https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/14/the-empire-strikes-back-but-maga-will-strike-h arder/
I’ve written many times that I thought Donald Trump would win the 2020 election. The question always was whether he would win it beyond the margin of fraud and litigation.
Did he? It’s touch and go. Television networks and even some foreign heads of state tell us Joe Biden won the election. The electors have yet to be appointed and meet to vote. Still, the forces arrayed against Trump are formidable. It’s not just, as Joe Biden bragged, that the Democrats had put together “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” That does appear to have been the case.
But if Donald Trump loses, it won’t only be because of that “extensive and inclusive” organization. Perhaps more important is the ambient jelly in which that organization has operated. I mean the eructations of the swamp, or to give it a more cinematic name, “The Empire.”
Children in the United States are (or at least they used to be) told that in America, anyone can become president.
Of course, that has never really been true. At any given time, there are plenty of people who, for various reasons, could never become president. But the pleasing story did name a sort of half-truth that was also an ideal, an ideal that revolved around the effort to maintain a society that rewarded talent, ambition, and hard work more than it valued wealth, connections, or pedigree.
Donald Trump put that ideal to the test. The test failed.
Trump was the first candidate since Andrew Jackson really to challenge the dominant narrative. Trump was rich, which is a plus for candidates these days. But he came not just from the wrong sort of family, but also from the wrong consensus, the wrong universe of opinion and sentiment.
It was not so much his particular policies that were at issue. It was rather what he himself represented. Some people have banged on and on about Trump’s “character,” which they said was a bad character. But I do not believe that his character was ever really the issue. The issue was that he represented an existential threat to the governing consensus.
This consensus is not fundamentally Democratic or Republican. It is not really even left-wing or conservative. John Fonte came close to identifying it with his phrase “transnational progressivism.” The “transnational” part was just as important as the “progressive” element, not least because the definition of “progressive” is always a mutable and hungry thing. Yesterday’s progressive ideas routinely become tomorrow’s reactionary throwbacks because the critical thing is not specific policies but specific attitudes.
