On the Republican side,
the structure of the primary schedule, however, favored the insurgent Donald
Trump who, having performed the salutary task of dispensing the last of the
Bush Dynasty, ran away with the Southern primaries with his transparently
racist and xenophobic agenda and his crypto-fascist campaign style; a recipe
sure to appeal to the gut instincts of those who fly the stars and bars. What the moneyed elites who are presently
losing their tenuous grasp on the levers of the Rescumlican Party do not
understand is that these people have been savaged by the economic policies of
their party and are now in no mood to be dictated to by the policy wonks holed
up at the Heritage Foundation or any of the other stink tanks heretofore
directing the show. This struggle can be
openly seen in the tussle now occurring between Donald Trump and the current
Speaker of the House who insists on driving budgets that savage the very people
that inhabit these haunts. Accordingly,
the ‘evangelicals’, the rank and file that is, are voting for the likes of
Donald Trump, much to the chagrin of their religious and Republican Party
leaders.
The Rescumlican leadership
now finds itself in full panic mode as the flock have fled the pen and left the
reservation. Mitt Romney, speaking
before a group at the University of Utah, excoriated Trump, calling him out on
his many failures and his phoniness.
This, alas, only served to strengthen Trump as the rank and file of the
Rescumlican Party, long inured to the influence of the ‘press’ quickly ciphered
that Trump must be worth something to be hated in so indecent a fashion. And so as “Faux News” rails against the
upstart to no avail; the king makers, long accustomed to docility, now find
themselves confronted with a full-fledged revolt for, alas, it turns out that
the beer-drinking fans of NASCAR do not have the same economic agenda as Wall
Street hedge fund managers and vulture capitalists. The southern primaries were meant to stop
this. Evangelicals and Southern
good-old-boy racism were meant to prevent any woolly-headed ideas cooked up by
northern liberals from ever emerging on the national stage.
But this is a different
year. The times, they say,
‘are-a-changing’. On the political right
(wrong), instead of hampering the economic populism always nascent in
conservative America, such is the strength of the ‘populist’ revolt currently
underway that all the old bromides—abortion, flag-waving jingoism, and appeals
to ‘tinkle-down’ free-market economics, have the sound of tinkling brass—or,
rather, a cruel hoax. Instead the rank
and file on the conservative end of the spectrum, retaining only the
all-too-transparent racism and misogyny, have opted for a full-throated rage
against the economic policies that have created this mess.
Nowhere is this seen as
clearly as in the wholesale rejection by the Rescumlican rank-and-file of
experience. Why? Because experience
hasn’t served them very well. Those in
power are the ones who created this mess in the first place; and, after nearly
4 decades in which the Middle Class has been left with their faces pressed
against the window as the party inside went on and on, there is now rumbling in
the streets.
Gone now are Governors
Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Chris Christie and, most notably, John Ellis Bush
leaving only The Donald, followed by an empty shirt and a messianic menace,
both first-term senators. Only John Kasich
of Ohio, of those still standing, has any real experience in governance. For it is written “the Last shall be First”.
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