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America’s March to Socialism: The NeverTrump Right

America’s March to Socialism: The NeverTrump Right
Better Red than Orange.
By Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

“I would have been prepared to crawl over broken glass to vote for anyone but Trump — yes, even Sen. Bernie Sanders,” Jennifer Rubin wrote in a Washington Post column headlined, “NeverTrump becomes NeverRepublican.”

“If you’re really never-Trump, then you know there’s no except-if-he’s-a-socialist footnote,” Joe Walsh also threw in his two cents in the Post. “I’d rather have a socialist in the White House than a con man.”

“If Sanders does emerge as Democratic nominee, I would vote for him over Trump as a forlorn gesture of protest,” David Frum tweeted.

“There’s a reasonable case to be made that one term of Bernie is less dangerous than a second term of Trump,” Bill Kristol argued.

At Kristol’s Bulwark site, its executive editor, Jonathan V. Last, argued in a post titled, “Ready for Bernie”, that voting for the Communist-friendly socialist would uphold the “rule of law”.

Cuban elections also upheld the rule of law which was the same as the rule of Castro and socialism. The rule of law that The Bulwark is concerned with upholding is the rule of government, not the Constitution. It’s the rule of the bureaucrats, administrators, and judicial activists imposing socialism.

The Bulwark has no choice but to be ready for Bernie and socialism. The site is funded by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder, who backs The Intercept, Bernie’s media machine. The Omidyar Network has a Reimagining Capitalism project and has been testing a Universal Basic Income.

The dirty secret of Never Trumpers is that they’re employed by lefty Big Tech billionaires.

Rubin, along with Max Boot and George Will work at the Washington Post, a paper owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. David Frum works at The Atlantic whose majority share is owned by Steve Jobs’ widow.

Socialism isn’t a ‘Better Red Than Orange’ compromise for the greater good of defeating Trump.

It’s the whole damn point.

The Bulwark was allegedly set up by principled conservatives who opposed Trump, but there are very few conservative principles there. When the site strays from its bête orange, it’s to promote socialism.

Richard North Patterson, a Hillary, Pelosi, and Obama donor, who has worked with the Brady Campaign and J Street, recently churned out a piece claiming that Trump is just a “symptom” of income inequality and proposed “profoundly conservative” models like FDR’s New Deal to solve all that inequality.

Patterson’s rant, which loosely throws around phrases like the, “hoary fraud of supply-side economics”, and the “ossified class system”, and then complains that we don’t “have anything close to universal healthcare coverage”, reads like the sort of thing Elizabeth Warren might have written on a bad day.

That’s not a coincidence.

Patterson’s Bulwark articles routinely feature illustrations of Warren doing heroic things under headlines like, “The Case for Progressive Capitalism” or “Why Elizabeth Warren Matters”. His economic solutions don’t just dovetail with Warren’s, but with those of Omidyar’s Reimagining Capitalism project.

You’ll also find Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center celebrating Warren at The Bulwark as “the greatest enemy of corruption, graft, and capitalist self-dealing in the U.S. Senate, and its most compelling advocate of clean government and democratic reform.”

What a coincidence.

Inequality was and has always been a hoary fraud. Its real purpose, as The Bulwark manages to demonstrate, is to kneecap meritocracy by diverting power from aspiring Americans at the behest of experts and pundits working for insurgent billionaires whose careers prove meritocracy is real. Its true goal is to politicize the economy and put it under the thumb of left-wing billionaires like Omidyar.

Is Omidyar, the richest man in Hawaii, really out to reimagine a capitalism that doesn’t favor him?

The inequality myth, as Thomas Sowell observed, assumes fixed Marxist classes of the rich and poor, when they “actually refer to whoever happens to be in a particular income bracket at a particular time. And Americans who, for example, start out in the bottom 20 percent, over 95 percent of the people who start out there are no longer there 15 years later. In fact, more of them reach the top 20 percent after that period of time than remain in the bottom 20 percent.”

That’s social mobility. And proponents of the inequality myth deny that social mobility exists.

The most vocal critics of mediocrity, who bang on about inequality, are curiously, products of the “ossified class” that Patterson references in an essay which heavily leans on the work of Matthew Stewart in The Atlantic. Stewart’s own essay begins with the “philosopher” recollecting how “my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina.” Patterson, who has a home on Martha’s Vineyard, was the son of a business executive.

President Donald J. Trump, The Bulwark’s embodiment of oligarchy, is the grandson of a German barber. The obvious difference between dilletantes like Patterson and Stewart, or, for that matter, Kristol, is that the Trump family continued aspiring upward in each generation, as opposed to ossifying.

Trump quit his business to become the President of the United States. Patterson stopped writing bad, but successful novels, to write worse articles by becoming a mediocre lefty pundit on a Never Trump site. Social mobility is real, but it demands ambition and personal effort. And those who have it either want others to also rise or to keep them down on the farm. The latter approach is known as socialism.

Some of the country’s wealthiest insurgent billionaires want socialism because they hate competition. And they have no shortage of usefully mediocre Never Trump mouthpieces who also hate competition.

That’s what is really at stake in the debate over President Trump and inequality.

Your average Never Trumper might be the mediocre son of a talented conservative thinker or a former member of the Bush administration, but inevitably a former something or the son of someone. Their hatred of President Trump and their willingness to embrace the myth that there is no social mobility aren’t two unrelated fetishes or a difficult compromise that they made in order to defeat Trump.

Socialism and the Never Trumpers are two sides of the same tarnished Janus coin.

The Never Trumpers wanted to rein in the political insurgency that upended their cushy places in the conservative movement and the socialists want a permanent underclass in whose name they can rule. MAGA represents a revolution against both orders, the punditocracy that had stifled emerging voices in the conservative movement seeking to address the forces that are destroying America, and the creeping surrender of the Democrats, of some Republicans, and of much of the younger generation to socialism.

If you accept Patterson’s conclusions, as many Never Trumpers do, then socialism makes sense. Similarly, generations of Marxists who accepted that humanity was bound upon an iron wheel of class, decided that revolution, collective totalitarianism, and the bureaucratic enslavement of mankind made sense. Every totalitarian solution begins with a similarly deterministically inevitable historical crisis.

That’s why Never Trumpers and lefties deliberately misunderstand MAGA. They dismiss the mass attendance at Trump rallies as populism or racism. Why is Trump popular? There’s always a fixed answer. It’s because he appeals to the worst instincts of Americans, they tell us in their NPR voices.

But what Trump and MAGA are really about is confronting inequality and lack of social mobility not through the preferred Martha’s Vineyard solutions of socialists and Never Trumpers, by concentrating power among a small technocratic class of government and non-profit experts, but by eliminating the obstacles that this same class has placed in the way of factory workers, small businesses, and farmers.

MAGA isn’t a mere ideological revolution: it’s a Jacksonian uprising against a political plutocracy.

There is a class war, but it’s not between rich and poor, or black and white. It’s between blue and red cultures, between the old ‘dirty’ manufacturing work and the new ‘digital’ economics, with the former seeking to restore the power of work, and the latter trying to turn it into meaningless make-work.

On one side lies Trump’s struggle to restore the value of work by fighting tariff wars and reining in regulations, and on the other are the socialist solutions of free everything and government jobs and cash. Both promise social mobility, but only MAGA offers the real thing by empowering Americans to succeed, instead of disempowering them to plead for regulated crumbs from a socialist oligarchy.

Never Trumpers don’t just hate Trump, they hate his insurgent economics and its threat to their status. That’s why they’re willing to support Bernie Sanders and the Democrat Party’s campaign to exploit the pandemic to freeze the economy in place and retard the aspirations of small businesses across the land.

The radicals are using the economic freeze to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” by reversing President Trump’s power shift from the blue state plutocracy to the red state workers. They are doubling down on the power of government and eliminating the independent agency of individuals.

Within a few short months, a formerly free nation has become a socially isolated socialist gulag.

The Bulwark and Never Trumpers have been among the loudest voices cheering this development and, like Patterson, forecasting how it can be used to break the back of free enterprise and impose socialism. Contrary to their protestations, they wouldn’t have had to close their eyes and grit their teeth to vote for Bernie Sanders. Totalitarians, whatever their ideological differences, end up in the same place.

Never Trumpers cast their struggle as a post-ideological stand for principles. But there is one principle truly at stake here. Freedom. The Never Trumpers and their new socialist allies love it in principle, much as they claim to love the ‘unequal’, while hating them in reality. Trump doesn’t love freedom as a principle.

He loves the reality.

As Democrats exploit the pandemic to deprive a nation of its freedom, Never Trumpers once again stand with the socialist technocracy and its political thuggery against the aspirations of millions of Americans.

Original Article

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