The editors of The Washington Post have never been a fans of Mr. Trump.
But today’s editorial “The rank nihilism driving the GOP’s acceptance of Trump” is a new low in The Washington Post’s elitism and disconnection from the discontents of America’s country class.
As evidence of the Republican Party’s “nihilism” the newspaper’s editors cited Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’s statement that, “We want to win in November, and Donald Trump is someone who has been winning.”
That Chairman Priebus wants to win in November should gladden the heart of every Republican voter, since the content-free campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney left us with the distinct impression that winning was not part of the Republican Party’s plan.
Nihilism is often defined as the belief that conditions in society are so bad as to make destruction, independent of any constructive program or possibility, desirable for its own sake.
This is clearly not what Trumpism is all about.
Donald Trump’s winning slogan—Make America Great Again—is hardly “nihilism,” it was perhaps the most positive and future-oriented rhetoric of any candidate in the Republican primaries, and certainly much more positive than Hillary Clinton’s proposition, which might be best summed up as “More of the Same.”
What The Washington Post calls nihilism is what America’s country-class citizens call a good house cleaning.
After conflating nihilism with building a winning populist-conservative coalition, the Post’s editors then leap to a shopworn attack on Mr. Trump arguing that it is “important that voters see Mr. Trump’s full business and financial record precisely because he lacks a history of public service on which to judge his suitability.”
We agree that financial transparency should be required of all candidates, particularly one, such as Hillary Clinton, who has made a career out of monetizing public service and went from leaving the White House “broke,” as she put it, to having a net worth of several hundred million dollars, all while working in government jobs.
It should be self-evident, even to the editors of The Washington Post, that the most important job of a political party is to win elections and that choosing a candidate who can win by testing the ability of multiple candidates to assemble a winning coalition through state primaries is how modern American political parties decide who will represent them in the general election.
Despite our support for Ted Cruz, Donald Trump won the most primaries and will go to the Republican National Convention with the necessary majority to be nominated. This is not an endorsement of Donald Trump by us; it is a reality created by the voters who voted in the Republican primaries.
The Washington Post’s opposition to Mr. Trump and its mindless defense of the indefensible status quo brings to mind another 19th century Russian political doctrine that competed with Nihilism—Feudalism and the divine right of the Russian monarchy.
In the political ideology of the Monarchists, stability came from the State and the Feudal nobility—and the Czar was the State. Change was impossible because the existing order was divinely established and everyone had their divinely established place; the elite ruled and the peasants labored.
Today’s inside-the-Beltway culture looks and feels a lot like the Russian monarchy of that era; government by decree and rule by a feudal elite who have made themselves immune to the rules of criminal law and civil society and who maintain their positions by taking whatever they want from the laboring classes.
A big part of Trump’s appeal, repeated often on the stump, is that he’s a builder. What has Hillary Clinton built, other than an impenetrable bubble of corruption?
To the extent that Donald Trump has promised to tear down the corrupt edifice that enables Hillary Clinton and the rest of Washington’s oppressive system, it may look like destruction for its own sake to those on the inside, such as the editors of The Washington Post.
However, to us country-class peasants on the outside it doesn’t look like nihilism or destruction for its own sake; it looks like Trump is undertaking a necessary clearing away of the trash before building something new, and if the elite editors of The Washington Post don’t want to get crushed in the debris, they better get out of the way.
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