It is Emerson I believe who made the observation that when you strike at a king you must kill him. The Democrats spent record time and money, had willing abettors in the press, and still only managed a minor victory against allegedly one of the most maligned presidents in history. The Democrats might do well to search their souls and wonder how much they are to blame for the phenomenon that is Donald Trump.
As of this writing, Mr. Biden is the apparent winner of the U.S. presidency. Very good. No more talk of counts, ballots, and lawsuits; each of those dramas will play out on their own stage - as will the drama surrounding the House and Senate, the next Speaker of the House and the cabinet fights in the new year that I do not even want to begin contemplating. All of these are spoils Mr. Biden has won, and they loom in a misty period beyond today's euphoria for he and his supporters. No sense raining on that parade; I'm not a monster.
But all of that presumes of course, that Mr. Biden is indeed the winner in this election, and by that I do not mean due to recounts and lawsuits which I feel will get Mr. Trump nowhere, but by the very results as they stand today where he has won a battle but sadly is way behind in the war. If you go by that template, the real winner on this Saturday evening is Mr. Trump and his party. Not the Republicans mind you; the Republicans of yesteryear like the Democrats who are watching the last gasp of their era pass before their eyes with the election of Mr. Biden, are no more; I am talking about the Trump Party or Trumpism which (in my opinion) will turn Donald Trump into the Juan Peron of the United States.
Before some of you get your tin-foil in a wad by the term "Juan Peron" I do not mean a coup whereby a real estate investor turned demagogue rallies thousands of supporters to raid the White House and install him as president; that doesn't even make good fiction. I am talking about the transformative nature of populism in the United States, and how this loss - like Juan Peron's 1955 exile - will do more to aggrandize and romanticize he and his movement than a victory would have done.
Also, like Mr. Peron, there is meat on the bones of his movement. If Mr. Trump were merely a real estate investor turned demagogue, it might be expected that he would become a footnote of history. That opportunity passed four years ago. Now Mr. Trump is a former president with a record and a legacy, and no matter how much the left wish to deride that, he is the first president in my lifetime that kept us out of a war and the first to hold Europe accountable from raiding the U.S. Treasury at will. He blew the dust off the book of Mercantilism rebound as Globalism and exposed its frayed cover and yellow pages, and he reiterated during a global pandemic, that in a federal republic the fate of its citizens are in the hands of their states not an all powerful/all seeing federal government. In many ways, he was more successful in core conservatism than even Ronald Reagan!
Of course, the left knows all this; and they spent much time and treasure screaming about it at the top of their lungs to anyone who would listen. They pouted, paraded, held hearings, rioted, protested, impeached, impugned and otherwise went into a political asceticism where nothing else mattered other than driving the Trump devil from the hallowed temple of government. Thing is, it seems their evangelism only got them as far as the choir.
When Mr. Trump won in 2016, the left could have viewed him as a national Jesse Ventura and let him run his course. His record and behavior would have been judged for good or for ill on merely the merit or failure of each. However, the left chose to take a dust bunny from under the bed and turn it into a hydra that was out to strip every singe identity that they (the Democrats) could conceivably politicize - of every right and dignity imaginable. And that was before accusing him of systematically and single-highhandedly killing a quarter-of-a-million people with a virus. Now they have chopped one head off the hydra and a hundred more will grow back in its place. Rather than discrediting Trumpism, the Democrats, by making it the overriding issue of their election, have legitimized it beyond even Donald Trump's wildest dreams. It's like the end of Alice's Restaurant. If you get fifty people a day-- its a movement.
Only time will tell if Mr. Biden can mend this rift. It's doubtful. The underlying issues that fuel Trumpism in all its many forms, are not going anywhere anytime soon. There is nothing in Mr. Biden's platform that will address their concerns, because like Peronism before it, Trumpism draws from both the left and the right. If the Democrats were truly taking a strike at the king, as they claimed ad nauseam for the past four years, they will now have to pay Emerson's price for not killing him. And that is a heavy price to pay, the first installment which will most likely be due in November of 2022.
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