An Election Heard Round the World
In 2016, Donald Trump shocked the world. With no political experience whatsoever he ran for president and defeated two political dynasties, the Bushes and Clintons, in the Republican primary and general election, respectively.
Trump came out of nowhere and took the bipartisan ruling establishment completely by surprise. At first, they ridiculed him, Huffpo going so far as to relegate any articles about his campaign to the Entertainment section.
However, it didn’t take long before they recognized Trump was a credible threat not only to the Republican Party side of the establishment, but the whole, corrupt, globalist cabal. That’s when they began demonizing him. And once he won the presidency, the establishment committed itself to two objectives:
1. Neuter his presidency to the best of its ability with investigations, impeachments, and resistance to his directives by the executive branch bureaucracy and,
2. Make sure electing him or anyone like him could never, ever, happen again.
And so, the public was regaled with anti-Trumpism nonstop, during and after his presidency, for eight straight years. Trump and his supporters weren’t the only victims of this psychological waterboarding. Tens of millions of American liberals became consumed with irrational fear planted in their psyches by the media that Trump would “end democracy” and replace it with 1930s-style fascism a la Hitler or Mussolini.
Even after Trump’s first term, during which none of this happened, liberals as high profile as actor Robert De Niro truly believed they would be in physical danger were Trump to be elected again. Certainly, Trump made the media’s job easier with some of the undisciplined things he said, but no one can point to any overt act of his as president that remotely justifies this animal terror.
What would motivate the political establishment to go this far, to demonize one half of the electorate along with their candidate, and to inflict psychological terror on the other half? To go so far as to prosecute Trump in multiple jurisdictions on spurious charges even after he secured the Republican nomination?
Consider what the establishment stands to lose. Over the course of the 20th century, the so-called “progressives” had systematically undone a political system which, although its lifespan was relatively brief, had improved the human condition more in a few decades than it had improved in the thousands of years of recorded human history that preceded it.
That system was called “liberalism,” although it bore no resemblance to the system supported by the people who call themselves liberal today. It was a system based upon John Locke’s concept of “property,” which included individual liberty, the security of justly acquired possessions, and the right to participate in what we would now call a laissez faire free market.
Under this system individuals have the opportunity to acquire wealth through what Franz Oppenheimer referred to as the “economic means.” This is the means of production and voluntary exchange in a free market.
The other means of acquiring wealth, which has dominated human civilization for most of its history, is what Oppenheimer called the “political means.” As Murray Rothbard put it, “The "political means" siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer's incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence.”
As I’ve said before, progressivism isn’t really progressive; it’s regressive. It is an attempt to return society to the system that existed before liberalism, before the original “shot heard ‘round the world.” It was a system in which wealth was acquired by a ruling elite through the political means. Its basic structure should sound familiar:
1. A virtually all-powerful executive
2. A vast, unelected bureaucracy appointed by the executive, rather than elected by the people, which legislated arbitrarily rather than by any consent of the governed
3. A protected class of merchants either outright granted monopolies over trade in certain products or effectively given monopoly or oligopoly power by the bureaucrats’ rules written specifically to hamper competitors
4. An enormous military establishment through which not only was vast wealth transferred from the people to connected merchants but also extracted from foreign nations, all via the “political means.”
5. Aggressive persecution, including criminal prosecution, of anyone who dares to publicly criticize the system.
This was precisely the system against which the American colonists rebelled in the 18th century and it is the same system which has systematically been reinstalled in the United States over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. All the original elements are there.
Instead of a king, we have a president almost completely free of the limits placed upon his office by the Constitution. Instead of a Privy Council or Board of Trade, we have the New Deal administrative state, unelected and similarly exercising legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Instead of the king’s protected class of merchants, we have international corporations, protected from competition by regulation and working hand in hand with the government for mutual benefit via the political means.
Not only are the corporations international and therefore bound by no national allegiance, but an international administrative state is also emerging to siphon the production of the entire globe, rather than merely individual countries. Having maxed out war, the traditional political means for robbing the public, this international cabal has added climate change and pandemics, which they intend to exploit through international regulatory bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), World Health Organization (WHO), and World Economic Forum (WEF).
Having been miseducated on their own history, indoctrinated into Marxist suspicion of free markets, imbued with inordinate faith in government, and completely shielded from the principles upon which their country was founded, the American public’s resistance to this scheme is imperfect. But they instinctively know the system is rotten.
They aren’t even seeking to tear it down (yet). They simply want elected leaders who will act in their interests instead of against them. They want policies which are at least intended to improve their quality of life, instead of deliberately diminish it. And they are done being lectured or called “racists” or “white supremacists” merely for making these reasonable demands.
Trump squeaking out an electoral victory by razor thin margins in 2016 was an accident. The globalists took the movement too lightly and got bit.
This time, it wasn’t a surprise, and it wasn’t close. Trump won every swing state and the popular vote, the latter presumed out of reach for any Republican given today’s demographics. A majority of Americans sent a message to the tyrannical international elite reminiscent of one left for the British by its colonists almost 250 years ago. This far shall you go and no farther.
It was truly an election heard round the world.
Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?