By Wayne Allensworth
Rasmussen has been the most reliable pollster since I started paying close attention to polling during President Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. Unlike most pollsters, Rasmussen is truly independent, not owned by corporate media. In his latest podcast, Rasmussen pollster Mark Mitchell reports that on the question of whether the country is “on the right track or the wrong track?,” 50 percent said, “the right track.” That is a high point for that question since Rasmussen started asking it nearly 20 years ago. And 75 percent of Republican respondents said “the right track,” another high. Mitchell called the result “unprecedented.” Trump’s approval rating has peaked as well — 52 percent. Sixty-five percent of Democrat respondents said “the wrong track” which, as Mitchell noted, was a relatively low negative. Independents tend to be a hard sell, Mitchell observed, but 45 percent said the country was on “the right track,” another high. Fifty-eight percent of men approve of Trump, highlighting a big problem for the Democrats with those voters. An astonishing 34 percent of black respondents approve of the president’s performance. Mitchell said that Trump scored “A-plus” on this voter “report card.”
Yet Trump’s remarkable comeback isn’t just a good sign for the president and his party. It’s a bad omen for the Democrats, who have become politically tone deaf, as the last election showed. Example: They have invested $20 million to study “male syntax” to develop a strategy for “speaking to men.” They want to learn to speak Man. You can’t make this stuff up, as they say. A friend commented on this in an e-mail to me, noting that the left, having jettisoned the characteristics, limitations, and defining qualities of humanity in a mad quest for total freedom from restraint, now see actual men as a foreign species in a lab. They don their white coats to study him — The Other. They won’t understand anything until they move out of the lab and take off the coat. But that would mean making a drastic shift in their ideology.
A number of commentators, including Democrats, have noted that the left is in the wilderness, lost, stunned, and bewildered by Trump’s trouncing Vice President Kamala Harris. The left was so intoxicated with its own ideology and so certain that the peasants would listen to the “experts” whom the managerial regime trotted out to scold them, that Trump couldn’t possibly win. Now, despite the tone deafness, the left looks for ways to mimic Trump’s bravado, his style, and even his celebrity team of outsiders. Politico conjured up a group of non-politicians to “refresh” the “Democratic brand” with a “shadow cabinet” that includes Mark Cuban, apparently playing the Trump role as billionaire businessman, Bill Nye “the science guy” (it’s the science!), comedian Ben Stein, and the judicial Madame Defarge, Letitia James. The Democrats are on the lookout for their version of podcaster Joe Rogan, while U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas is the left’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, the GOP representative from Georgia. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York pretend to be populists.
It probably won’t work. The hapless Democrats don’t get that Trump is a one off — authentic, confident, and in touch with popular sentiment. He is a billionaire with the common touch, a man who connects with ordinary voters, without appearing to condescend to his base. Most of all, Trump is a pragmatic, non-ideological patriot who unapologetically loves America in its post-war “leader-of-the-free-world” guise, but without the kneejerk impulse to intervene everywhere at all times. Trump is hardly a conventional conservative. But his commonsense worldview — that a country without borders is not a country, and one without an industrial base can’t be sovereign, for instance — appeals to a commonly-held instinct of how the world works. As noted in this space previously, Trump is a proprietary businessman, a throwback to an older class of business owners, including smallholders, who shared a feeling of ownership of the country. That America belonged to us, to the people who have a stake in it. He is not a member of James Burnham’s managerial class, which makes him anathema to globalists. In that sense, Trump is profoundly conservative.
His big tent of commonsense accommodated social conservatives, though he is not one himself. An America that has been through the social disruptions of the last 60 years, especially the sexual revolution, isn’t going back to the old rules regarding dress, decorum, and sexual mores anytime soon. MAGA seems mostly OK with “gay marriage,” doesn’t condemn homosexuality outright, and accepts what amounts to a broad compromise on abortion, endorsing some restrictions while not banning it. It has adopted a Suasn B. Anthony version of feminism, but does not believe that men and women are the same, and is repelled by the left’s attacks on motherhood and masculinity. MAGA accepts the historical narrative on civil rights but rejects quotas. It pays its respects to Christianity, and what was once called “the Religious Right” has been absorbed into the Trump Coalition, though I doubt Trump himself has spent much time in church. In short, while “Trump” as a political phenomenon is hardly socially conservative, traditionalists will be treated respectfully during a Trump administration.
Trumpism is a synthesis, a radical, counterrevolutionary center — Samuel Francis’ “Revolution from the Middle.” At its core, it is a Middle American movement that is using the Republican Party — which historically has favored management over labor, but brought in social conservatives to its anti-Communist coalition during the Cold War — to mount an assault on globalism. The globalist regime incorporated the revolutionary left in its efforts to dissolve the nation-state and all barriers that would restrict the rule of the “experts.” It includes those wannabes who see themselves as socially and intellectually superior to the hoi polloi. For decades, conservatives wondered when the public would revolt against the chaotic forces unleashed during the 1960s. That revolt finally came when identity politics, built on resentment and rage, pushed its boundaries too far. The left’s “trans” agenda hit a wall among Americans when it sanctioned the mutilation of children and made the mad claim that “trans women” are, in fact, women. “Drag queens” grooming children and allowing “trans women” to compete against biological women in sports or enter women’s bathrooms, set off the collective alarm among people who may never have considered themselves Republicans, much less conservatives. The “it’s-the-science!” crowd pushes “transhumanism” and would replace us with “artificial intelligence.” The old left’s working-class support evaporated in reaction to economic decline, its demographic displacement, a deranged identity politics agenda, and the “woke” left’s acting as the strike force of the managerial class.
Ideally, a political system based on democratic representation would require a set of commonly held assumptions about reality, a sense of fair play, and an assurance that every election would not amount to an existential crisis. “Right” and “left” could act as complementary wings of a system that could operate on a give-and-take basis, a dialectic that would synthesize elements of both in instituting reforms, avoid revolution, and preserve a fundamental balance that did not stagnate. Complementarity is a fundamental principle, with seemingly opposite, but related, pairings acting as a necessary basis for traction in nature and society. Think of the hemisphere theory of human cognition, which is itself reflective of metaphysical conceptions of yin and yang, of the complementarity of male and female, a foundation of sentient life. At a deeper level, chaos and order oppose one another, but order can never become so rigid that it cannot evolve and adapt. It needs a force that sometimes disrupts its stasis.
What happened to the left? Or, better to say, a center left or loyal opposition to the prevailing order that was aware of its complimentary role and was not revolutionary? It could disrupt at a certain level but not aim for chaos or dissolution. It had to pay respects to common sense to act as a positive balancing force. When that sense of complementarity was jettisoned, the ability to recognize boundaries went with it. Fanaticism and ideology replaced moderation and pragmatism. I believe that we have reached “The End of Politics.” The managerial regime became ensconced in power over a long time, and the conserving element was ridiculed, rejected, and ultimately hated. Postmodern leftism and identity politics are founded on victimology. All relations are power relations, with oppressors imposing their will on victims. There is no room for compromise in a zero-sum political game in which the alleged victims seek to reverse the situation by imposing their will. Truth is unknowable or impossible to determine. Only power remains. Drunk with hubris, the globalist-leftist alliance, which drew support from nominal “conservatives,” as well, saw its opportunity after the Cold War to build its Utopia. Naturally, the adoption of a zero-sum political game led to the globalists’ portraying the conserving impulse in political life as “fascist.” Common sense was defined as a “far right” reaction, and a man like Trump, whose worldview is much like that of a center-right Democrat of an earlier era, and whose administration includes quite a number of former Democrats, as “The New Hitler.” Utopia defines any resistance to its agenda as atavistic. The Democratic Party was completely taken over by its activist wing, serving the interests of globalist Blofelds like George Soros.
That may seem ironic, but, in fact, utopian movements in the last century included both a romantic revolutionary element and a managerial technocratic leadership. As noted in this space previously, the managerial bureaucracy is fully under the sway of the left-brain hemisphere’s “take” on reality, a narrow, focused view that can operate only on an either/or basis, never the complementarity of both/and. It cannot see reality as a continuum of more and less true. Its reality is one without context or particularity of circumstance. It’s not that the left or globalism has a monopoly on that view. Puritans and tyrannies of all sorts come from the same place. But it is the globalist left, totally captured by the LH paradigm, that has held the reins of power in recent times.
Trump occupies a broad political space at the center that was formerly a fulcrum for complementarity in politics. Thus, the difficulty the Democrats have in “rebranding” themselves becomes evident. Having rejected politics in the conventional sense, they have no place to go. Personally and as a social and political phenomenon, Trump has incorporated the right in its coalition and has taken the place a moderate opposition could occupy. What can the Democrats offer as an alternative? Reverting back to open borders? Opposing re-industrialization? Spurring on hostilities with a nuclear-armed Russia? Doubling down on identity politics? On an operational level, they can still seek the tacit support of establishment Republicans to sabotage Trump, or feign moderation, as California Governor Gavin Newsom appears to be doing. But the charade rings false — as false as their efforts to mimic the Trump movement. The Democrats are viscerally and structurally incapable of constructive opposition. All they have left is to oppose Trump personally, which reveals their own psychological fixations on the man as an archetypal devil who upset their political applecart.
The Democrats wrongly thought Trump had a hard ceiling politically. Now they are in that position. Sure, a “Black Swan” event might intervene in their favor. But nothing is over, and Trumpism’s fight against globalism is still in its early stages. The Trump administration must keep pushing.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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