Saturday, November 12, 2016

Gary North Is a Trump Optimist; He Says the Revolution is Over

In an important essay, Gary North has called the Trump revolution over.

I am not sure there ever was a revolution in the sense that people were behind a leader who would bring limited government. Trump was never that man. A careful monitoring of Trump statements would cause anyone to realize that Trump has no problem with big government---as long as he is running it.

Most of North's essay is centered on warning that the establishment is taking control of the Trump presidency. In that sense, I see North an optimist. It is likely going to be much worse. There is a very real possibility that we are going to see authoritarian measures instituted in the United States that the country has never seen before. Trump thinks outside the box. He is very creative. He will allow the establishment in but outfox them in the worst possible way. It will be establishment rule with a clever authoritarian moving them around the board.

I think North recognizes this possibility but just isn't ready to pull the trigger on that warning just yet----but it is not for nothing that he manages to mention Hitler and Lenin in his essay. He mentioned them in a distant fashion but he did mention them.

Here are excerpts:
First, Donald Trump is not part of what is sometimes called "the conspiracy."

Second, he will be on January 20, 2017.

We are about to see the capture of Donald Trump. It has already begun.

The mainstream media are beginning to see this. By January 20, it should be clear to anybody who wants to look at his nominees for the top cabinet positions. CNN's headline has it right: Team Trump is already filled with Washington insiders....

The handwriting is on the wall. We can expect more of the same. We had better expect more of the same...

There is going to be a growing sense of betrayal within the conservative movement. They will see, certainly by January 20, and no later than the end of 2017, that nothing has changed. The general population will never really understand this, but there will be a growing awareness that this is the case.

Donald Trump is not going to betray deliberately the revolution that he launched. That is because he did not launch a revolution.

There are four driving forces in the lives of successful males: money, sex, power, and fame. More than any man in American history, Donald Trump is going to prove to be the incarnation of all four. There is nobody else in American history to match him in this regard.

He has done what no one in the history of the United States has done. He has been elected President of the United States, and he really is beholden to nobody. He has no experience in politics. He was not vetted by the powers that be. He has no agenda. We have, for the first time in American history, a President who got the position entirely on his own. We speak of the powers behind the throne. There are no powers behind the throne. But there will be on January 20...

I have a Ph.D. in history. I can assure you, that there is nothing like this situation in American history. I suggest that there is nothing like this in British history.

Now I'm going to say something which could be misinterpreted. There are two figures in the 20th century who are at least comparable to Donald Trump. One is Vladimir Lenin, and the other is Adolf Hitler. I am not suggesting in any way that Donald Trump thinks like Lenin or Hitler. I'm speaking only institutionally. From the point of view of political history, these are the two men who are most like what Trump is today. They had no political experience before they gained the top political positions. They came from what seemed to be out of nowhere. They were never elected to political office. People tend to forget that Hitler's Nazi party did not win the election of 1932. He was appointed as Chancellor by President Hindenburg. There were no subsequent elections.

Yet even here, the examples don't hold. Lenin ran a hierarchical political organization, the Bolshevik Party. Hitler ran a hierarchical political organization, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, called "Nazis" as an acronym. Donald Trump has come out of the world of business, which means he has always faced competition in an open market. His skills are completely separate from the skills of political mobilization. He has no skills whatsoever in the area of politics, which is a matter of power inside a system that is not based on free-market pricing...

Trump is the most naïve elected senior politician in the history of Western civilization. He has no skills whatsoever for the position which he has now been elected do. He is what is sometimes called a babe in the woods. More to the point, he is a sitting duck...

 don't be surprised when you read that the revolution has been betrayed. It hasn't been betrayed. There was never any institutional arrangement by which the revolution could be implemented. This is a man with no experience politically who gained the senior position of world politics without anyone's having vetted him.

It's going to be fun to watch. There will be a mountain of monographs written by scholars on what takes place over the next four years. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Do read North's full (optimistic) analysis here.  But prepare for worse, much worse.


 -RW

3 comments:

  1. I think there are several different and very relevant perspectives to take on Trump.

    First, Clinton is on record, consistently, as wanting to expand Nato to Ukraine and Georgia. Putin is also on record, consistently, that either is a red line. A RED LINE, Bob. On the one hand, you have a guaranteed war with Russia within four years (sooner, since it was a high priority of hers). On the other, you have man who has indeed been all over the map. Nonetheless, he is the SECOND primary candidate, and the FIRST national candidate, in decades to float multiple trial balloons on rethinking or even abandoning the alliance.

    Europeans understand that she is a "madwoman" (their words) intrinsically when apprised of these options.

    http://voxday.blogspot.co.il/2016/11/how-god-emperor-already-saved-world.html

    To wit:

    I have spoken to several Europeans in the aftermath of the US presidential election, and they've all been very curious about what happened, and how it was possible for Donald Trump to win when everything they had heard from their medias indicated that he was a) very, very bad, and, b) certain to lose by a huge margin.

    Of course, they were even more deluded than the US electorate, as the European media took the already misleading US narrative and exaggerated it, just as the US media does the same thing in reverse.

    What is interesting is their reaction to finding out that Hillary Clinton supported NATO membership for both Ukraine and Georgia. It can be best described as "aghast". Learning about Hillary's foreign policy on Russia also suffices to convince them that Donald Trump was, in fact, the vastly preferable candidate. One man even said, "well, no wonder he won, given that he was clearly running against a madwoman."

    Unlike Americans, Europeans take the idea of war with Russia very, very seriously and understand it is something to be absolutely avoided at almost all costs. There are still millions of people who remember the brutal swath that the Red Army cut across Eastern Europe on its way to Berlin. They also understand that a considerable quantity of the natural gas that heats their homes comes from Russia, and that the first consequence of any military action will be for that pipeline to be shut off.

    Back to me Bob. There is NO REALISTIC ARGUMENT that she is a preferable candidate. Everything you are saying COULD happen. You are saying the worst-case scenario is inevitable. Sorry, don't buy it. I don't know how much Trump will be co-opted by them. If it's 90%, it's still 10% less than her. You don't know, and your scaremongering is growing tiring.

    As far as I see it, he has no choice but to work with the system. Duh. He was never out to destroy it. He's a populist. Remember, his voters support the cops and law and order.

    He also rewards loyalty, even to distasteful politicians like, for example, Rudy Guiliani. A loathsome creature. to be sure. But look, if Trump makes him Attorney General and says focus all that prosecutorial zeal on the government corruption complex (and a much lighter touch on private industry), and I will stand by you no matter what dirt they uncover about you. When I consider how things could play out, given what I've read of the man, this is how I think things are more likely to play out. And, I'm down with that. I'm giving the man a chance, and nothing you can say at this point will change that.

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  2. Bob, do you know how we know the media lies? Because there are words on the page. Including words like "is," "and," and "the."

    Was Dimon approached? How do we even know this is for real? Do you honestly think someone in Trump's immediate team is leaking stuff?

    Look, a politician like Reagan threw James Watt under the bus for making a mildly off-color remark. A man like Trump won't do that. He is loyal to a fault. Everyone acknowledges this, even his opponents. He'll get better performance from everyone he appoints, because they will all know in advance he will never stab them in the back.

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  3. I would love to read Gary's comments on Bannon and his role in all of this. Montfort was behind the curtain throughout as well. And Kellyanne Conway doesn't seem like an establishment elitist either.

    How about Mad Dog Mattis? He isn't establishment.

    He's got Nikki Haley pigeonholed at the UN and a stronger conservative replacing her, too.

    There's a lot going on. Trump fought hard for this. Not just the MSM. Even the betting pools got it wrong.

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