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For years, it was easy to see the political storm clouds gather over
Europe with its fractious coalitions and its ancient babble of conflicts.
Marine Le Pen’s Daddy, severe old Jean-Marie, was on the scene in France
decades before Donald Trump ascended to glory on the noxious clouds of
America’s crapified culture, attended by heavenly hosts of Kardashian angels
and the cherub Honey BooBoo.
For all the strains in recent American life, the two-party system had
seemed as solid as the granite towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not even the
estimable Teddy Roosevelt could blow up the system when he tried in 1912 —
though his Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party carried California, Pennsylvania,
and Minnesota, and he far out-polled the incumbent Republican President Taft,
who garnered a measly 8 electoral votes (Democrat Woodrow Wilson won). Ross
Perot made an impact in 1992 — he certainly had a good point about NAFTA and
“the giant sucking sound” of jobs draining out of the USA. But his popinjay
manner didn’t go over so well, and at the critical moment in the general
election he lost his nerve and withdrew, only to foolishly re-enter weeks
later. Then there was the Ralph Nader in 2000, whose egoistic crusade
arguably put George W. Bush in the White House.
Since then, the country see-sawed between the long tenures of two Deep
State errand boys from each major party, putting both parties in such a bad
odor that Trump now rises on their mephitic fumes. Which raises the question,
of course: what exactly is this Deep State? Answer: A leviathan of symbiotic
rackets producing maximum incompetence affecting adversely the majority of
citizens. It’s a blood-sucking beast of a hundred-thousand heads draining the
USA of its dwindling vitality, lying about its intentions while it advertises
the pietistic certainties of the Left and superstitious shibboleths of the
Right, leaving a smoking hole in the middle where the practical problems of
everyday life used to be worked out by practical means.
The Deep State is also the sum of unintended consequences and diminishing
returns of a late-stage, bureaucratic, techno-industrial economy
cannibalizing itself to stay alive. One obvious conclusion is that this
economy has got to change before there is nothing left to eat, and no
political figure on the scene, including Trump and Bernie Sanders, has a
plausible vision of where this takes us. Both really just assume that the
engine keeps chugging down the track of ever more material wealth that can be
distributed differently. The truth is, there will be a lot less material
wealth of the kind we’re used to, and a lot less capital representation in
the things we call “money.” In fact, the scene at hand today is just a
spectacle of the shrewdest and biggest rodents scarfing up the table-scraps
of a 200-year-long banquet.
Hillary Clinton, of course, is the Deep State incarnate, which is the real
reason so few citizens trust her. Every poor schnook getting shaken down for
a $90,000 appendectomy bill looks at Hillary and knows exactly what she
represents. Every 25-year-old jobless, couch-surfing millennial carrying
fifty-grand in college debt sees the face of the Deep State in her
self-satisfied demi-smile. Mainly, she has gulled the diversity pimps —
because they are wards of the Deep State — and women, because it’s Mommy’s
“turn” to direct the Deep State. Writer, financier, and Deep State rogue
operative Jim Rickards keeps insisting that Uncle Joe Biden will end up as
the Democratic nominee. (He said so in a Tweet just the other day). You have
to wonder what this guy knows. Don’t suppose that Uncle Joe is the knight on
a white horse you’ve been waiting for. After all, he’s vice-president of the
Deep State.
Voters seem attracted to Trump because he’s so eager to give the finger to
the Deep State. It deserves the finger, but it also needs to be carefully
disassembled without blowing up what remains of this country. Trump already
has a good start on blowing up the Republican Party. Never before have so
many party officials dissociated themselves from the (so far) presumptive
nominee. I expect to see more extreme measures against Trump to be yet
attempted by the party mandarins in the two months before the convention. I
doubt you will hear about them before they happen.
In the face of that, Trump’s behavior only gets more childish. His speech
after the Indiana primary was a masterpiece of incoherence. Everything that
reflected on the magnificence of his victory was “incredible.” Interestingly,
that was exactly the right word. He’s tuned in to the national nervous breakdown
underway. From time to time, when he’s not speaking emptily about how much he
is loved, Trump voices some legitimate concern of the Deep State’s victims.
There are few decent jobs outside the Deep State’s own rackets. We’re not
obliged to take in a limitless stream of immigrants. Nation-building by
military means has been a dismal failure. The national debt is a problem. The
country’s infrastructure is decrepit. Trump says he can negotiate a fix to
all this: the art of the deal. Blowing smoke up the Deep State’s ass is not a
plan.
The tragedy is that no other serious, grown-up figures stepped forward in
this dangerous moment of history. The party that Trump purports to represent
lost itself in wilderness of grift, jingoism, and supernatural pettifoggery.
The rival Democratic Party is high on the fumes of “diversity and inclusion,”
kindergarten politics that only corrode what’s left of our tattered common
culture. Hillary’s Deep State couldn’t have found a better diversionary
subterfuge. Both parties are close to blowing up altogether. I’m not
convinced that they’ll survive their own conventionas this summer. Then what?
