The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Accordingly

I honestly thought that by now the hysteria over Donald Trump and his approaching presidency would have abated to at least some extend. Not. A. Chance. Congressional boycotts, street protests, and unhinged commentary are a sure thing for the foreseeable future, as the anti-Trump fervor continues.

At the core of it all is the ridiculous notion that somehow, after spending $1.2 billion (about twice what Trump spent), having the media, the current administration, and most Democrats (with the except of Bernie Sanders supporters) shilling for her for at least six months prior to the election, Hillary Clinton had the election "stolen" from her by any of a long list of culprits (e.g., Putin, Comey, fake news). But at the core of the hysteria over this is the prevailing narrative that Hillary Clinton would have made a better, more stabilizing president—that somehow the country and the world would have been better off under her leadership.

Daniel Henninger comments on this:
It is said that the Trump electorate wanted to blow up the status quo. And so it did. The passed-over truth, however, is that the most destabilizing force in our politics wasn’t Donald Trump. It was that political status quo.

The belief that Hillary Clinton would have produced a more reliable presidency is wrong. Mrs. Clinton represented an extension of the administrative state, the century-old idea that elites can devise public policies, administered by centralized public bureaucracies, that deliver the greatest good to the greatest number.

Future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, in a 2001 article titled “Presidential Administration,” justified what soon would become President Obama’s broad use of executive authority as promoting “the values of administrative accountability and effectiveness.” This has been the lodestar idea of governments here and in Europe since World War II.

Today, that administrative state, like an old dying star, is in destructive decay. Government failures are causing global political instability. This is the real legitimacy problem and is the reason many national populations are in revolt. Some call that populism. Others would call it a democratic awakening.
Big Intrusive Government (B.I.G.) fails in far more ways that it succeeds. It's enormously wasteful, breathtakingly incompetent, unreasonably slow to act, and in recent years, relentlessly intrusive, affecting the lives of both citizens and businesses in ways that are counterproductive and sometimes downright authoritarian.

The Democrats and their trained hamsters in the main stream media can't (or won't) understand this. They prefer to label those who pushed back and voted for Trump as "deplorables," when in fact, the vast majority of deplorables see the world far more clearly that the elites on the East and West coasts. The deplorables see failure after failure coming from government, inaction that would be unacceptable in the real world, incompetence that is startling, and worse, the simple reality that no one is held accountable. For example, the Obamacare website failed to launch for months, wasting hundred of millions of dollars in the process, and no one of any importance was fired. The IRS attacked small citizen groups, and no one—no one—is held to account and the main stream media largely avoided any independent investigation. Four men were murdered by Islamic terrorists in Benghazi, Libya and we got a long litany of lies, crafted by government agencies and operatives.

Sixty-two million deplorables in 30 states said "enough," and they focused their anger at Hillary Clinton. In an odd way Clinton was a victim of Democratic Party governance, a demonstrably failed approach that never made the lives of deplorables (and even the Democrat's own constituencies) no better, and in fact, often made them worse.

So spare me the handwringing about the "fear" that pervades the progressive community as Trump is sworn in. An honest assessment of the last eight years (and more) uncovers failed policies and bad decisions that many feared would continue and expand under a Clinton presidency. The deplorables wanted that to stop, and they voted accordingly.