In this crazy election cycle Trump’s prospects seem to rise and fall, but they never seem to go away. And that scares the daylights out of the most powerful people on earth.
A Trump win scares me because I don’t trust him. At all. He talks about abortion like someone who is doing a bad imitation of a pro-lifer. In fact, he talks about a lot of issues that way.
But it scares the United Nations’ news center, I think, for different reasons. They represent globalist secular elites who fear Trump’s voters as much as him.
I like Trump’s voters — the ones Hillary Clinton called “deplorables” on more than one occasion. She thinks his voters are backwards; sexist, homophobic and racist. What that really means is that his voters are not cosmopolitan internationalists. After all, they tell us that we are in a “war on women” when we defend the right to life and that we are haters when we say what Hillary Clinton said about marriage in 2000 — “Marriage is as it always has been, between a man and women.”
So I scratched out some reasons what the powerful fear from a Trump win.
A Trump win scares secularist elites because it would change the Obama narrative.
After Obama’s win in 2008, many registered surprised approval at what America had just done: looked past a foreign name and elected the first black president. There was a sense that America was atoning for its racist past and growing past its nationalism to choose an international figure as its president — after all Obama, had gathered 200,000 people in Berlin the summer before the election.
Well, what will it mean for that story if the same voters who elected Obama pick Trump next? It would change everything. The Obama election would show not that we are intent on erasing or racism, but that the rumors of our racism were greatly exaggerated. Suddenly the politics of 2008 would look less like America making a deliberate globalist choice, and more like America hoping that Obama really meant the “outsider” and “change” parts of his message. That original narrative would be damaged more than it already has.
A Trump win would mean efforts at re-education are failing.
Public education in America has descended through layers of mist to where it is today, from Values Clarification to No Child Left Behind to Common Core and from a competitive position worldwide to, well, not so much.
But something more will have gone wrong if Trump wins. Our education system is designed in many cases to do more than teach reading, writing and arithmetic: It is also supposed to reset public opinion. By teaching nontraditional, value-neutral political correctness it was supposed to produce citizens who shrug off icky America-first patriotism and crazy religious superstition in favor of a new relativistic morality. And it sure seemed to be working.
But a Trump win, by voters who are public school alums, would suggest that as often not, America’s public education system will have produced Trump voters. Which leads to another thought …
We should all fear the counterattack if Trump wins.
Democracy is supposed to put the citizenry in the driver’s seat. It is supposed to be government of the people, for the people and by the people. That is why the onset of democracy worldwide in the 20th century made so many world leaders fearful. They didn’t want to trust the rabble with that much power. It was too dangerous.
So the powers that be have slowly eroded the powers of the people, to keep us at bay. In America, you can see this in the diminishing power of our representatives in the legislative branch of government and the growing power of the judicial branch, which alone took away the right to life of the unborn, and the executive branch, which alone took away religious freedom from the Little Sisters of the Poor and many others. You even see it in the electoral system, which curtailed the power of voters to elect Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
For the “rabble,” a large part of the appeal of Trump is that he so deeply offends those who are taking their freedoms away.
We will likely see the elites fight back and further erode the power of the people, no matter who wins. They will never want us to have this much power again. For me, it is thrilling to see the people make a grab for what has been taken away from us; but it is chilling that we are wasting the moment on Trump.
So what is left? An appeal to an even higher power. What we can, and must, do is pray.