Counter-Revolutionary

It difficult to determine who won the presidential election. A combination of mail-in ballots, very close races (belying the tendentious media claim that a Democrat/Progressive landslide was in the offing), and rules that make the reporting of results late and potentially error-prone, all add to the confusion. I'll await definitive results before commenting on the winners and the losers.

However, win or lose, there are some things about Donald Trump's presidency (if it is about to end) and the Democrats' reaction to it that are worth considering.

Over the past few decades, the American Left has done a remarkable job of taking over our media and entertainment media, our universities, our government agencies, our courts, and many of our largest and most powerful corporations. They have inculcated political correctness and then its extreme extension—woke culture—into the national consciousness and have all but succeeded in damping out opposing views by labeling those views as "racist" or "misogynist" or ... you pick the epithet. As the decade of the 20s began, the American Left was poised to institute the socialist transformation of America. Victims had been defined, their oppressors had been identified, and a game plan for intrusive government control had been proposed. A "revolution," driven by leftist ideology, had begun.

But a counter-revolutionary arose and for the past four years, threw a monkey-wrench into the plans of the American Left. The counter revolutionary was crass, combative and often vulgar, but he was effective—and that infuriated the American Left and their supporters, driving a hatred unseen in this country since its founding. The counter-revolutionary is Donald Trump.

Victor Davis Hansen writes about the revolutionaries and then the man who has, almost singlehandedly opposed them:

We are in the midst of a cultural revolution, for the most part driven by angry middle-and upper-class white youth of Antifa and its sympathizers, wannabes, and enablers. Many are humiliated that they have college pedigrees, lots of multi thousand-dollar debt, plenty of woke-studies classes to their credit, but still have no real jobs, no real knowledge, and no real immediate chances of buying a house, marrying, and raising a family in their 20s.

Nothing in history is more dangerous than the underemployed wannabe intellectual or college graduate, whose cultivated sense of superiority is not matched by his income or standard of living, but who blames “them” for his own self-inflicted miseries and unappreciated genius.

The revolution toppled statues, renamed what it did not like, Trotskyized the past, photoshopped the present, and used language, government, and cultural intimidation to do its best to make America into Animal Farm.

The unrest and anger we have begun to see as a consequence of this election is being driven by the "dangerous ... underemployed wannabe intellectuals ..., whose cultivated sense of superiority is not matched by [their] income or standard of living, but who blame “them” for [their] own self-inflicted miseries and unappreciated genius." The American Left is populated by far too many people who fit VDH's characterization.

Donald Trump fought the revolutionaries and won, but his battle may be at its end. Then again—maybe not.

The Left wants to begin the process of transformation. Not all change is good, and if history serves, the socialist changes that the Left wants will be suffocating, destructive, and ultimately, dystopian. If the Left prevails over the coming weeks, the forces that naively supported them will watch as economic opportunity is dampened, innovation and wealth formation are discouraged, and government intrusion into their lives accelerates.* Some will cheer, and some may regret their support. It doesn't matter. Trump will have fought a counter revolution and ultimately lost.

Hansen goes on the discuss Trump's path::

What tools did Donald Trump have to wage these many counterrevolutions?

The media? America’s Fortune 400? Academia? The great foundations? The nation’s think tanks? The bipartisan government establishment? The international community? The banks? Wall Street? Corporate CEOs? Silicon Valley? Professional sports? The entertainment industry? Hollywood? The intelligence community? The current and retired top military brass?

In fact, none of them. All had joined or enabled the revolution, on the theory either that their wealth and influence would shield them and their own from its excesses, or like naïve Kerenskyites their status would impress and win over even those who targeted them, or they were inner revolutionaries themselves all along, just waiting to be freed at last by BLM and Antifa.

Against all that money and clout, the counterrevolutionary Trump had only one asset, the proverbial people. He had solely the under-polled and the written-off. They came out to his rallies in the tens of thousands, deluded the pollsters, and told the media less than nothing, but voted and will vote in waves to save America from what it was becoming.

Given the reality that VDH describes, a Trump victory (now in doubt) would be truly remarkable. The revolutionaries will continue their quest, but they were thwarted for a time and regardless of the outcome, they have been warned that there are tens of millions of us who will not roll over.

FOOTNOTE:

*  After raising almost 250 million dollars from leftist billionaires in a failed attempt to defeat both GOP Senate and House candidates, it looks like the Senate will remain in GOP control. That will act as a brake on the socialist transformation that the Dems want. In addition, it may come to pass the a Biden presidency will lead to a Dem bloodbath in the House in 2022 with control switching to the GOP. So the predictions I noted may not, in fact, be as dangerous or as likely as stated.

UPDATE:

The counter-revolutionary's challenge was made all the more daunting because our normal sources of public information along with new sources that have emerged in the past decade are now all-in on the side of the Left and have become belligerents in the culture war. 

Frank Pavone writes:

The media is supposed to be a neutral participant. So, to a lesser extent, are Hollywood and academia. Hollywood’s job is to entertain us. The universities’ job is to educate us. The media’s job is to report the news to us. If there is indeed some kind of philosophical, theological and economic battle being waged for the soul of the country, Americans would certainly want to know if those responsible for filtering information to us are doing so in an objective fashion.

If people knew for a fact that the media were taking sides, the jig would be up. The media would lose much of its ability to influence the outcome. This is what lies behind the media’s fear and loathing of the president. It wants desperately to advance an agenda, but knows that to do so effectively it needs to be perceived as impartial. In other words, the media cares nothing about reality—only the perception of reality.

Though the president has repeatedly condemned white supremacy, reporters keep asking if he is willing to do so. Though the Supreme Court confirmed his travel ban wasn’t based on religion, many still refer to it as a “Muslim ban.” And who could forget the evidence-free claims, repeated for more than two years, that the president was colluding with Vladimir Putin, or was himself a Russian agent? For four years, Mr. Trump has shined a piercing light on the media’s bias. He has blown the lid completely off its cover. And despite relentless attempts to discredit and destroy him in response, he has survived and even gained momentum.

And the media knows it and hates him for it. 

But in the end, a Trump defeat (if it occurs) means that the media has won. The tsunami of bias and misinformation gave the media what they've wanted—Trump's defeat. But even worse, the media is complicit in an accelerating attempt to silence opposing views. Stephen Green comments:

A major benefit to federalism is that it allows safe spaces — if you’ll forgive [me] using that horrid phrase — for disagreement.

We’re all much freer to disagree when there isn’t a federal behemoth with enough power to enforce conformity in all things across the entire country.

Washington has, after a century or more of increasingly progressive politics, established enough centralized power that virtually nothing lies outside of Washington’s purview.

What that means is that we’re never more than one election away from tyranny. Today’s Left has shown that they’re unafraid — eager, even — to wield Washington’s anti-federalism powers to silence the opposition.

Presumably forever.

That loss is far, far more important than the results of this election. 

But in another way, Trump's lasting legacy—unmasking the media for what it is, a group of despicable, dishonest and untrustworthy propagandists—is a victory in itself.