George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 October 2016.]
Today’s polls, rigged or not, make it look like Hillary Clinton will be our next president. Donald Trump has made about every mistake possible on the campaign trail, and most would agree that any of the other 16 Republican candidates would have taken Hillary in a walk.
The real question is about the attitude with which she and the Democrats will attempt to govern. All, save her hard core supporters, know her to be damaged goods. Of course that doesn’t mean she will not do her best to spin her victory as a triumph of progressivism, and see a mandate to inaugurate a “second progressive” era as explained in the Washington Monthly. But there’s good reason to believe that Hillary won’t be able to pull that off any better than did Lyndon Johnson when he beat Goldwater in 1964 and attempted to launch America into a another New Deal. Although I have to admit that Johnson’s Great Society did the next best thing to set the country on a path to big government socialism and also put conservatism on the map.
The real point here is that Hillary’s victory may well sweep away Trump’s political career, but it will not erase the national anger that has grown over the last decade. Today well over half the voters believe that the federal government is more than less incompetent, and that includes even some of the folks who are getting regular government checks. A recent Gallup poll revealed a solid 54% majority who favor a less intrusive government in Washington. And half of Americans see the federal government as “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens” according to Gallup which in 2003 measured that sentiment at only 30%.
The progressives will have a hard time with even the minimally informed Millennials because, although they may hold liberal views on such issues as illegal aliens and gay marriage, they are not all in favor of growing leviathan, with less than one-third still thinking that Washington will do a better job than their local governments at solving problems. And the Millennials, like the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers before them, will become more conservative as they age and learn.
On the Right, these sentiments against a big, intrusive, incompetent, and distant government are deeply ingrained. And these are not in the slightest tied to Trump, who is seen as the only available standard bearer willing to call out the longstanding corruption and incompetence of the Washington establishment and their coastal allies – media, entertainment, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. If and when Trump fades into the distance, most Americans will note that nothing in Washington has changed, except that we will then have the most corrupt, untrustworthy, and scandal-riddled president in the Oval Office, who will be opposed at every turn as she attempts to double down on the failed policies of her predecessor.
In short, with the groundwork of discontent started under Bush2 and solidified by Obama, the country was ready to hear from two political outliers like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Combining their supporters, we see a huge fraction of Americans who demand and are ready to try something new in how the country is governed. But that does not mean that these people see eye-to-eye on the needed solutions. Instead it will make visible the real schisms that have given rise to what many see as the coming Great Divide.
Obama advertised himself as the Great Unifier, and wound up being the most divisive president of the last hundred years. Hillary will up that in a new era of political and socio-economic factionalism which we have not seen since the country was rent by abolition. In such times people will seek to bind more closely with those they view as ‘their own kind’ to find like-minded support to oppose the new tentacles reaching out from Washington. And this should not surprise us; it has always happened in times of heightened political chaos and corruption.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] As I drafted this commentary a reader and correspondent, to whom a hat tip is in order, sent me the link to similar thoughts expressed in ‘Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up Is Just Getting Started’ by the nationally syndicated Joel Kotkin.
rebanesruminations.com 
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