Did Donald Trump unite the American Silent Marjory behind things true and shared?

These are economic prosperity, national pride and unity, recognizable neighborhoods—a yen that demands an end to the transformation of neighborhoods through centrally planned, mass immigration—and an end to gratuitous wars.

Those were the questions asked in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June 29, 2016), and answered in the affirmative.

Unlike America’s self-anointed cognoscenti, some of us saw this coming. The former recognize truth only once card-carrying members arrive at it independently, grasp and broadcast it, sometimes years too late. Not so America’s marginalized writers. Not in 2012, but in 2002 did we pinpoint the wrongness of the Iraq War. And not in 2016, but in July of 2015 did some of us, not fortuitously, finger Trump as “a candidate to ‘kick the crap out of all the politicians'” and “send the system’s sycophants scattering” (August 14, 2015). His appeal, as this writer has contended since late in 2015, transcended left and right.

Conversely, vaunted statistician Nate Silver “calculated, last November, that Trump’s support was ‘about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.'” (Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University properly downgraded wonder boy Silver’s intellectual prowess. His prose, wrote the good teacher, was a sprawl that “evinces a greater affiliation to rigor with data analysis than to rigor with philosophy of science or, for that matter, rigor with rhetoric.”)

Given the disparate groups that rooted for Mr. Trump’s candidacy, it would appear that he did in fact awaken a historic majority. You could say Mr. Trump was an “omnibus candidate,” a concept floated by historian David Hackett Fischer. An omnibus campaign is one that appeals in all cultural regions. Back in the 1840 and 1848 elections, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, respectively, proved to be “omnibus candidates,” popular across cultural regions.

In his ability to run strongly in almost every cultural region, Trump is the closest the country has come in a long time to an “omnibus candidate.”

President-elect Trump answered the many prayers of very many people.

The establishment’s reaction to the Trump revolution comports with “the conduct of elites,” also traced by Hackett Fischer in his towering text, “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America”: “There is a cultural equivalent of the iron law of oligarchy. Small groups dominate every cultural system. They tend to do so by controlling institutions and processes, so that they become the ‘governors’ of a culture in both a political and mechanical sense.”

“The iron law of cultural elites is an historical constant,” posited Hackett Fischer in his magisterial account of American cultural and social origins. “But the relation between elites and other cultural groups is highly variable. Every culture might be seen as a system of bargaining, in which elites maintain their hegemony by concessions to other groups.”

These old bargaining processes may have worked in New England’s town system, where each community enjoyed a “high degree of autonomy and also a common interest in supporting the system itself.” But “reciprocal liberty” in early America’s “back settlements” has long since given way to elite solidarity, hegemony, log-rolling and collusion with favored interests.

In virtue, the American oligarchy currently in control of the intellectual means of production bears no resemblance to the natural aristocracy, the object of Thomas Jefferson’s lauding reflections. Likewise, Sir William Berkeley’s concept of a society governed by “gentlemen of honor, courage and breeding” is nowhere seen in the fragmented, faction-based politics of America. This is not to say that Mr. Trump exemplifies these lost qualities, but, as “The Trump Revolution” contends, there is a distinct element of gruff, made-in-America noblesse oblige to Trump’s political crusade.

Put it this way, President-elect Trump is unlikely to be caught off-guard mouthing his contempt for small-town America, as Barack Obama did in depicting potential voters as clinging to their guns, god and other “bigotries.” It’s hard to imagine President-elect Trump ever demonstrating the cruelty and hypocrisy of a Gordon Brown, Great Britain’s former prime minister. In May of 2010, after hearing Mrs. Gillian Duffy’s worries over deficits and immigration, the pompous, two-faced boor of a prime minister retreated to his limousine, and, microphone on, proceeded to berate this perfectly decent lady, calling her “horrible,” “old woman,” and “bigoted.”

The Trump presidency is the last heave-ho of America’s Mrs. Duffys; of America’s historic, founding majority.

Almost 200 years on, Albion’s seed is scattered, diluted and demoralized. More so than cultural identities, issues have come to dominate elections. The Trump revolution boiled down to fundamental things like Islam (“no thanks”), immigration (“much less”), and a government that refused to heed.

In the short term, the success of this majority awakened and its candidate will depend on President-elect Trump’s ability to beat back the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. Comitatus, now writhing like a fire breathing mythical monster in the throes of death. Or, so we hope.

©2016 BY ILANA MERCER
Townhall.com, The Unz Review, Constitution.com,
Praag.org & The Libertarian Alliance
November 14.

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Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.  To fully appreciate what afflicts Hollywood—and the presidency, the academy, and the media—watch “Idiocracy.” The film is a product of Mike Judge’s genius (Beavis and Butthead, anyone?), and was backed and then spiked by the idiots at 20th Century Fox. It is easily one of the smartest and darkest satires.

Luke Wilson plays Joe Bowers, frozen by the military in 2005, “who accidentally wakes up in 2505 to find a broken-down, thuggish America where language has become a patois of football chants, hip-hop slang and grunts denoting rage, pleasure and priapic longing, where citizens are obese, violent, ever-horny and narcotised by consumerism,” to quote the Guardian.

The “dumb-ass dystopia” depicted in “Idiocracy” has evolved because the robust retarded have out-bred the intelligent (yes, Judge openly references IQ as a measure of intelligence). Consequently, nothing gets fixed. There are garbage avalanches. A Gatorade-like drink has replaced water for irrigation, so nothing grows. The most watched show on the “Violence Channel” is “Ow, My Balls!” The “highest grossing movie of all time is called ‘Ass,’ and consists of 90 minutes of the same naked, hairy butt on screen.” All enterprises are sexualized; Starbucks offers a “full body latte.” Costco is an Ivy-League law school. If you’ve watched Ann Coulter trying to explain to Bill O’Reilly what a syllogism is, you’ll appreciate “Idiocracy” for the cultural barometer it is.

Audiences are beginning to avoid Angelina Jolie. Ever since she began to believe she was on earth to die for everyone else’s sins against the poor “brown babies” of the world (Ingrid Bergman’s coinage in “Murder on the Orient Express”), Angelina has lost whatever meager acting abilities she possessed. Instead of emoting, Jolie should take lessons from Jon Voight, her estranged father. Thus not even Matt Damon was able to rescue “The Good Sheppard.” Don’t touch it with a barge pole; it’s tedious and pretentious.

The prospect of a pregnant Angelina with an afro and an accent playing a self-styled saint is no fun either. So spare yourself too from Angelina’s “A Mighty Heart.” The film is Mariane Pearl’s attempts at self-beatification. Her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who accused Pearl of being a spy and agent of the Mossad and made him recite a humiliating confession to that effect, before lopping his head off. The jihadis released a video of Pearl’s butchering titled, “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”

Don’t expect the deeply silly Mariane, upon whose memoir the film is based, to have comprehended the role vintage, Islamic Jew hatred played in her husband’s “slaughtering.” At the time, she responded to the barbarism by declaring superciliously that “revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable … to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism.”

So as to aggrandize themselves, Angelina and Mariane have diminished Daniel in the film. The dashing Daniel is played by the unknown Dan Futterman, whom Salon.com’s no-doubt feminist reviewer described approvingly as “grave and elfin.” That’s a good thing only if you are a garden gnome. Mariane does, however, have the mark of a member of the media: she celebrates both herself and the Islamic hajj.

Speaking of facing Mecca, keister to the sky, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has prohibited the mention of “Muslim” in tandem with “terrorism.” As this dhimmi prepared to move into Downing Street, the British people were celebrating the life of another dodo, Diana. The nation’s darling even in death was a manipulative neurotic, given to histrionics. But in “Cool Britannia,” and in Hollywood, is it the queen that is maligned.

“The Queen,” with Helen Mirren in the lead, is not about the monarch, but about Elizabeth II vis-à-vis Diana. It is shot through with smarmy contempt for tradition, duty, and the stiffer upper lip, embodied by the queen, and once identified with the British character. As for the incessant prattle about Diana’s very public charity work, the queen has been working quietly (and apparently thanklessly) for the English people for over half a century. According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Windsor was 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated. Still in her teens, Elizabeth II joined the military, “where she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.” I could go on and on. In any event, if the Brits cared for substance, they’d stop slobbering over Diana.

From Australia comes a simply superb western, “The Proposition,” written by John Cave and directed by John Hillcoat. Arthur Burns and his feral family are murderers run amok in the Australian Outback, circa 1880. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) is out to get them. He captures two of the brothers, Charlie and Mike. The arch-evil, and exquisitely educated, Arthur (Danny Huston) remains at large. Captain Stanley then makes a proposition to Charlie: he will spare his life and that of his young brother if he tracks down and terminates Arthur.

Pay attention to the achingly beautiful relationship between Captain Stanley and his wife Martha (Emily Watson). The two depend on one another for dear life. The civilizing English afternoon tea and the rose bushes in the desert cocoon the couple from the savagery of their surroundings. The legendary John Hurt of Midnight Express fame is marvelous, but he does not outperform Winstone or Huston. This is a remarkable film. Had it been a Hollywood production, you’d have been saddled with one of the industry’s androgynous “men” in the lead role. Picture Ryan Phillippe, puffy pout and soft doe eyes, struggling to break a few heads. You’d have also been treated to a plodding and preachy account of the crimes the colonists committed against the Australian aborigines.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
July 6

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