Occasionally, you’ll hear someone complain that the Republican Establishment is willing to sell out conservative principles in order to get elected. This isn’t really true. The problem with the political consultants, the talking heads, and the Republican establishment is that they just aren’t very good at politics.
Over the last few months, we’ve heard people pronounce Donald Trump politically dead over and over again. But he just keeps getting stronger. And these same people are those who gave us Bob Dole over Pat Buchanan, or who foisted John McCain on the Republican Party in 2008. The bottom line is that they don’t know how to win elections. After all, if you are a political consultant, you get paid either way.
It’s not necessarily true that every election is basically about getting your base to compromise as much as possible and then winning the votes of the independents in the center. As VDARE.com readers know, there is something called The Radical Center, and anti-establishment independent voters may appear “moderate” by some political measures and radical in others. For examples, I’d guess many of Trump’s voters are “centrist” in the sense that they don’t want to raise the Social Security retirement age. Some Beltway Right types might even call them “liberal” for that reason. But they have strong patriotic views when it comes to The National Question, which makes them “radical” in today’s political climate.
Plus, we have to think about the way the American political system works. Unlike Europe, where you essentially vote for a party, here you vote for personalities. And many voters support a candidate solely on personality, the kind of gut feeling they have about somebody. You can map out the “correct” sequence of political positions that will win you majority support, but if people don’t like your personality, you are not going to win the election.
Which brings us to the Democrats. While the national media is fixated on the Republican primaries – after all, that’s where Trump is – the Democratic primary might turn out to be an even closer contest. If Trump wins Iowa, where some recent polls now have him ahead, he might very well run the table considering his national lead. However, for the Democrats, it looks like Bernie Sanders is pulling ahead in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and Hillary Clinton’s national lead is rapidly shrinking. It may be the Democrats who end up going to a brokered convention, as Hillary might have to call in her pledged “superdelegates” to essentially award her the nomination.
Hillary has always been a paper tiger. In 2008, she was supposed to cruise to the nomination and easily defeat Barack Obama. But her sense of inevitability gradually collapsed. Once she was perceived as vulnerable, the Clinton campaign fell apart.
The same thing is happening today. People just don’t like Clinton very much. And Trump, by bringing up Bill’s record, has turned Hillary’s feminist credentials into a weakness rather than a strength.
Which means the GOP may be facing Bernie Sanders in the fall. Republican establishment types and consultants may take this as a sign of guaranteed victory. They should not be so certain. In many ways, Sanders could prove harder to beat.
First, socialism isn’t the scare word it once was. A solid majority of young people and students, according to some polls, favor socialism above capitalism. The polls show he is competitive. Sanders is drawing huge crowds at his rallies and has a great deal of enthusiasm behind him. More importantly, unlike Trump, if he can deflate Hillary, he will practically be guaranteed fawning media coverage.
The GOP, and even Trump, is too complacent about him. Sanders will be able to campaign as an outsider and a rebel. He may even pick up some of Trump’s supporters if the GOP is foolish enough to deny The Donald the nomination and give it to someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio who has nothing to offer white working class voters. Not that Sanders would be good for white working class voters – with his fanatical support of mass immigration, waffling on gun control, high taxes, anti-white racial preferences, and political correctness, he won’t actually do anything about the collapse of most Americans’ standard of living. But he will be perceived as something new, and that may make all the difference in an election cycle defined by anger.
Truth be told, the GOP should want to run against Hillary. She’s not a very good politician. She’s unlikable and her voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Her tenure as Secretary of State was an utter disaster on policy grounds. And her only real accomplishment was marrying Bill.
The GOP Establishment keeps assuming America is a Center-Right nation. Thanks to the Cultural Marxist takeover of academia and the media and the growing Third World population, this is no longer true. America is on the verge of a precipice. 2016 is, in many ways, America’s last chance.
The GOP candidate, especially if it’s Trump, needs to run as a rebel against the System. He can do that if he’s running against Hillary Clinton. It will be awful hard to do it if he’s running against a Socialist he can pose as a rebel. Of course, Sanders isn’t some rebel against the System. He’s its culmination. He’s simply a more extreme version of Obama. But this year, people aren’t looking for moderates. They’re looking for revolutionaries. Let’s hope the revolution comes from our side.
I’m Virginia Dare and I’ll speak to you again soon.
