Category: Ideas and Policy

Symbolism and Trumpism

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire often links to noteworthy pieces on American Greatness, the premiere blog for the Trumpist Right.  American Greatness does real yeoman’s work to articulate what Trumpian conservatism is.

His American Greatness Post of the Day for this foggy Monday morning is Robin Burk’s “What Trump Understands that Kevin Williamson Doesn’t.”

Kevin Williamson, you’ll recall, is the house globalist/libertarian for National Review (despite a brief, one-article stint at The Atlantic).  In 2016, he infamously wrote that “dysfunctional, downscale communities… deserve to die.”  He argued that communities like Garbutt, New York—a gypsum boomtown in the nineteenth century that ran its course when the gypsum was gone—have outlived their economic usefulness, and its inhabitants should move elsewhere for opportunity.

There is something to this perspective, but, as Tucker Carlson eloquently noted in an exchange with Ben Shapiro, the neoliberal order and its notions of economic mobility are hugely disruptive to communities.  Families are told, essentially, to leave behind their grandparents’ graves, their Little League teams, their memories, in order to work in service to the gaping maw of some efficiency-maximizing corporate conglomerate.

What Trumpism understands is that, while economies are dynamic, they require strong communities and stable families to maintain.  So it is that Robin Burk argues that Williamson’s libertarian approach lacks any sense of a narrative or symbols.  Williamson is testy because Trump is planning a big military parade (and, presumably, because Trump has been a far more effective advocate for conservatism than Williamson’s angry brand of libertarian orthodoxy).  It seems like wasteful agitprop to him.

What Burk explains in her piece, however, is that a common people need some unifying symbols.  That’s why the NFL National Anthem controversy revealed such deep splits in our culture.  It’s why Americans don’t particularly like it when protesters burn the American Flag.  Yes, it’s constitutional, but that doesn’t mean it’s good—and it’s the literal destruction of one of the most unifying national symbols.

Burk’s focus is more on the local, though, and it’s what makes her piece so interesting.  Communities are built between friends and neighbors.  Yes, the mills shutdown, and some people have to move to look for opportunity.  The mills shutting down also mean some people lose their way, and resort to opiates to numb the pain.

But not everyone can or wants to become economic mercenaries, shifting about rootlessly in search of the highest bidder—or just a job, for that matter.  Some folks want to build a life and a community where their ancestors did.

The implication from neoliberal and libertarian types is that, at best, that desire is unrealistic; at worst, it’s bad:  your loyalty should only be to efficiency!  Efficiency is morality!  While I love efficiency as much as the next cog, efficiency-for-its-own-sake is not and should not be our god.

As Carlson puts it (to paraphrase), we shouldn’t work for capitalism; capitalism should work for us.  Burk adds that we need symbols, formed from and interpreted by our individual experiences and memories, to create a society that fosters the good life.

Saturday Update

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Today’s post is short and delayed. My Internet has been restored (as has my faith in the competence of at least a small fraction of Frontier’s workforce), and I’m out of town for my nephew’s second birthday.

I also just filed my taxes returns for fiscal year 2018. Actually, my brother filed them for me. I was supposed to get it done on my own this year, but I waited long enough that he just did them anyway. The lesson: wait long enough, and someone else takes care of your problems for you.

The wrong lesson, perhaps. The other lesson I learned from filing taxes is that my various side gigs are now generating enough that, for the first time in my adult life, I actually owe taxes to the federal government. Apparently, I need to withhold more during the year.

Oh, well. It was a good year financially, especially with private lessons. I came back from some medical expenses from a broken wrist thanks to teaching private lessons, as well as adjuncting more classes on top of my day job.

Back to regular programming tomorrow.

Happy Saturday!

–TPP

Nordlinger on the Arts

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Jay Nordlinger, a guy who gets paid to write about classical music for a living (I’ll confess, I’m a bit jealous), has a piece about the role of government in the arts, and arts in society, politics, etc.  It’s in the form of a questionnaire of generic questions the ubiquitous critic often receives, along the lines of “should the government support the arts,” “should artists make political statements with their works,” etc.

Nordlinger—not only an excellent critic, but a master of the emphatic incomplete sentence—handles these questions well.  I particularly like his response to the question about politics in art.  Here is an excerpt, including the question (italicized) and Nordlinger’s response (unformatted):

You will concede that politics has a place in art, right? Many artists think it is incumbent on them to deal with the politics of their day. To make directly political art. Is there such a thing as political art? There’s art with politics in it. Most of the time, I think it’s pretty boring, because, somehow, the art takes a backseat to politics. And the politics is of a hectoring quality.

Politics is often a spoiler of art, because of that very quality: “Eat your peas.” It may well be that political art is yet another excuse for people to lecture. (Lecturing has its time and place, needless to say.) Better, I think, is to do things subtly. I like a movie that way, for example. A movie may convey a message — a great many of them do. But you don’t have to do it in a honkingly obvious way. Weave it in, you know?

I think of Shakespeare, which is cheating, because he is the greatest of all artists, but let’s do it anyway. Many of his plays are political — or rather, they have politics in them. But the art of them transcends the politics. The politics means practically nothing to us today. Same with Verdi’s operas, some of them. Un ballo in maschera is stuffed with politics — but we don’t give a damn about that, and rightly so. The music and the human drama are what counts.

Nordlinger is spot-on here.  I am very “political,” in the sense that I write about politics and rarely hide my political leanings (unless trying to enjoy myself in the midst of a gaggle of progressives—not exactly the friendliest of situations for dissenting viewpoints and wrongthink).  But I’m also a musician, and I avoid writing anything overtly political in my music.

My song “Hipster Girl Next Door“—the closest thing I have to a “hit,” as it’s frequently requested at live shows—has one oblique line that says, “And though you hope for change, I hope I’m never estranged/from my Hipster Girl Next Door.”  The song is more a humorous critique of the hipster, coffee shop culture and its trappings, not a diss track against the Obama administration.

I also started writing an over-the-top, sci-fi rock opera back in 2013, The Mystic Chords, that was to embody William F. Buckley’s admonishment “don’t immanentize the eschaton” (in other words, don’t try to create heaven on Earth).  I think that work, though, were it ever to be completed, would fall under the Shakespearean rubric of “a work of art with politics, but about the human condition.”

Otherwise, I understand that people don’t want to be bludgeoned over the head with half-baked political ideas in their music.  You might cater to a specific niche, but you’re going to alienate a big chunk of potential listeners.  And pedantic hectoring and lecturing in otherwise fun music isn’t going to win anyone over.

The best art, when it does have something to say, does so with subtle suggestion.  Subtlety is incredibly hard to pull off.  It’s like when jazz musicians says, “It’s not the notes you play, but the notes you don’t play.”  I honestly have no idea what they mean by that, but I think the same concept applies to art, especially humorous, slice-of-life, tongue-in-cheek songwriting like mine:  it’s not so much what you say, but how you say it, and how you say things without saying them.  Implication, in other words (there’s a Nordlingian incomplete sentence for you).

But I digress.  Those are my slapdash, off-the-cuff observations at the end of a hectic week.  My Internet is finally restored, so I should be back to some degree of normality.  Spring Break is approaching, too, and I can tell teachers and students need a well-earned rest.

If you’d like to support my art, please visit www.tjcookmusic.com, or pick up a copy of my EP, Contest Winner EP, at any number of online retails (see my website for direct links).  You can also pick up my digital EP, Electrock EP:  The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse, for just $4!

TBT: Cold Turkey

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As the fate of Brexit still hangs in the balance, it seems apropos to look back to a post I wrote shortly after the successful Brexit vote in 2016, “Cold Turkey” (by the way, why is Turkey in NATO again?).  As I wrote then, all of these objections—what’re we going to do about the Irish border, for example—are distractions.  Yes, they might require some sorting out, but just rip off the Band-Aid.  People will find a way to make money.  Europeans will be itching to keep their business in Britain—remember, London is one of the world’s financial capitals—and will find ways to get business done.

The devil’s bargain of the European Union was simple:  give up your freedom and national sovereignty in exchange for sweet government bennies.  The British people chose the better, harder option:  they voted for freedom (and probably government bennies on their own terms, just without European largesse).  Of course, the British people never got to opt-into that bargain; it was thrust upon them after the bait-and-switch of the European Common Market—a good idea!—morphed into an unholy, supranational tyranny.

So, here is 2016’s “Cold Turkey.”  Like any addiction, the best approach is to “just say no”:

Last week, approximately 52% of Brits voted to “Leave” the European Union in a national referendum.  They did so peacefully and democratically.  Already, 23 June 2016 is being hailed as Britain’s “Independence Day.”

I’ve written several posts about Brexit recently (here, here, and here).  Last Friday’s post, which I wrote as the results were coming in Thursday evening, explored why liberty–a vote for “Leave”–was worth the price of temporary economic disruption and, too, of giving up certain “benefits” bestowed to EU citizens.

(A quick aside:  I still find it interesting that a supranational organization that originated as an economic free trade zone evolved into an entity capable of forcing twenty-some-odd nation-states to pool sovereignty; didn’t Europe fight two world wars to prevent Germany from ruling the Continent?  But I digress.)

Based on several comments on my Facebook page, and from personal conversations, it seems that some of my pro-Remain friends and colleagues missed this point, or very candidly admitted that national sovereignty and liberty are not worth the price of sweet EU bennies (one colleague–a reluctant Brit–discounted the entire “Leave” campaign as fundamentally xenophobic and racist, implying that those alleged qualities alone invalidated the entire movement).  To the latter contingent, I can only hope we can agree to disagree.  To the former, allow me to address some points.

“[D]idn’t Europe fight two world wars to prevent Germany from ruling the Continent?”

One poster discussed at length that Brits have “become VERY accustomed to the benefits,” and that, whether they are in the EU or not, they “will still be governed, regulated, and heavily taxed by their own government but no longer enjoy the goodies that come with EU membership!”

Consider, if you will, a drug addict.  Let’s say someone addicted to heroin seeks treatment and begins taking daily doses of methadone.  Would we say, “Oh, well, sure he’s off heroin, but he’s still chemically dependent on methadone, and now he’s missing out on the sweet high that only heroin can provide”?  Or would we continue to encourage this recovering addict to kick his methadone habit, too, and restore a sick, dependent body to healthy independence?

Quit me cold… and don’t let me in the European Union.

Generous government benefits–whether they come from the EU or the British government–might come with some nice “perks” (every pro-Remainer I’ve talked to seems preoccupied with the ability to travel freely through Europe, something most of us plebes haven’t had the luxury of doing without a passport; this, to me, seems to be the definition of a “First World Problem”), but those “goodies” come at a price.  The British people have freely said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Naturally, there will be those who will start jonesing for cheap travel opportunities to economically depressed parts of Southern Europe, where they can live out leisurely, government-funded retirements.  There will also be everyday people who still find themselves frustrated by high taxes and tight regulations, and missing out on certain opportunities afforded them by EU membership.

“The Brits have thrown off one level of bureaucracy because… they realized it was not worth the cost.”

But is the solution more regulations and higher taxes?  The Brits have thrown off one level of bureaucracy because, despite the redistribution of wealth it brought (which mostly went away from productive countries like Britain and Germany and to profligate nations like Greece), they realized it was not worth the cost.  One of two things will now happen:  either Brits will demand further deregulation and reform of their own government, which will further ease their burdens and lower costs; or they will make an oft-repeated mistake and demand more redistribution and more taxpayer-funded goodies.

Crucially, though, the choice will be theirs to make.

Leaving the European Union will be like tearing off a bandage.  It will hurt like hell initially–we’re already seeing the effect on markets, which can’t stand uncertainty–but the pain will be fleeting (as I’ve argued in my earlier posts on the topic).

Similarly, any nation facing heavy regulations and stifling taxes can pursue a similar course–if it hasn’t become too hooked already.  “Austerity” failed in Greece not because it demanded that the Greek government stop paying janitors wages comparable to skilled tradesmen; it failed because the Greek government couldn’t kick its habit (and because austerity required tax increases, not stimulating decreases).  The nation–and the Greek people–have become so dependent upon handouts, they can no longer function without huge bailouts from wealthier nations.  That dependency will only perpetuate the cycle of addiction.

The best approach is not more dependency–more bureaucracy, more social programs, more taxes–but quitting cold turkey.  Rip off the Band-Aid, then get back to being free… or end up like Greece.

Reblog: Practically Historical on the Electoral College

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A quick (and late) post today, as the Internet is still out at home (although this time it’s not entirely due to Frontier’s incompetence).  SheafferHistorianAZ of Practically Historical posted another classic piece yesterday defending the Electoral College.  Rather than rely solely on abstract arguments, he went to the primary sources:  in this case, the words of James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of Treasury.

Here is an excerpt from SheafferHistorianAZ himself, taken from before and after quotations from Madison (writing in Federal No. 39) and Hamilton (Federalist No. 68; emphasis is Sheaffer’s):

Plurality is part of the Federal electoral process, but integrated to meet the needs of federalism.  States matter in our compound republic.  Madison wanted them involved in the process of choosing the executive.

Think of the electoral vote this way…  In the 1960 World Series, the New York Yankees outscored the Pittsburgh Pirates 55-27  and out-hit the hapless Pirates 91-60.  Using the rationale of plurality as demanded by the national popular vote crowd, the Yankees were clearly world champs that year.  But runs are integrated into games, and in 1960, the Pirates won 4 games, the Yankees 3.  Runs and hits are part of a process, but the process integrates all parts of the sport into choosing a winner[.]

That sports metaphor is one that I think will resonate with many voters, and it’s one that is intuitive.  It’s probably the best I’ve heard.  It’s a tough pitch to say, “the States have rights in our system, and without the Electoral College, LA and NYC would decide every election.”

Anti-Collegiates (the best term I can come up with on the fly for the anti-Electoral College crowd) always argue that States like Wyoming would get more attention from presidential candidates, which is numerically ludicrous—what’s 600,000 Wyomans against millions of New Yorkers?—and disingenuous.  No one arguing against the Electoral College cares about the people in Wyoming; they just want progressive elites and their urban mobs to always carry presidential elections for progressive Democrats.

But the sports metaphors takes something abstract but important—States’ rights and accounting for regional differences—and puts in terms that are more concrete but trivial.  Everyone knows it doesn’t matter if you win every game by an extra point—what matters is that you win every game (college football fans may disagree slightly, but a W is a W).

One final note before wrapping up:  I’ve recently heard proposals to reform the Electoral College to conform with congressional districts, so that it’s more reflective of the popular will, while still retaining the essential “flavor” of the Electoral College.  It’s intriguing, but I also think it’s a trap:  it’s a compromise position for a side that has no leverage.  Engaging in that debate tacitly concedes that there’s something wrong with the Electoral College, when there really isn’t.

Don’t fix what isn’t broken.  Yes, we occasionally get distorted outcomes.  But those “distortions” act as an important break on mob rule and the tyranny it inevitably breeds.

Lazy Sunday VI: Progressivism, Part II

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Last week’s Lazy Sunday shared four of my pieces about the excesses and abuses of Leftist progressivism.  This week, I’m reheating three TPP classics for your Sunday morning consumption.  Enjoy!

1.) “Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings” – the meltdown of the Left was on full display during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.  Here you had a straight-as-an-arrow judge who had been through multiple confirmations without incident.  What most frustrated me about the Kavanaugh hearings was how women began reasoning this way:  “because something bad happened to me, Kavanaugh must have done something to Dr. Blasey-Ford.”  How can we have the presumption of innocence—and rational, impartial weighing of evidence—if people make such absurd, illogical leaps in their “reasoning”?

2.) “Sanctimonious Leftism” – this piece was about a smarmy letter from Rich Harwood of the Harwood Institute about how disgraced Virginia Governor Ralph Northam can redeem himself.  It basically boils down to a lot of “feel-good crap,” as my mom would say.  Who cares what Northam did at a party thirty-plus years ago?  His heinous views on post-birth infanticide should be ring way more alarm bells.  The black-face/Klan hood incident is a distraction, but it’s one that makes the Left feel virtuous and smug about its own perceived righteousness.  Remember, for the Left, killing babies is good, but wearing a costume is bad.

3.) “Academic Leftism’s Sour Grapes” – this piece detailed a disturbing, outright pro-socialist piece from a college professor, in which the prof urged his fellow academic socialists to abandon the academy and to get into the government—as if they don’t already dominate both.  The Left must have total domination of every aspect of society, as well as the levers of power in the government.  If they lose the government, they lose control, even if they still dominate in the media, academia, the culture, etc.

So there’s your weekly dose of warmed over Leftist insanity.  More to come (assuming my Internet gets fixed in a timely fashion).

Happy Sunday!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Posts

The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part II

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A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about a New Age healer involved in a scam selling “healing crystals” and the like, and the women she employed.  Those women worked for this con artist with slavish devotion.  It was chilling how this Instagram thot used spirtualistic gobbledygook to influence those around her.

A similar example of women espousing dangerous ideas floated across my transom earlier this week.  Super controversial blog Chateau Heartiste shared a Tweet from James Woods.  Woods’s tweet features a video of two loons involved in some kind of energy channeling activity.  The older lady is delivering a discourse on overpopulation, telling women that having children is “not a good way” because it’s bad for the environment.  She also claims that the Earth can only support about one billion people (despite evidence to the contrary—we’re doing well enough with seven billion).

Next to the old crone is a younger women, who periodically toots—watch the video, and you’ll see how accurate that verb is—“That’s true!”  It’s creepy in that kind of unsettling, horror movie kind of way, like a scene where a disembodied child’s voice sings a nursery rhyme.

What’s even creepier is the death-centric, anti-life ideology that’s being espoused here.  Gavin McInnes played another clip from this New Age witch on a recent podcast, and explained that the women’s arm motions are a form of channeling, which these women believe pulls cancerous energy strands from their bodies.

My issue isn’t the alternative medicine (the old lady also calls Western medicine bad):  I’m open to all sorts of novel approaches to handling physical and mental illnesses, as I’m intellectually humble enough to know there are many things we still don’t understand.

Rather, my concern is that more and more women are falling for some seriously deadly notions.  “Don’t have children, it’s bad for the environment” inevitably leads to “let’s import Third World peasant cultures to keep Social Security solvent.”  It also deprives women of children.

I’m all for women having careers and being treated fairly in the workplace, etc., but let’s face it:  most women, whether they admit it or not, want to have children.  Children are a huge source of satisfaction and delight for women.  For every high-performing, Type-A go-getter like Nikki Haley (who does have children) or Angela Merkel (who does not), you probably have a thousand women who are (or would be) happiest raising children.

But what do I know?  I’m just a man.

Hungarian Border Wall is 100% Effective

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Pundit Dick Morris has a short piece on his website, DickMorris.com, about the Hungarian border fence.  It’s a quick read, but here are the key excerpts:

Along its 109-mile border with Serbia, Hungary has built a 13-foot-high fence featuring concertina wire (barbed wire in circles). It took six months to build (July-December of 2015) and cost $106 million. It was built by contractors and 900 Hungarian soldiers.

The fence consists of three rows of razor wire with a sturdier 11.5-foot-tall barrier inside….

And the Hungarian fence works! Before the barrier was built, in September of 2015, 138,396 migrants entered Hungary over the Serbian border. Within the first two weeks of November, the average daily flow had dropped to only 15 people.

Hungary and its populist-nationalist leader, President Viktor Orban, have faced a great deal of backlash and scorn from the progressive, bureaucratic autocrats of the European Union for their border control and immigration measures.  But Hungary is intent on keeping itself culturally Hungarian—it cannot effectively absorb the millions of potential migrants that began pouring into Europe from Syria and North Africa a few years ago.

President Orban is often cast as some latter-day Hitler, but he’s merely doing his job:  he’s putting the people of Hungary and their interests first, behind the interests of foreign vagabonds.

While researching this post, I learned that the European People’s Party—an umbrella party of “center-right” parties (as many outlets described it) running in the European Parliament’s elections this May—is barring Orban’s Fidesz Party from participating.  Apparently, part of their concern is that Orban’s Fidesz Party has posted humorous ads depicting George Soros and Jean-Claude Juncker (the Leftist super-villain billionaire and the President of the European Commission, respectively), suggesting the two are in cahoots to control Europe.

Well… aren’t they?  Isn’t the “center-right” European People’s Party supposed to represent a challenge to the Eurocrats (if anyone knows, I’m only asking semi-rhetorically)?

Two takeaways:

1.) Leave Viktor Orban alone.  He’s helped protect his country at a time when other European nations turn blind-eyes to Muslim rape gangs.

2.) The original point of this post:  President Trump can follow the Hungarian model and build an effective wall on the cheap.  Granted, we have more than 109 miles, but copy-paste that approach along our long border with Mexico, and could get the job done quickly and efficiently.

Open borders and progressive politics are the real dangers to liberty and prosperity, not an unabashed nationalist in Central Europe—or one in the United States.  Build the Wall, Drain the Swamp, and Leave the European Union!

Avenatti Arrested

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President Trump was vindicated Friday.  Yesterday, attorney Michael Avenatti—the attorney who represented porn star Stormy Daniels, making him a star among Democratic sycophants—was arrested on charges of extortion and fraud, and could face fifty years in prison.

I wrote yesterday that the end of the Mueller probe, with its lack of any charges of collusion or obstruction of justice against Trump, felt like the 2016 Election, Part II.  That sense of victory—and intense satisfaction—deepened with Avenatti’s arrest.

Here is a brief excerpt from that National Review breaking news piece linked above:

Avenatti worked “to extract more than $20 million in payments from a publicly traded company by threatening to use his ability to garner publicity to inflict substantial financial and reputational harm on the company if his demands were not met,” according to SDNY prosecutors. Those threats, which were made over the phone and in-person meetings with Nike’s attorneys, were recorded.

“A suit and tie does not mask that fact that, at its core, this was an old-fashioned shake down,” U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman said when announcing the charges Monday.

Democrats were trumpeting Avenatti as a presidential contender in 2020.  He began to believe the hype before deciding not to run (he probably realized he, unlike the president, actually had committed some heinous misdeeds).

Progressives make a huge deal about how they’re guardians of “principle” and “decorum” in the “Age of Trump,” yet they cling to whatever crass personality says mean things about the president the loudest.  They don’t even believe their own tripe.  Political victory is all that matters—by any means necessary.

That’s why substance-less hacks like Avenatti—or low-IQ race-baiters like “Auntie” Maxine Waters—are such darlings to the Left.  They promise to “impeach 45” and to uncover misdeeds, so they can do whatever they want (like encourage their supporters to commit violence against conservatives, as Congresswoman Waters did).

Trump did nothing wrong.  Avenatti tried to use his unearned media clout to shake-down a publicly-traded company for his own personal gain.

I fully expect the Dems will quickly throw away Avenatti now that he is no longer useful to their cause.  There’s a lesson there for us all:  revolutions eat their own.  But they’ll keep fabricating charges against President Trump.

The Deep State is Real, Part II: US Ambassadors and DOJ Conspired Against Trump

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Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) dropped a bombshell earlier this week:  Obama-era US ambassadors conspired with the Department of Justice against President Trump.  Every site I find points back to the original Washington Examiner piece linked above, although the blog Independent Sentinel has a bit more commentary, tying it back to the fake Christopher Steele dossier.

You’ll recall the Steele dossier is a document the Clinton campaign commissioned through back-channels (a law firm), which was then used to obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap then-candidate Trump’s communications.  That mendacious original sin spawned the odious “Russian collusion” narrative that lingers around the Trump Administration like a bad fart.  Andrew McCarthy in National Review calls the dossier a “Clinton-campaign product.”

Regardless, if Meadows is correct, it serves as further proof that the Washington “Deep State”—the “Swamp”—is very, terrifyingly real.  It will stop at nothing to disrupt President Trump’s America First agenda, and subvert a free and fair election.

What’s most chilling about all this chicanery is not that it targets President Trump particularly (although that certainly creates its own problems—few good, conscientious Americans will choose to run for public office, especially as conservatives, unless they have the cash and the guts to risk everything).  Rather, it suggests that our experiment in self-government is dangerously threatened by a group of unelected elites cloistered in the Washington foreign policy and law enforcement establishment.

America stands at a crossroads.  We’ve arrogated ever-more power to an unaccountable federal bureaucracy.  Many conservatives—myself included—hoped that the extended government shutdown would aid in the draining of the Swamp.  So far, though, it seems that the president is still surrounded by enemies.

We have a choice:  we continue down the current road, ceding more power to the government, and hoping against hope for some kind of “enlightened, constitutionalist despot” to restore as much of our constitutional framework as possible.  President Trump’s difficulties weeding out seditious bureaucrats suggest that path is incredibly difficult, and it will make presidential contests—as well as Supreme Court nominations—increasingly vicious.  The progressive Left has an edge in the culture, the institutions, government, and on the streets.

The other option is weed out the federal bureaucracy, strike down the administrative state, and restore power to Congress.  Restoring power to the States would also reduce the emphasis on national politics über alles.

But conservative politicians have been peddling those nostrums for years, without much headway.  Thus, we find ourselves struggling along with a feeble Congress, a dictatorial federal court system, an arrogant administrative regime, and a presidency that is both excessively powerful and, paradoxically, unable to control its own bureaucracy.

Something has to give.  President Trump has fought back ably overall, but one man alone cannot restore our constitutional order.  Indeed, that’s the whole point of our system—to diffuse power broadly.  He’s done what he could through the constitutional powers at his disposal.

I don’t know what the future holds, but if we want to continue the grand experiment in self-government, we have to hobble the Deep State—indeed, it must be destroyed.