But let’s just pretend for a moment that the 50 million number is deceiving, that just as there’s a structural unemployment rate that will never entirely vanish, there’s a structural disenchantment rate — ordinarily populated by the dumbest, the most gullible, the most irritable, the meanest, the hurtingest, the most selfish Americans — whose numbers swell during certain frightening moments in history. Such as war, economic recession, globalization and inequitable concentration of wealth along Gilded Age lines.
That’s the narrative we’re hearing in the press. The problem is, what’s happening now isn’t some transitory blip; it’s the culmination of a 40-year campaign, an incessant drumbeat of grievance against minority rights, gun control, same-sex marriage, secularization, tax-and-spend Big Government, climate hoax, “job killing” regulation, feminism and the rest of a sinister Liberal Agenda that amounts, of course, to tyranny.
Yes, Trump is riding a wave of resentment, but this isn’t a natural ocean, it’s a wave pool at a bizarro theme park, operated by the Heritage Foundation, the American Family Association, Fox News Channel, the NRA, Mark Levin, the Club for Growth, the American Enterprise Institute, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Breitbart and the Tea Party. Trump’s calumnies are little more than a “Best of” collection from the Great Rightwing Conspiracy.
Go back to 2012 and the last set of Republican primary candidates. Newt Gingrich called for the arrest of federal judges for “activist” decisions. Michele Bachmann denied the separation of church and state. Ron Paul said the United Nations was going to usurp American sovereignty and take away our guns, property and rights. Gingrich called the Obama administration “socialist” and Bachmann called it “gangster government. Rick Santorum said Obama “has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.”
Sound familiar at all? It’s a never ending chorus, Ted Nugent-style.
