abedin laptop, one wonders if will even matter to a sufficient number of voters. They have shrugged off so many scandals, lies, and failures that should have sunk a candidacy, that it’s hard to calculate what level of incompetence, unpleasantness, dishonesty, sleaze, and crime is disqualifying anymore. Here are the greatest hits from Hillary’s catalogue:

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

From Bad to Worse: Obama’s Ransom Payment to Iran is Just the Tip of the Iceberg In his bid to pursue a legacy, Obama charts disastrous course with reckless abandon. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

Most of us, including several democratic lawmakers, cringed when Obama inked the Iran deal but those of us who are familiar with the malevolent nature of the Iranian regime, recoiled in horror when we learned that Obama transferred $400 million to the Iranians in exchange for four American citizens held captive by the mullahs on trumped up charges. The $400 million was part of a larger installment totaling $1.7 billion, ostensibly to settle claims Iran had against the United States stemming from aborted Iranian arms purchases dating back to the Shah. Obama claimed that this was money that was “owed” to Iran and the settlement, which included $1.3 billion in interest, saved the U.S. taxpayer “billions” because the Iranians were demanding even more at the Hague tribunal, where the claim was being adjudicated.

The timing and method of the cash transfers were disquieting to say the least and raised serious questions of legality as well as broader geo-political concerns. The Americans were freed only after Iran received its $400 million. The payment, which was airlifted in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane, was made in untraceable cash, stacked on wooden pallets. The Iranians demanded Swiss Francs and Euros rather than Dollars and a pliant Obama agreed to the Islamic Republic’s dictates. Gleeful Iranian leaders were quick to announce victory and claimed that the payment was indeed a ransom, contradicting the administration’s adamant denials.

Even within the administration there was confusion about whether the payment was in fact a ransom. State Department spokesman Mark Toner came very close to acknowledging this fact when he noted that the $400 million was used as “leverage” to ensure the Americans’ safe return. The White House however, quickly repudiated the State Department’s characterization.

Even if one were to believe the story peddled by the administration, the mere appearance of a quid pro quo payment potentially exposes the U.S. to extortion and hostage-taking. The Iranians certainly believed it was a ransom payment and more likely than not, every two-bit dictator on the planet saw it that way as well.

But there are deeper more troubling aspects to this convoluted story. In his January 17, 2016 address to the American people, Obama tried to put a positive spin on his dealings with the Islamic Republic but as noted by Rick Richman in an excellent article featured in Mosaic, the deal struck with the Iranians was rotten to its core and the administration deliberately kept the American people in the dark about various aspects of the shady arrangement.

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Obama’s Secret Muslim List Why enemies of Israel and Iran’s “go-to guy” appeared on the list. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

Like a warped Islamic version of Santa Claus, Obama had a secret Muslim list. And his people checked it at least twice. The list was of Muslims who were prospects for important jobs and appointments.

It included a Muslim who had described Israel as an “Apartheid State,” Iran’s “go-to guy in New York financial circles” and a number of figures linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was the ultimate religious test from an administration that had vocally rejected them.

Obama had claimed that having religious tests for migration was “shameful” and “not American.”

“When I hear folks say that, well maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims,” he huffed from Turkey. His Muslim host country was run by a bigoted sponsor of Islamic terror.

“We don’t have religious tests,” he insisted.

Except we did and we do. Obama also had religious tests. His religious tests excluded Christians and favored Muslims. That is why his Syrian refugees were between 98% and 99% Muslim with only 68 Christians and 24 Yazidis, even though both groups are real victims of the Muslim religious war.

Syria is 10% Christian and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Yet only 68 have made it past Obama’s iron curtain. That’s either an Islamic religious test or the world’s greatest coincidence.

But would the man who piously lectured us on the evils of religious tests really have a religious test?

Of course he would.

The hacked emails include a list of “Muslim American candidates for top Administration jobs, sub-cabinet jobs, and outside boards/agencies/policy committees.”

The list was sent to John Podesta who headed the Obama-Biden Transition Project. It had been put together by a woman who had sat on the Commission on International Religious Freedom, but boasted that she had, “Excluded those with some Arab American background but who are not Muslim (e.g., George Mitchell). Many Lebanese Americans, for example, are Christian.”

How “shameful.” How “not American” of Barack Hussein Obama.

“Most who are listed appear to be Muslim-American, except that a handful (where noted) may be Arab American but of uncertain religion (esp. Christian),” she assured Podesta.

Religious tests are only out of line when they exclude Muslims. Not when they exclude Christians.

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UN Plan to Turn the World into an Islamic Colony? by Maria Polizoidou

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

The UN is the mothership of injustice and radical global Islamization.

As the UN does not recognize the historical presence and continuity of the Jewish people in their land, the next people on the menu in UNESCO’s food chain are most likely the Greeks and then the Italians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan already said as much last week.

No one would be surprised if UNESCO, to institutionalize the Islamic presence in the international community, claims that Greeks have nothing to do with the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and that Italy has no historical ties to the Colosseum in Rome.

With the rate of admission of Muslims into Greece, by 2050 the Greeks will be a minority in their own country.

The Greek media chose not to inform the Greek people on the attitude of their politicians towards the Jewish nation because it would expose their preference for Islam over Israel, and the Greek people might not see this choice in a positive light.

How can Greece credibly ask for help from the global community on the issue of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, when the politicians themselves maintain a neutral attitude on the virtually identical issue of the Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?

When the news arrived that UNESCO does not recognize the connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, it brought to mind that the UN is the mothership of injustice and radical global Islamization. Its members, which include the large bloc of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — 56 Islamic nations plus “Palestine” — evidently believe that if they want to transform the Western world into an Islamic colony, first they must bring down the State of Israel. This resembles the suggestion in ancient Greece of the exiled Greek general, Demaratos, to the king of Persia, Xerxes: If you want Greece to fall, first you have to destroy the Spartans.

If Jerusalem falls into the hands of Islam, the rest of the world will presumably fall. UNESCO’s decision is not only nonsensical from a historical perspective (Islam did not even exist at the time of ancient Jerusalem), basically it is also a strategic move against the cultural foundations of the West.

As the UN does not recognize the historical presence and continuity of the Jewish people in their land, the next people on the menu in UNESCO’s food chain are most likely the Greeks and then the Italians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan already said as much last week.

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Turkey: Erdogan’s Galloping Despotism by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

Before Turks could digest so many undemocratic practices they had to face in one week, they woke up only to learn that scores of journalists at a newspaper critical of Erdogan had been detained. On October 31, police raided the homes of 11 people, including executives and journalists of Cumhuriyet newspaper, after prosecutors initiated a probe against them on “terrorism” charges.

“This is about … abolishing all universal values… The most explicit indications of it are the growing pressure against the Turkish press and the policies to destroy it. This is the process of the destruction of free thought.” — The Contemporary Journalists Association.

Both fascism and communism exercised a large influence on the Arab “Baathist” ideology — “resurrection” in Arabic, and which started as a nationalist, Sunni Arab movement to combat Western colonial rule and to promote modernization. In Iraq, the despotic Baathist regime survived 35 years, largely under the leadership of Saddam Hussein. In Syria, it is still struggling under the tyranny of President Bashar al-Assad. These days a non-Arab, but Islamist version of the Baathist ideology is flourishing in an otherwise unlikely country: candidate for membership in the European Union (EU), Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism is killing Turkey’s already slim chances of finding itself a place in the world’s more civilized clubs and turning the country more and more into a “Baathist” regime.

In 2004 Erdogan’s government abolished the death penalty as part of his ambitions at the time to join the EU. Twelve years later, on Oct. 29, 2016, Erdogan addressed fans of his party, and said he would ratify a bill reinstating capital punishment once it passed in parliament despite objections it might spark in the West. He said: “Soon, our government will bring (the bill) to parliament … It’s what the people say that matters, not what the West thinks”.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Michael Angwin : How Green Activists Nuked Themselves

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

The anti-nuclear movement had everything going for it, from copious funding and the support of international NGOs to sympathetic press coverage and parliamentary supporters. Yet its crusade petered out, laid low by bogus science and ardent, absolutist ratbaggery.
Australia’s environmental warriors have failed in their campaigns over the past 40 years to stop the Australia’s uranium mining industry. In the past decade in particular, the anti-uranium movement has suffered devastating defeats, as uranium mining has expanded with bi-partisan support from Labor and conservative parties. It’s instructive to analyse why.

The anti-uranium movement operated on a permanent basis through the nation’s foremost environmental organisations and hundreds of other smaller organisations. It had access to considerable financial resources[1], to sympathetic media and to Commonwealth and state parliamentary sympathisers. It was gifted three nuclear accidents as a platform for its advocacy.

Given these propitious circumstances, how did the movement fail so completely to impede the development of Australia’s nuclear industry? What accounts for this monumental failure of policy, strategy and tactics? First, let’s look at the past decade’s landmark political decisions in support of uranium. The process began with the Howard Coalition government, and the ALP followed suit.

The centre-left Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed uranium mining and exports ten days after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed by a tsunami
Eight months later, Ms Gillard announced her government would export uranium to India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, contrary to ALP policy. Shortly after, the policy fell humbly into line with her decision
Four uranium projects were approved under mainstream environmental laws, despite the close involvement of the anti-uranium movement in the assessment process
In 2016, South Australia’s centre-left government began to implement a Royal Commission report that endorsed SA as a suitable place for a global nuclear waste repository.

The anti-uranium movement emerged in the early 1970s to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The movement next turned its attention to domestic uranium mining, using the Fraser government’s decision to permit mining at Ranger as a focus for activism. By the end of the 1970s, an anti-uranium strategy had emerged: frame uranium as a class-based issue and connect it with a broader political assault on the capitalist status quo; establish many small, local opposition groups; coordinate their activities; frame the movement as large, vigorous and publicly-supported; focus on emotions, especially fear; and target traditional land owners as a key point of resistance to mining.

However, even as insiders conceded at the time, ‘the ’70s movement did not fundamentally threaten Australia’s nuclear industry’.[2] The movement declined during the 1980s. The rise and decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Party paved the way for the co-option of the anti-uranium movement by the Labor Party[3]. The movement then declined even more rapidly, and uranium economics became much more important in shaping uranium development.

By the mid-1980s, anti-uranium activism tried a more mainstream advocacy strategy of influencing public opinion.[4] By the late-1990s, the movement’s strategy had become, by default, ‘isolated campaigning’.[5] While some environmental NGOs continued to fund full-time ‘anti-nuclear campaigners’, isolated campaigning has become the norm.

Why did it fail? A first clue is found in this history. The policy, strategy and tactics of the movement were shaped by Marxist ideological[6] beliefs. This never appealed to a mainstream Australian audience, which is more interested in workable solutions for real problems. The anti-uranium movement also faced the global failure of its founding ideology: in the 1980s, the Cold War ended and Soviet communism collapsed.

The ideological failure of the anti-uranium movement was accompanied by a long series of startling policy, strategy and tactical errors, particularly in making claims that had no credibility. For example, anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott once claimed[7] a Howard/Bush conspiracy, involving the owners of the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway, to store America’s nuclear waste at Muckaty Station, once proposed as the Federal government’s low-level nuclear waste site. This vast claim was based on the small fact that a subsidiary of Halliburton, a company with which former US vice-president Dick Cheney was once associated, was one of the handful of companies in a joint venture, to operate the rail road. There are many examples of this kind, and they illustrate the weakness of the anti-uranium movement’s advocacy: policy makers won’t take you seriously if you prosecute your case with selective facts, used out of context and without perspective.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Daryl McCann: Battlers Against the System

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

As demonstrated by both Trump and Sanders, a key feature in the 2016 US election has been a populist narrative about how foreign governments and companies, in cahoots with political and institutional insiders, have wrought ruin upon the nation.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has endured two populist insurrections over the past eighteen months, one from the Left and the other from the Right. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have played the populist card, a conviction that ordinary men and women have been rorted by “the system” and that strong decisive action was required on behalf of regular folk to take back control of the nation from a coterie of cronies. The populist’s worldview is invariably a Manichean one of blameless “outsiders”—in alliance with a would-be political saviour—fighting the good fight against the “wicked insiders”. Sanders’s gripe was the state’s failure to safeguard the little person; Trump’s grievance is much the same, albeit for mostly different reasons.

A populist movement is a function of voters going rogue after deciding that the political status quo has lost its legitimacy—in the American case, the customary policies of the Democratic Party and the customary policies of the Republican Party. Populist revolts in America have emerged before at times of stress, from the People’s Party of James B. Weaver in the 1890s to the “Share the Wealth” movement of the Great Depression, the latter cut short by Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. Jack Ross, writing for the American Conservative in March 2016, insisted that Sanders’s politics should be seen as a contemporary version of Huey Long’s proletarian-flavoured radicalism rather than in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt-style liberalism and Henry Wallace’s progressivism or, we might add, Barack Obama’s New Left-style identity politics. Ross rationalises Sanders’s recourse to the middle-class identity politics of Black Lives Matter as the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, then, Senator Sanders differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in his populist morality tale by implicitly casting her as the establishment candidate, an insider compromised by long and intimate association with “Wall Street speculators”.

Bernie Sanders, fittingly enough, kicked off his primary campaign by refusing to set up a Super PAC (political action committee) as proof that shady plutocrats and their Washington accomplices could not buy off the aspiring people’s hero. He was free to remain an independent operator and, presumably, the champion of outsiders. Central to his populist narrative was that an overclass had subverted democracy in America; decisions were being made that profited powerful oligarchical interests by selling out ordinary American workers, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being two obvious cases in point.

Sanders’s self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” insurgency also drew on a pervasive bitterness at the wage and wealth inequality in the modern-day US. Accordingly, Sanders’s policy rollout began with a range of government-guaranteed benefits for ordinary workers, from a new minimum wage to longer holidays. Sanders also pledged full remission on student-debt loans and a $70 billion plan to make tertiary education free. It was payback time for the outsiders.

Five weeks before the November 8 election an audiotape (dating back to a March 2016 fundraiser in Virginia) emerged of Hillary Clinton dismissing Bernie Sanders’s supporters as ill-informed Millennials who believed America should have “free college, health care” and that the Obama administration had not “gone far enough” in transforming the United States into “Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means”. However, as Sanders’s campaign was surging at the time, Hillary Clinton entered into a bidding war with her rival. For instance, she promised a $250 billion infrastructure upgrade, only for Bernie Sanders to top this with a $1 trillion undertaking, throwing in high-speed internet access for rural America as a bonus. Why not? Add to that, of course, his plan for universal health care (or so-called Berniecare), a single-payer health plan that Sanders himself acknowledged would increase annual government spending on health from $1 trillion to $2.9 trillion. A Sanders presidency would have likely seen the resentments of the Occupy Wall Street movement to “the greed of corporate America” become the de facto creed of the White House.

Such was the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s leftist version of “the system is rigged” that he garnered almost 39 per cent of Democratic delegates in the primaries, possibly his most surprising victory being the March 8 victory in Michigan. In fact, he collected 46 per cent of delegates if “superdelegates”—party-appointed delegates not elected in primaries or caucuses—are excluded from the count. This was not the only way in which Democratic Party apparatchiks worked in favour of the establishment’s candidate. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks revealed that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had conspired against Sanders from the beginning. For instance, some of the 20,000 leaked e-mails show that the DNC considered making Sanders’s Jewish background a campaign issue in some states. There was also evidence of collusion between the DNC and the Washington Post in the interests of the Clinton campaign. These troubling revelations forced DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign but, tellingly, immediately afterwards she was hired by the Clinton campaign.