Monday, October 8, 2018

It's Too Bad Trump is Such an Intellectual Lightweight


By Robert Wenzel

As I write, below is what is featured at the top of The Drudge Report:



There is much truth in the picture and headline.

For a long time, there has been a Cultural Marxist/Postmodernist movement developing in America that at its core wants to tear down western civilization. It can be traced back to when Frankfurt school cultural Marxists fled Hitler's Germany for the United States. 

The cultural Marxists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse all washed up on the shore here in 1934. They wasted little time in infecting intellectual thinking in America with their justifications for the hate of current society and a desire to destroy all of modern civilization. 

A side wing with just as radical postures against civilization developed in the 1950s, the Postmodernism movement, led by such equally twisted thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

It is these two movements that have provided the intellectual foundation for current madness, e.g. the demand of the use of zee-zed pronouns, the demand for "equality " for women and minorities by mere counts of numbers in any situation without regard for talent or natural ability to perform a task, the feminization of men, the "right" to socialist healthcare, the call for a socialist administred universal basic income, the censorship of speech on social media platforms.

It continues in many directions, most recently, of course, in the hearings for then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the bizarre demand that "women must always be believed" when they make sexual abuse charges--even when there is no corroborating evidence.

The attacks became so intense against Kavanaugh, based on nothing, that many observers believed that his name would be pulled as the nominee.

Many presidents would have, but the current president is street tough and hung with Kavanaugh through the vicious confirmation process. It was Donald J. Trump that single-handedly delivered Kavanaugh over the finish line. He did it in the face of the masses of CMPM useful idiots that screamed and raged against Kavanaugh during the confirmation process.  

And that is the beauty of Trump, he is fearless and does not give up. Fueled with apparently nothing but Diet Coke, he has the ability to, as just one man, charge and tweet against the entire CMPM movement that took decades to build to its current formidable size and depth. He has them shaking.

And that is why he has a solid core of perhaps 30% of the voters in the country. He really is Superman to them. Sick of political correctness and CMPM attacks (although most have probably never heard of cultural Marxism or Postmodernism), they know something is wrong and, for the first time, there is someone who is tough and doesn't stop and is willing to take it all on.

But here is where the story takes a dangerous curve at a steep angle. While Trump is the near perfect tough guy fighter against the CMPM movement, he has zero intellectual understanding of what to replace the CMPM with.

He has no intellectual appreciation for liberty. His Supreme Court justice that he fought so valiantly for is nothing but a Bush foot soldier who is anti-personal privacy and leans pro-Obamacare.

He does the economically bizarre and "fights trade wars."  He has nominated to the Federal Reserve establishment players. He has under his watch increased global tension with new sanctions on both Russia and Iran. And he is about to send the U.S. Pacific Fleet within a whisker of Chinese claimed territory.

And so it is difficult to see, outside of by accident, how he will make any liberty-advancing policy moves. Liberty is not his goal. He does not appreciate it to any significant degree.

What he has done though is triggered the nation. It has become more radicalized. The useful idiots of the CMPM are ready for battle. Those who see Trump as Superman are ready to battle with him against them.

The Drudge headline gets it right, but here is the thing. Since neither side appreciates liberty, under these circumstances, as Hayek warned, anything goes. 

He wrote in The Road to Serfdom in 1944.

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literallly nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole", because the"good of the whole" is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. The raison d'etat, in which collectivist ethics has found its most explicit formulation, knows no other limit than that set by expediency-the suitability of the particular act for the end in view.

This is perhaps easier to understand when contemplating the CMPM crowd but it applies as much to the Trump crowd. They will follow Trump anywhere, and remember he has no foundational libertarian principles. He does have a simple appreciation for the military and government police and  has the thought process of a simple central planner. A man who can get crowds to follow him, loves the military and has a simple central planning mind is always dangerous.

So the questions become: 

  • How far will the loony CMPM crowd go in the months ahead to trigger Trump in a way that he can get his base to support anti-liberty actions, actions that never end well for anyone?
  • What will happen if the Democrats take the House with strong showings by the socialists?

Serious things are in play. 

Perhaps, the best we can hope for is that most focus turns to the 2020 presidential election and the radicalized focus their energy there.

But the 2020 presidential election is going to be no panacea. The best outcome might be a Democratic centrist beats Trump and gets elected. An Elizabeth Warren victory or a Kamala Harris victory would be serious trouble. But maybe the goofy former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz could take it. I would not expect anything good out of him other than releasing steam off of the current pressure cooker that is the United States population but that would be big right now.

Trump is a failed solution for current ills. With Schultz or someone like him, we will at least have a chance to back into a corner and regroup.

If the nutjobs on either side get control and go rabid, either now or after the election, the liberty loss is going to be ugly and swift.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of

1 comment:

  1. A very astute assessment RW I think this is the key and at this point I am trying to gauge severity rather than the eventuality at this point:

    "If the nutjobs on either side get control and go rabid, either now or after the election, the liberty loss is going to be ugly and swift."

    Not only the severity but the "bridge too far" nature of the inevitable clash and whether it breaks the back of this county or not. I fully expect liberty to lay dormant until such time as things truly crash and burn which is sad and scary ... but where we are now.

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