Trump wins the GOP nomination
- Thread starter Narushima
- Start date
Spoken like a European who actually cares about his continent.
No matter the outcome of the election, the shift of the political zeitgeist that Trump heralds is going to ripple out into western Europe.
Pat Buchanan - a true American Conservative - predicted just this back in 2014. To be honest, when read him at the time, I was actually very pessimistic about the US itself and believed that a nationalist-populist movement would only be viable in Europe but it seems that Buchanan was a prophet after-all. His prophecy is worth quoting in full here for you guys:
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"Who Owns the Future?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the “end of history” where “Western liberal democracy” becomes “the final form of human government.”
A quarter century on, such optimism seems naive.
Consider the United States, the paragon of liberal democracy.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that only 14 percent of the people approve of Congress and only 19 percent approve of the GOP. Seventy-one percent believe America is headed in the wrong direction.
Nor is this the exceptional crisis of a particular presidency.
JFK was assassinated. LBJ was broken by race riots and anti-war demonstrations. Richard Nixon, facing impeachment, resigned. Gerald Ford was rejected by the electorate. Ronald Reagan was highly successful — like Nixon, he won in a 49-state landslide after his first term — but during the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987 there was a real threat of a second impeachment. And Bill Clinton was impeached.
Our democracy seems to be at war with itself.
Now there is talk of impeaching Obama. It will become a clamor should he grant executive amnesty to 5 million illegal immigrants.
Political science has long described what seems to be happening.
From the tribal leader comes the monarch, whose reign gives way to an aristocracy that produces a middle class that creates a republic, the degenerative form of which is that pure democracy of which John Adams wrote:
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” Then comes the strong man again.
Is that our future? Is Western democracy approaching the end of its tether, with the seeming success of
authoritarian capitalism in China and Russia? Recent history provides us with examples.
World War I, begun 100 years ago, brought down many of the reigning monarchs of Europe. The caliph of the Ottoman Empire was sent packing by Kemal Ataturk. Czar Nicholas II was murdered on the orders of the usurper Vladimir Lenin.
Fighting off a Bolshevik invasion, Marshal Pilsudski rose to power in Poland. Admiral Miklos Horthy ran the communists out of Budapest and took the helm. Mussolini led the 1922 March on Rome. Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 failed, but his party utilized democracy’s institutions to seize power and murder democracy. Out of the Spanish Civil War came the dictatorship of Gen. Franco. And so it went.
Vladimir Putin may be the most reviled European leader among Western elites today, but he is more popular in his own country than any other Western ruler, with 80 percent approval, for standing up for Russia and Russians everywhere.
Polls in France say that, were elections held today, Marine Le Pen would replace Francois Hollande in the Elysee Palace.
Eurocrats bewail what is happening, but, inhibited by secularist ideology, fail to understand it.
They believe in economism, rule by scholarly global elites, and recoil at the resurgence of nationalism and populism.
They do not understand people of the heart because they do not understand human nature.
People don’t enlist, endure, fight and die for cerebral constructs.
Who, then, will own the future — of Europe, America, the world?
The day of the democratist and transnational elite appears to be passing. In Europe, the Scots, Catalans, Corsicans, Venetians and Flemish seek to secede from England, Spain, France, Italy and Belgium, respectively.
Not only the National Front in France, but also the UK Independence Party of Nigel Farage and a dozen other nationalist parties on the continent want out of the European Union and an end to immigration.
And they are no longer intimidated by name-calling.
In America, a tectonic shift has taken place in public opinion with the arrival on our border of 60,000 children from Central America and the threat by Obama to issue executive amnesty to 5 million illegals.
Last week, Alabama Congressman “Mo” Brooks said there is a “war on whites” in America, being led by Obama, noting that under civil right laws the only group one may discriminate against is white males.
Nor has Brooks recanted under fire.
In a Washington Post column answering Brooks, “A Welcome End to American Whiteness,” Dana Milbank concedes that, by 2043, white Americans will be less than half of the U.S. population. They were near 90 percent in 1960.
Far from being something to fear, Milbank writes, this “is to be celebrated. Indeed, it is the key to our survival.” Immigrants pouring in from the Third World will bring a “fresh labor supply” and “fresh blood to cure us of what ails us.” A tired America will be revitalized.
Perhaps. But sociologist Robert Putnam discovered that the more ethnically and linguistically diverse a society becomes, the more its social capital evaporates, and the less do its multicultural members gather together to cooperate in common causes.
And from those recent polls, Americans seem to look on the prospect of an even more racially and culturally diverse America of tomorrow, not with anticipation, but with a measure of dread."
Sir Francis Drake
Active member
Buchanan speaks post Trump nomination win, "Bush Republicanism Is Dead and Gone":
“The two living Republican past presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, have no plans to endorse Trump, according to their spokesmen.” So said the lead story in The Washington Post.
Graceless, yes, but not unexpected. The Bushes have many fine qualities. Losing well, however, is not one of them.
And they have to know, whether they concede it or not, that Trump’s triumph is a sweeping repudiation of Bush Republicanism by the same party that nominated them four times for the presidency.
Not only was son and brother, Jeb, humiliated and chased out of the race early, but Trump won his nomination by denouncing as rotten to the core the primary fruits of signature Bush policies.
Twelve million aliens are here illegally, said Trump, because the Bushes failed to secure America’s borders.
America has run up $12 trillion in trade deficits and been displaced as the world’s first manufacturing power by China, said Trump, because of the lousy trade deals backed by Bush Republicans.
The greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history, said Trump, was the Bush II decision to invade Iraq to disarm it of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
The war Bush began, says Trump, produced 5,000 American dead, scores of thousands wounded, trillions of dollars wasted, and a Middle East sunk in civil-sectarian war, chaos and fanaticism.
That is a savage indictment of the Bush legacy. And a Republican electorate, in the largest turnout in primary history, nodded, “Amen to that, brother!”
No matter who wins in November, there is no going back for the GOP.
Can anyone think the Republican Party can return to open borders or new free-trade agreements like NAFTA?
Can anyone believe another U.S. Army, like the ones Bush I and Bush II sent into Afghanistan and Iraq, will be mounted up and march to remake another Middle East country in America’s image?
Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom are history.
What the Trump campaign revealed, as Republicans and even Democrats moved toward him on trade, immigration and foreign policy, is that Bush Republicanism and neoconservatism not only suffered a decisive defeat, they had a sword run right through them.
They are as dead as emperor-worship in Japan.
Trump won the nomination, he won the argument, and he won the debate. The party is now with Trump — on the issues. For GOP elites, there can be no going back to what the grass roots rejected.
What does this suggest for Trump himself?
While he ought to keep an open door to those he defeated, the greatest mistake he could make would be to seek the support of the establishment he crushed by compromising on the issues that brought out his crowds and brought him his victories and nomination.
Given Trump’s negatives, the Beltway punditocracy is writing him off, warning that Trump either comes to terms with the establishment on the issues, or he is gone for good.
History teaches otherwise.
Hubert Humphrey closed a 15-point gap in the Gallup poll on Oct. 1 to reach a 43-43 photo finish with Richard Nixon in 1968.
President Gerald Ford was down 33 points to Jimmy Carter in mid-July 1976, but lost by only 2 points on Election Day.
In February 1980, Ronald Reagan was 29 points behind Jimmy Carter, whom he would crush 51-41 in a 44-state landslide.
Gov. Michael Dukakis left his Atlanta convention 17 points ahead of Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988. Five weeks later, Labor Day, Bush had an eight-point lead he never lost, and swept 40 states.
What this suggests is extraordinary volatility of the electorate in the modern age. As this year has shown, that has not changed.
How then should Trump proceed?
Unify the party, to the degree he can, by keeping an open door to the defeated and offering a hand in friendship to all who wish to join his ranks, while refusing to compromise the issues that got him where he is. If the Bushes and neocons wish to depart, let them go.
Lest we forget, Congressman John Anderson, who lost to Reagan in the primaries, bolted the party and won 7 percent of the national vote.
Ted Cruz, who won more states and votes than all other Trump rivals put together, should be offered a prime-time speaking slot at Cleveland — in return for endorsing the Trump ticket.
As the vice presidential nominee remains the only drama left, Trump should hold off announcing his choice until closer to Cleveland.
For while that decision will leave one person elated, it will leave scores despondent. And the longer Trump delays his announcement, the more that those who see themselves as a future vice president will be praising him, or at least holding off from attacking him.
Ultimately, the Great Unifier upon whom the Republican Party may reliably depend is the nominee of the Democratic Party — Director James Comey and his FBI consenting — Hillary Rodham Clinton."
You must be registered for see links
“The two living Republican past presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, have no plans to endorse Trump, according to their spokesmen.” So said the lead story in The Washington Post.
Graceless, yes, but not unexpected. The Bushes have many fine qualities. Losing well, however, is not one of them.
And they have to know, whether they concede it or not, that Trump’s triumph is a sweeping repudiation of Bush Republicanism by the same party that nominated them four times for the presidency.
Not only was son and brother, Jeb, humiliated and chased out of the race early, but Trump won his nomination by denouncing as rotten to the core the primary fruits of signature Bush policies.
Twelve million aliens are here illegally, said Trump, because the Bushes failed to secure America’s borders.
America has run up $12 trillion in trade deficits and been displaced as the world’s first manufacturing power by China, said Trump, because of the lousy trade deals backed by Bush Republicans.
The greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history, said Trump, was the Bush II decision to invade Iraq to disarm it of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
The war Bush began, says Trump, produced 5,000 American dead, scores of thousands wounded, trillions of dollars wasted, and a Middle East sunk in civil-sectarian war, chaos and fanaticism.
That is a savage indictment of the Bush legacy. And a Republican electorate, in the largest turnout in primary history, nodded, “Amen to that, brother!”
No matter who wins in November, there is no going back for the GOP.
Can anyone think the Republican Party can return to open borders or new free-trade agreements like NAFTA?
Can anyone believe another U.S. Army, like the ones Bush I and Bush II sent into Afghanistan and Iraq, will be mounted up and march to remake another Middle East country in America’s image?
Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom are history.
What the Trump campaign revealed, as Republicans and even Democrats moved toward him on trade, immigration and foreign policy, is that Bush Republicanism and neoconservatism not only suffered a decisive defeat, they had a sword run right through them.
They are as dead as emperor-worship in Japan.
Trump won the nomination, he won the argument, and he won the debate. The party is now with Trump — on the issues. For GOP elites, there can be no going back to what the grass roots rejected.
What does this suggest for Trump himself?
While he ought to keep an open door to those he defeated, the greatest mistake he could make would be to seek the support of the establishment he crushed by compromising on the issues that brought out his crowds and brought him his victories and nomination.
Given Trump’s negatives, the Beltway punditocracy is writing him off, warning that Trump either comes to terms with the establishment on the issues, or he is gone for good.
History teaches otherwise.
Hubert Humphrey closed a 15-point gap in the Gallup poll on Oct. 1 to reach a 43-43 photo finish with Richard Nixon in 1968.
President Gerald Ford was down 33 points to Jimmy Carter in mid-July 1976, but lost by only 2 points on Election Day.
In February 1980, Ronald Reagan was 29 points behind Jimmy Carter, whom he would crush 51-41 in a 44-state landslide.
Gov. Michael Dukakis left his Atlanta convention 17 points ahead of Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988. Five weeks later, Labor Day, Bush had an eight-point lead he never lost, and swept 40 states.
What this suggests is extraordinary volatility of the electorate in the modern age. As this year has shown, that has not changed.
How then should Trump proceed?
Unify the party, to the degree he can, by keeping an open door to the defeated and offering a hand in friendship to all who wish to join his ranks, while refusing to compromise the issues that got him where he is. If the Bushes and neocons wish to depart, let them go.
Lest we forget, Congressman John Anderson, who lost to Reagan in the primaries, bolted the party and won 7 percent of the national vote.
Ted Cruz, who won more states and votes than all other Trump rivals put together, should be offered a prime-time speaking slot at Cleveland — in return for endorsing the Trump ticket.
As the vice presidential nominee remains the only drama left, Trump should hold off announcing his choice until closer to Cleveland.
For while that decision will leave one person elated, it will leave scores despondent. And the longer Trump delays his announcement, the more that those who see themselves as a future vice president will be praising him, or at least holding off from attacking him.
Ultimately, the Great Unifier upon whom the Republican Party may reliably depend is the nominee of the Democratic Party — Director James Comey and his FBI consenting — Hillary Rodham Clinton."
Claymantan
Active member
The GOP thought they ran the game. Trump wasn't even an insider. This is a crippling blow to them that's going to force them to rethink their entire conception of politics.