The Polemics of Donald Trump

[Ender]

December 28, 2015
The Polemics of Donald Trump
By Greg Richards
What Donald Trump is saying is both:

true and/or a real-world response to extreme conditions and at the same time is;
scandalous.
How can this be? What is missing here?

Liberal pieties.

What Trump is traducing is not the truth, but liberal pieties. But that means that liberal pieties, the "truths" of liberalism, are not literally true! They are untruths.

Why is this? Because liberalism is not built on the world the way that it is, but the way liberals think it should be. This is why all their programs fail, and all their "facts" are wrong, and this is why liberals go around looking as if they have just bitten down on a lemon. They are constantly being insulted by, being surprised by, being taken aback by...reality. They build papier-mâché worlds, but the truth keeps crashing through their walls.

In order to maintain their inflated self-regard, something other than themselves must be to blame. Who? The truth-tellers.

Donald Trump.

Truth is not kind. It just is. And liberals are not used to being confronted with it. So we have all this bluster, this outrage from both Democrats and Republicans who we see now are on the same side. (For instance, Paul Ryan had the chance to defund just a couple of liberal programs like refugee immigration and Planned Parenthood. He could not muster the fortitude to do so and carry those issues to the public if Obama "shut down' the government over them. More significantly, the Republicans in the House elected Ryan Speaker, which tells us even more about them than about him. Lastly whatever Ryan did, if the Republican majorities in either the House or the Senate had voted against the budget it would not have passed.)

Since liberals control the vocabulary and the terms of debate in the public space, it takes both courage and skill to tell the truth in it. Donald Trump is the first one to do this since Reagan (and he is stronger than Reagan in this regard because we are much further gone as a society now than we were in 1980).

For the last 50 years, liberals have been the challengers. Now they are in charge. And we see how civilization collapses when that happens -- in national defense, in immigration, in the cities, in the universities, in public education. This is the first election in which liberals are not challenging, they are defending. They have made the long march through the institutions and now that they are in charge, are leaving in ruins the country first of all, but also themselves.

Trump is calling them on it and they don't like it. More to the point, they don't understand it. Donald Trump is challenging the liberal world. He is pointing out its failures. Trump is in the position of Harry Truman: he isn't giving the liberals hell, he is telling the truth and they think it's hell.

It has been surprising that some that one would have thought inoculated against liberalism -- the conservative commentariat for one (yes, that means you Charles and you George) -- are deeply penetrated by the liberal world-view. Who knew? Well, we know now.

Because of this, Trump has to be his own bell-ringer. He does not have an amen corner in the MSM like the liberals do. He has to be his own player on the field and his own cheerleader. But...who could do it better?

His speeches are like a bath in steel. What liberal observers think are disjointed ramblings are actually conservations with the audience. If you listen to one all the way through, Trump is candid, he reveals himself to the crowd, and he enthuses them. Quotes that seem deplorable out of context turn out on observation to be Trump playing with the crowd and they both understand it and love it -- for instance telling the Iowa voters they are stupid for not polling for him.

This effect is called a "cult-like following" by the ignorant. It isn't. It is the response of people hearing the truth, knowing the Trump will follow the truth, and that the truth will stop the liberal assault on the load-bearing members of the greatest country in history.

Trump, by having the sensibility of an ordinary Joe in spite of his billions, is the anti-liberal. He looks at social disaster and sees...social disaster. Since liberals only produce social disaster, this makes him an extremist in their eyes. But not in the eyes of the public.

Trump can put across a complex idea in a rapier flash, in a single sentence, a single phrase. Philistines deplore this, regard it as vulgar, anti-intellectual, undisciplined, but it has always been a necessary qualification for leadership...to reach people emotionally, instinctively.

Any community has ramparts where in the end you are either inside those ramparts or outside them. And they have to be defended for the community to survive. Liberals will no longer defend the ramparts of the American community but Trump -- and the public -- will.

Trump is a natural. He is not sitting in a room with campaign consultants plotting this all out. His positions arise organically from who he is and from the logic of the situation. Professional observers cannot imagine that someone running for office would speak from genuine conviction rather than from focus-group calculation. ("Conviction" will join "authentic" as the next big thing in campaign consultation.)

Liberalism can liquidate a society; it cannot build one. We are now at the end of liberalism in America. Liberals have the commanding heights of most of our major institutions and they are consequently in the early stages of collapse.

Donald Trump is running instinctively against the failures, the disasters of liberalism issue by issue as they arise. That is the drama of this election.

Thrilling times.



Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/the_polemics_of_donald_trump.html#ixzz3vdoWNRTr
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[Admiral Yi]

   "Bath of steel."

What's with the sock puppet dude?

[The Brain]

I reach people instinctively.

[The Brain]

I love conservations with the audience.

[alfred russel]

The article omitted the stuff about Trump being a transparent blow hard that will say anything to get attention, money, and/or power, and deep down he is probably just a narcissist, but if he does believe in anything at all, it isn't the crap he is spewing now.

[MadImmortalMan]

 

Oh boy. Planned Parenthood isn't a "liberal program". It's a 501c3 charity that operates regardless of what Congress does. You can give them money right now if you want.

[Eddie Teach]

Oh boy. Planned Parenthood isn't a "liberal program". It's a 501c3 charity that operates regardless of what Congress does. You can give them money right now if you want.

It's an advocacy group that also provides services.

[Valmy]

I just do not understand these articles trying to tell me how society is far gone and doomed. Everything seems pretty good to me. But then maybe I am too much of a liberal not to see the bodies pilling up in the streets or whatever these people see.

[The Brain]

I just do not understand these articles trying to tell me how society is far gone and doomed. Everything seems pretty good to me. But then maybe I am too much of a liberal not to see the bodies pilling up in the streets or whatever these people see.

America has abandoned God.

[DGuller]

I just do not understand these articles trying to tell me how society is far gone and doomed. Everything seems pretty good to me. But then maybe I am too much of a liberal not to see the bodies pilling up in the streets or whatever these people see.

I think it's a combination of the fact that some people have not fared as well as others in this changing economy.  And when things aren't going well for you, you tend to see everyone and everything in worse light than you normally would.  It also doesn't help that we live in another age of irresponsible propaganda, and people in general tend to let reality be informed by ideology far more than they would admit.

[Razgovory]

What exactly is the social disaster that liberals have just unleashed on the US.  I'm a little unclear on that.

For the last 50 years, liberals have been the challengers. Now they are in charge. And we see how civilization collapses when that happens -- in national defense, in immigration, in the cities, in the universities, in public education. This is the first election in which liberals are not challenging, they are defending. They have made the long march through the institutions and now that they are in charge, are leaving in ruins the country first of all, but also themselves.

What were liberals challenging 50 years ago?  What are they in charge with now?  What has collapsed in the cities, universities, military and public education in the time span of 1965-2015?   

[Valmy]

Wait so Kennedy and LBJ were not liberal politicians? Seems to me that the liberals were dominant from the early 1930s until the 1980s. But then I don't really know who 'liberals' are in this context that they only now have taken charge.

[Admiral Yi]

What were liberals challenging 50 years ago?

I'm guessing that's a reference to Vietnam and, more generally, the counter culture.

[MadImmortalMan]

Wait so Kennedy and LBJ were not liberal politicians? Seems to me that the liberals were dominant from the early 1930s until the 1980s. But then I don't really know who 'liberals' are in this context that they only now have taken charge.

If Obama is a liberal, then he's certainly not the same kind of liberal that Kennedy was. Maybe LBJ.

[Valmy]

Wait so Kennedy and LBJ were not liberal politicians? Seems to me that the liberals were dominant from the early 1930s until the 1980s. But then I don't really know who 'liberals' are in this context that they only now have taken charge.

If Obama is a liberal, then he's certainly not the same kind of liberal that Kennedy was. Maybe LBJ.

I guess I have a hard time seeing the certainty you are trying to draw on here. What distinction are you drawing here?