RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is Donald Trump’s presidential nomination the vanguard of a new political movement in the Republican Party or an accident of circumstance in this odd election year? The answer won’t be clear at least until November, but the evidence in recent GOP primaries suggests it may be the latter.

That message came through Tuesday with the thumping primary victories by Senators Marco Rubio in Florida and John McCain in Arizona. Mr. Rubio received more than 70% of the vote in a multicandidate field that included businessman Carlos Beruff, who campaigned as a Trump clone on trade and immigration. He spent $8 million of his own money but didn’t get a fifth of the vote.

Mr. McCain defied predictions of a close primary in Arizona by whipping former state senator Kelli Ward by double digits. Ms. Ward was backed by Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund operator who financed Ted Cruz. Ms. Ward ran hard against immigration and tried to portray the five-term Senator, who turned 80 years old Monday, as a tainted fixture of Washington.

The impact of immigration is especially intriguing in these primaries. Messrs. Rubio and McCain were members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” Senators who negotiated the 2013 immigration reform. That bill passed the Senate but never made it to the House floor amid a conservative panic. Their opponents tried to make those Senate votes disqualifying, but GOP primary voters seem to have put immigration well down the list of priorities.

These races follow the defeat of businessman Paul Nehlen, another Trumpian, who received less than 16% against House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin in early August. Mr. Nehlen received lots of out-of-state money and publicity from the Trump network, especially Breitbart.com.

As Ian reports, it has now come to light that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy about 30 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi massacre. They were recovered by the FBI, notwithstanding the use by Mrs. “Like With a Cloth or Something” of an advanced software program – “BleachBit” – in a willful effort to erase the contents of her servers so thoroughly that no one would be able to recover her emails (many of which were government records, which it is a felony to horde and destroy).

Obviously, these emails were kept from the congressional committees that investigated the Benghazi massacre. Mrs. Clinton was also clearly trying to shield them from discovery by defense lawyers in the prosecution of the lone terrorist the Obama administration has thus far charged (in connection with an attack that involved scores of jihadists whom Obama promised to “bring to justice”).

The depth of Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct regarding the unlawful email system and the obstruction of investigations into a terrorist attack in which four Americans were killed is breathtaking – as is the media’s indifference to it. As I’ve repeatedly argued, Clinton ought to be impeached. How much more contempt for Congress does she need to exhibit before some dim memory of self-respect moves lawmakers to take some action?

Nearly as reprehensible, however, is the Obama administration at large. Evidently, it has just today gotten around to telling a United States court that these 30 emails have never been disclosed, even though they have been sought for years, the Justice Department has known the FBI had them for months, and the State Department, too, has to have known they were in the possession of the administration as it litigated Freedom of Information Act claims yet said nothing.

Just as astounding: In making their grudging disclosure today, administration lawyers claimed that they needed another month (until the end of September) to review the emails so that classified information could be redacted before they are disclosed.

Mind you: Mrs. Clinton told us there were no government-business related emails on her servers and certainly no classified information. It turned out there were tens of thousands of government-related emails, with thousands containing classified information. Clinton lawlessly withheld these emails for years, and the executive branch has known about them for months. Indeed, the FBI director told Congress and the public that the FBI went through a painstaking process with intelligence agencies to determine which of the recovered emails had classified information in them. And yet, despite all that, the State Department has the audacity to tell a federal judge that it needs another 30 days to review less than three dozen emails?

Seriously?

When I was a federal prosecutor, neither I nor any of the government lawyers I worked with would have had the nerve to look a federal judge in the eye and make such a mind-blowing request. We’d have been too worried about what we’d say when the judge inevitably asked, “Why am I just hearing about this now?” – and ordered us to produce affidavits from every government official potentially involved in the delay while all these investigations and FOIA requests regarding Benghazi were underway.

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.

In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda. The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.

Hillary Clinton would have us believe that Trump is a scary member of the white supremacist radical fringe. Democrats are happy to believe her, even though Trump has zero relationship with hate groups. None, nada, zilch. Their only evidence is gotcha questions from liberal reporters asking Trump to repudiate David Duke over and over, tarring him by association. But there is no association, except in liberal minds that see Republicans, that is, the majority of whites in this country, as hate-filled kooks.

In contrast, Hillary actually does support BLM, a racist organization that promotes murder of whites. She repeats the cop-killing lie that we have a racist justice system. This lie was first promulgated by President Obama before the Zimmerman trail because Obama was hemorrhaging black voters during his 2012 e-election bid. Hillary is repeating it for the same cynical purpose.

We are living through the results — cops afraid to police high crime neighborhoods, leaving their residents to be murdered. Now cops being assassinated in cold blood.

Hillary has blood on her hands, destroying the country with this demagoguery. There is no institutionalized police racism. There are have no facts on her side, just a false abuse of statistics.

Yet Hillary keeps piling on her accusations that Americans are racist. She has ginned up black fear, pain and victimization for her political benefit and provided legitimacy to the anti-cop radicals. Hundreds of black lives have been lost as a result. Real lives, real people, real dead.

Hillary’s support of BLM and other radical left groups is not new or out of character. This is not guilt by association, but actual associations.

Hillary actually was an acolyte of Marxist Saul Alinsky, whom she idolized. Young Hillary was thrilled to meet personally with Alinsky, a meeting so successful that he offered her a job at his Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).

The populist revolt against governing elites sweeping advanced democracies is the latest chapter in the oldest political story. Every society, regardless of its form of government, has a ruling class. The crucial question is whether elites rule in their own interest or for the common good.

In the decades after World War II, the ruling classes in Western Europe and the U.S. managed their economies and social policies in ways that improved the well-being of the overwhelming majority of their citizens. In return, citizens accorded elites a measure of deference. Trust in government was high.

These ruling classes weren’t filled by the traditional aristocracy, and only partly by the wealthy. As time passed, educated professionals assumed the leading role. Many came from relatively humble backgrounds, but they attended the best schools and formed enduring networks with fellow students.

Some were economists, others specialists in public policy and administration, still others scientists whose contributions to the war effort translated into peacetime prestige. Many were lawyers able to train their honed analytical powers on governance. They were, in a term coined in the late 1950s, the “meritocracy.”

In some human endeavors, meritocratic claims are largely unproblematic. In sports, we celebrate the excellence of those who win. In the sciences, peer review identifies accomplishment; most people in each specialty can name the handful of individuals likely to win the Nobel Prize.

Politics, especially in democracies, is more complicated. Democratic equality stands in tension with hierarchical claims of every type, including merit. In a letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson characterized elections as the best way of elevating the “natural aristoi” into positions of authority. He had in mind people like himself, liberally educated and trained in the subtle art of governance.

This view didn’t survive the 1820s, when Andrew Jackson led a popular revolt against it. Alleging that a “corrupt bargain” among elites had cheated him out of the presidency in 1824, he swept to a victory in 1828 that he portrayed as a triumph for the common man—farmers, craftsmen, sturdy pioneers—against the moneyed interests. Ever since, the trope of the virtuous people against the self-dealing elites has endured in American politics.

Yet this is more than an American story. In democracies, meritocracy will always be on the defensive. Its legitimacy will always depend on its performance—its ability to provide physical security and broadly shared prosperity, as well as to conduct foreign policy and armed conflict successfully. When it fails to deliver, all bets are off. CONTINUE AT SITE