February 11, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Three New Columns by Pat Buchanan – Where America Is Headed in 2020

Friends,

I have written previously in several columns—published by various publications—that this country has reached, or is reaching, a situation unparalleled in its history since 1861. The divisions, indeed, the very worldviews of diverse segments of our population have become so unbridgeable that talk of separation of parts of America, even a kind of civil war now is increasingly routine.

I have distinguished very broadly two segments of our population where this division sharply exists: those I call the “normals” and another group which I call the “insaniacs.”

The normals are those folks who more or less live in and inhabit the middle and south of the United States, what the late leftist writer Philip Roth once condescendingly denominated “fly over” country. They lead fairly consistent lives, are married (men to women), raise their children, work regular jobs, mostly go to church on Sundays, pay their mortgages, and generally follow the law. In a sense they are what I would call “traditionalists,” in that they live as best they can according to the rules and regulations of our social order, many of which are inherited, but which make for a mostly smooth-running society. They are not by definition either Republican or Democrat, although given the drift and movement in American culture and politics, they have tended to vote increasingly for Republicans…and they helped put Donald Trump into office in 2016.

They tend to be older, in their 40s, 50s, and on up, and in majority white racially.

The insaniacs, on the other hand, mostly inhabit the far West Coast (e.g., California, Oregon, Washington), the Atlantic northeast (e.g., Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, etc.), especially big cities like Chicago and Washington, and academic towns like Chapel Hill and Durham. They tend to be younger, Millenials—those in their 20s and 30s, usually far more wealthy than most normals (except for those college grads who continue to live with their parents), heavily dependent on the Internet and Twitter, college-educated (I should say “indoctrinated”), far less traditional in their personal lives and practiced morality (many unmarried). Religiously, if they practice any religion at all, they tend to be woke “social gospel” liberals. Higher level government employees, the vast number of academics and educators, and most media people--in other words major influencers in our society--can be classified as insaniacs.

Insaniacs have an almost diametrically opposite world view from normals. Their very concepts of reality differ in the extreme. For insaniacs there exists a whole set of postulates and assumptions which place them at extreme odds with normals, and those differences, which are profound, are growing by the day.

For nearly forty years Patrick Buchanan has been an acute observer of both our cultural and political environment. And he has signaled—and offered in his many columns and books significant  critiques and diagnoses of—what has happened and is happening in the country the American Framers left to us so hopefully in 1787. In that sense he has been a kind of St. John the Baptist announcing, if you will, the advent in 2016 of a Donald Trump.

And he continues to do that even into his 80s. 

I offer three of his most recent columns which seem to form a general theme about our current politics and society at large: his February 4 column on the failed impeachment attempt; the January 31 essay on Bernie Sanders and what his powerful movement (and that is what it is) means for the rest of us; and, most recently, the column of February 11, specifically addressing those apparently irreconcilable differences which only increase and become more fierce as time advances.

There is, I think, a certain unity in these three short essays, and it has specifically to do with earlier thoughts I’ve expressed. Pat certainly sees what is happening, and implicitly he raises the same questions that I raise: can this country remain united? What indeed is our future? Barring some Road to Damascus conversion are we headed for some kind of internal Brexit, or worse, civil war?

And, finally, if Donald Trump is re-elected this November…will the far East Coast and the far West Coast, and the leftist academic centers, erupt in violence and outright revolution?

Failed Coup of a Failing Establishment

https://buchanan.org/blog/failed-coup-of-a-failing-establishment-138111

By Patrick J. Buchanan    Tuesday - February 4, 2019

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad.

In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges.

As weekend polls show socialist Bernie Sanders surging into the lead for the nomination in the states of Iowa, New Hampshire and California, the sense of panic among Democratic Party elites is palpable.

Former Secretary of State and Joe Biden surrogate John Kerry was overheard Sunday at a Des Moines hotel talking of the "possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole."

Tuesday, Trump takes his nationally televised victory lap in the U.S. Capitol with his State of the Union address, as triumphant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a humiliated Speaker Nancy Pelosi sit silently side-by-side behind him.

Democrats may declare the Trump impeachment a victory for righteousness, but the anger and outrage, the moans and groans now coming off the editorial and op-ed pages and cable TV suggest the media know otherwise.

History, we are told, will vindicate what Pelosi and the Democrats did and stain forever the Republican Party for voting to acquit. Perhaps, but only if some future [radical Marxist] Howard Zinn is writing the history.

Reality: The impeachment of Trump was an attempted — and failed — coup that not a single Republican supported, only Democrats in the House and their Senate caucus. The impeachment of Trump was an exercise in pure partisanship and itself an abuse of power.

What was the heart of the Democrats' case to remove Trump? Trump failed to invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the White House, and held up military aid to Kyiv for several months, to get Zelenskiy to hold a press conference to announce that Kyiv was looking into how Hunter Biden got on the board of a corrupt energy company at a retainer of $83,000 a month while his father was the chief international monitor of corruption in Ukraine.

The specific indictment: Trump's suspension of military aid imperiled "our national security" by denying arms to an "ally" who was fighting the Russians over there, so we don't have to fight them over here.

And what was the outcome of it all? Zelenskiy got his meeting with the president. He got the military aid in September. He did not hold the press conference requested. He did not announce an investigation of the Bidens.

No harm, no foul.

How did President Obama handle Ukraine? After Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and intervened to protect pro-Russian secessionists in the Donbass, Obama's White House restricted U.S. lethal military aid to Kyiv and provided blankets and meals ready to eat.

What punishment did House and Senate Democrats and anti-Trump media demand for the pause in sending weapons for Ukraine?  Capital punishment, a political death penalty.

Democrats demanded that a Republican Senate overturn the election of 2016, make Trump the first president ever impeached and removed, and then ensure that the American people could never vote for him again. Nancy Pelosi's House and the Democratic minority in the Senate were demanding that a Republican Senate do their dirty work and keep Trump off the ballot in 2020, lest he win a second term.

For four years, elements of the liberal establishment — in the media, "deep state" and major institutions — have sought to destroy Trump. First, they aimed to smear him and prevent his election, and then to overturn it as having been orchestrated by the Kremlin, and then to impeach and remove him, and then to block him from running again.

The damage they have inflicted upon our country's institutions is serious. U.S. intelligence agencies are being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham for their role in instigating an investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign. The FBI has been discredited by exposure of a conspiracy of top-level agents to spy on Trump's campaign.

The media, by endlessly echoing unproven claims that Trump was a stooge of the Kremlin, discredited themselves to a degree unknown since the "Yellow Press" prostituted itself to get us into war with Spain. Media claims to be unbiased pursuers of truth have suffered, not only from Trump's attacks, but from their own biased and bigoted coverage and commentary.

The NSC and State Department have been exposed as employing individuals with an exaggerated view of their role in the origination and the execution of foreign policy. Disloyalty and animosity toward the chief executive appear to permeate the upper echelons of the "deep state."

Not in our lifetime have the institutions of government and the establishment been held in lower regard. Almost all now concede we have become an us vs. them nation.

How we accomplish great things again, giving our seemingly unbridgeable differences, remains a mystery.

Is Bernie's Hour of Power at Hand?

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernies-hour-of-power-at-hand-138097

By Patrick J. Buchanan     Friday - January 31, 2020

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It's hard to believe but not impossible.

As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls have him running first or second in the first three contests: Iowa on Monday, and then New Hampshire and Nevada.  If Bernie can best main rival Joe Biden in Iowa, he will likely thump Joe in New Hampshire. Biden's campaign, built around "electability," could suffer a credibility collapse before he reaches South Carolina, where Joe is banking on his African American base to rescue him if necessary and give him a send-off victory straight into Super Tuesday. If Sanders can beat Biden two or three times in the first four primaries in February, the last remaining roadblock on Sanders' path to the nomination could be Mike Bloomberg's billions.

Hillary Clinton may sneer, "Nobody likes him," but Bernie has a large, dedicated, loyal following, especially among millennials, and tens of thousands more small-dollar donors than any other Democratic candidate.

He is flush with cash. He has a radical agenda that appeals to the ideological left and the idealistic young. The rising star of the party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is campaigning alongside him. And, say what you will, Sanders is no trimmer or time-server. He has consistently voted his values and views. He voted no to Bush 41's Gulf War, no to Bush 43's Iraq War, no to NAFTA, no to GATT. In the '80s, when President Reagan battled the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Sanders was on the other side.

But what makes Sanders an appealing candidate for the Democratic nomination may prove poisonous to him as a party nominee in the fall. For what does Bernie promise?  Free tuition at public colleges and forgiveness of all student debt. "Medicare for All," a single-payer government-run health care system that would require a huge hike in middle-class taxes and abolish private health insurance for the 160 million Americans currently enrolled.
He would break up the big banks, go after Wall Street, add $60 trillion of federal spending in the next decade, and raise income, corporate, capital gains, estate and inheritance taxes. He would expand the government's share of the U.S. economy to levels rivaling that of France, the highest in the free world.

Bernie was first to back the Green New Deal and pledges to reach carbon neutrality in 10 years in energy and transportation. As for our oil, gas and coal producers, says Sanders, they "have evaded taxes, desecrated tribal lands, exploited workers and poisoned communities."

How would Sanders deal with the millions of illegal migrants now within the country? He'd welcome them all in. Bernie has proposed the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection and wants to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million to 22 million illegal migrants already here. He would decriminalize border-jumping and give health and welfare benefits to the invaders.

He would decriminalize the breaching of America's borders. "My first executive orders," tweeted Bernie last week, "will be to reverse every single thing President Trump has done to demonize and harm immigrants, including his racist and disgusting Muslim ban."

Leaders of the center-left think tank Third Way warn that a Sanders nomination risks a Democratic rout of the magnitude of the 49-state losses of George McGovern in 1972 and of Walter Mondale in 1984.

Vulnerable Democrats in moderate and swing districts would have to jump ship, abandoning the ticket to survive the slaughter.

Fearful of such an outcome to a Sanders-Trump race, super PACs run by moderate Democrats have begun to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads to blunt his momentum in Iowa. What Socialist Jeremy Corbyn did to Britain's Labour party — leading it to the worst defeat since the 1930s — Sanders could do to the Democratic Party, write Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of Third Way.

In 2016, Sanders ran a surprisingly strong race for the nomination, and it was later learned that a supposedly neutral DNC had been in the tank for Hillary Clinton. The Democratic establishment, the party elite, had collaborated to put the fix in against Bernie.

Yet Sanders supported Clinton that fall. If, however, Bernie's last chance at the nomination is aborted by an establishment piling on, party super PACs running attack ads against him, and major media taking time out from trashing Trump to break Sanders, the Democratic Party will have the devil's time of it bringing Bernie's backers home in the fall.

Bernie's believers might just conclude that the real obstacle to their dream of remaking America is neither the radical right nor Donald Trump, but the elites within their own party.

Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People

https://buchanan.org/blog/long-before-trump-we-were-a-divided-people-138138

By Patrick J. Buchanan  Tuesday - February 11, 2019

In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter.

Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of Republicans approve of his handling of his presidency, in his fourth year, despite the worst press any president has ever received and the sustained hostility of our cultural elites.

Only Bush I in the first months of the 1991 Gulf War and Bush II in the first months of the 2003 Iraq War registered support like this. Only one Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney, and only after having consulted God himself, joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi and voted with Sen. Chuck Schumer's caucus to bring down the president.

When have Republicans ever exhibited the home-team enthusiasm they demonstrated during that State of the Union address and the post-acquittal gathering in the East Room? When have working- and middle-class voters shown such support for a Republican as they do for Trump at his mammoth rallies? Heading for November, this is a party united.

But not only is Trump the great uniter of the GOP. He is the great uniter of Democrats. Every Democrat but three in the House voted to impeach and remove him. Every Democrat in the Senate voted to convict and expel him from office and prevent his ever running again.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, evicting Trump from the Oval Office seemed the one issue that animated every candidate. Getting Trump out of the White House seems far more important to Democrats than getting U.S. troops out of the endless Middle East wars.

But while he has made more than a small contribution to our savage partisanship, is Trump really the cause of the uncivil war in America? Or is his presidency, like Gettysburg, simply the battlefield upon which America's cultural and political war is currently engaged?

Consider. Bernie Sanders' nationalization of health care and abolition of private health insurance for 150 million Americans is grounded in a socialism that has never been reconcilable with Trump's belief in the superiority of the private sector, a belief reflected in Trump's tax cuts for corporations and individuals and his deregulation policies.

Democrats' unanimous support for "reproductive rights" is in eternal conflict with the traditionalist belief in a God-given right to life, as well as with Trump's pledge to nominate justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. Still, the battles over the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas predated by decades the battle over Brett Kavanaugh.

Immigration may determine the destiny of the West. Yet, Democrats believe in tearing down Trump's wall, an end to deportations, extending welfare benefits to border-crossers and granting sanctuary from border security agents for criminals here illegally.
That Americans of European descent, 90% of the nation in 1960, close to 60% today, will, in 20 years, be less than half of the population, is for Democrats a cause of ceaseless celebration. America, they contend, will be a far, far better place than we have ever known when a far smaller share of the population is white. The greater the racial, credal, cultural and ethnic diversity, the better the country.

Yet, Americans of European descent, headed for minority status, provide 85-90% of all Republican votes in presidential elections. What Democrats are cheering portends the demographic death of the GOP.

Republicans are a more nationalist and populist party than they were in the Bush presidencies. But the Democratic Party has become a politically correct institution where Joe Biden is forced to explain stands that he took when he was a moderate Democratic senator from Delaware. His opposition to the forced busing of children from neighborhood schools into inner-city schools was attacked as racist. He had to apologize for his friendship with Southern senators like Jim Eastland and his role in the Clarence Thomas hearings. He has been made to confess for voting to authorize the 2003 war on Iraq.

Biden is far to the left of where he used to be as a senator. Apparently, he has not moved far enough.

Even James Carville is castigating his own party's candidates for talking about "reparations or any kind of goofy left-wing thing out there." "It's like we're losing our damn minds," said Carville.  Is Trump responsible for what Carville himself sees as an irrationality and irresponsibility taking on epidemic proportions inside the Democratic Party? Or has Trump's success maddened Democrats into manifesting who they are and what they believe, and what may yet prevent them from being taken seriously as a party that can lead the nation?

We were divided long before Trump got here, and we will remain so long after he departs.