{"id":1631,"date":"2015-10-30T21:10:05","date_gmt":"2015-10-31T03:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/?p=1631"},"modified":"2024-09-23T13:26:34","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T19:26:34","slug":"trump-and-the-chumps-whats-a-serious-candidate-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/trump-and-the-chumps-whats-a-serious-candidate-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and the Chumps: What’s a Serious Candidate, Anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since Donald Trump rose to front-runner status in the 2016 GOP presidential field, we\u2019ve heard dismissive talk about how he\u2019s not a \u201cserious\u201d candidate. Pundits<\/a> and political-party leaders<\/a> have made this claim, in efforts ranging from seriously intended but unserious commentary to the tactic of hoping that if you act as if something is true it will be considered so. But whether or not Trump is a serious candidate, one thing is plain: these politics wonks have no idea what that is.<\/p>\n

\u201cSerious\u201d in the sense it\u2019s being used by the establishment types is not only a weasel word, but also akin to the tactic of calling an Internet commenter who utters uncomfortable truths a \u201ctroll\u201d; the water-muddying message is, \u201cOh, you don\u2019t have to pay attention to that; he\u2019s not serious.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what is a \u201cserious candidate,\u201d anyway? Does it reflect seriousness when a politician says, as Jeb Bush has, that violating our borders and invading our nation is an \u201cact of love\u201d? How about Carly Fiorina saying<\/a>, two weeks after 9\/11, that Muslim civilization was once \u201cthe greatest in the world\u201d and \u201cwas driven more than anything, by invention\u201d? What about when a brain-frozen Hillary Clinton blurted out, \u201cDon\u2019t let anybody\u2026tell you that, ah, you know, it\u2019s corporations and businesses that create jobs\u201d? Or what about when, subject to normal oversight as any public official should be, she petulantly exclaimed about Benghazi, \u201cWhat difference at this point does it make?!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the supposed savior of Democrat electoral fortunes, Joe Biden. When he said<\/a> that Franklin Roosevelt got on TV to address the 1929 stock market crash, not realizing it predated the television age and Roosevelt\u2019s presidency, was it suggestive of a serious candidate? And how about his boss, Barack? He thought “Austrian” was spoken in Austria, pronounced “corpsman” “corpse-man”<\/a> three<\/i> times<\/i> in one speech and called the “transcontinental” railroad the “intercontinental” one (you know, the intercontinental ballistic railroad developed during the Cold War). Would a serious politician have such a poor knowledge base?<\/p>\n

We could also mention Senator Marco Rubio, a.k.a. Aquaman, who promised conservatives he\u2019d never support an immigration bill whose first priority wasn\u2019t enforcement, but then told<\/a> Spanish language station Univision (in Spanish) \u201cFirst comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border.\u201d If such a shameless liar and panderer can be considered a serious candidate because he has a pretty face, we need to reevaluate our priorities.<\/p>\n

Again, though, what is a \u201cserious\u201d candidate? Well, imagine a doctor refuses to render a correct diagnosis, but instead tells the patient what he wants to hear, because he thinks the truth will be unwelcome. Or imagine he\u2019s a witch doctor who doesn\u2019t know the truth in the first place. Would you consider him a serious physician? If \u201cserious\u201d has any meaningful significance in the context of politics at all \u2014 as opposed to just \u201cserious about conning you\u201d or \u201cserious about attaining power by any means necessary\u201d \u2014 integral to it is knowing<\/i> the truth and being willing<\/i> to speak it. Otherwise the person is as serious as Joe Isuzu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, one quality characterizing almost all our candidates, to at least an extent, is political correctness (PC). But what is PC? It can accurately be defined as \u201cthe suppression of truth<\/i> for the purposes of advancing a left-wing agenda.\u201d Conclusion?<\/p>\n

It can roughly be said that a candidate can be serious only insofar as his pronouncements are not politically correct.<\/p>\n

And, question: who is the most politically incorrect candidate running this election cycle?<\/p>\n

Answer: Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Thus, Trump in this sense is not just a serious candidate \u2014 he\u2019s perhaps the most serious candidate in the race<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Punctuating this point is that he has talked the most, and the most seriously, about one of the most serious issues of our time: the invasion of our nation euphemistically called \u201cillegal immigration\u201d (hint: illegal entry isn\u2019t any kind<\/i> of immigration).<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that any candidate, including Trump, is as \u201cserious\u201d as I might like (hey, I\u2019m not running). Everyone has his deficits and his \u201cfilters.\u201d For starters, not one of the presidential aspirants seems to grasp \u2014 or is willing to say \u2014 that our legal immigration regime<\/a> is a far, far bigger problem<\/a> than illegal migration. Nonetheless, there are lessons in the Trump phenomenon that must be understood.<\/p>\n

First, any one of the other GOP candidates could<\/i> have tapped into what Trump has capitalized upon. But they either<\/p>\n

\u2022 lacked the wisdom and\/or guts to do so.<\/p>\n

\u2022 are of the Karl Rove school and believe that such brash political incorrectness can\u2019t win the general election (lamentably, given how morally degraded the country has become, this may be true).<\/p>\n

\u2022 have neocon instincts and actually subscribe to the PC nonsense.<\/p>\n

But what exactly is Trump capitalizing upon? To begin with, there\u2019s a certain truth that his rise illustrates:<\/p>\n

Tens of millions of Americans fear being politically incorrect.<\/p>\n

But relatively few Americans actually embrace political correctness.<\/p>\n

In this our nation is a bit like the old Soviet Union: the man on the street didn\u2019t believe in the state ideology, but everyone feared the ideological machinery of the state. Trump is saying (to an extent) what countless Americans want to but fear to; he is the champion striking a blow against an unpopular social code enforced by a minority via fear and intimidation.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say there aren\u2019t millions of useful idiots who subscribe to PC. But what percentage of Americans supported the forced resignation of marriage advocate and former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich or the firing of the Miami school principal<\/a> who merely voiced support for the McKinney, Texas, police officer? PC is largely a phenomenon of the pseudo-elite, not the street. And it has its sting \u2014 Trump himself has lost major business deals (and is the rare person who can afford to) because of his immigration stance \u2014 but the privacy of the voting booth is one place where Americans don\u2019t yet have to fear being politically incorrect.<\/p>\n

The second thing Trump has tapped into is related to the first, and it was brilliantly articulated by one Julius Krein in a September Weekly Standard<\/i> article. He wrote<\/a> of Trump:<\/p>\n

[W]hat defines him as a candidate and forms the essence of his appeal, is that he seeks to speak for America. He speaks, that is, not for America as an abstraction but for real, living Americans and for their interests as distinct from those of people in other places. He does not apologize for having interests as an American, and he does not apologize for demanding that the American government vigorously prosecute those interests. \u2026 His slogan is \u201cMake America Great Again,\u201d and he is not ashamed of the fact that this means making it better than other places, perhaps even at their expense.<\/p>\n

In other words, Trump is tapping into what is the historical norm and has only been dispensed with, quite recently, by the suicidal West: a \u201ctangible\u2026nationalism,\u201d as Krein put it. This makes him stand out in a time when an European Union insider can self-righteously say<\/a> \u201csovereignty is an absolute illusion that has to be put behind us,\u201d home-owner association officials can fine residents<\/a> for flying the American flag, and an establishment-choice presidential candidate can call an invasion an act of love \u2014 and not be tarred and feathered and \u201cwarned out of town<\/a>.\u201d Trump talks like a patriot in a bizarro world where treason has become the norm.<\/p>\n

Of course, a lack of seriousness does bedevil us. But understanding that PC is the antithesis of seriousness puts this in perspective. The arenas claiming to be able to identify \u201cserious candidates\u201d \u2014 the media and academia \u2014 are themselves the most PC of all and thus wholly unserious. And since they, along with PC entertainment, drive the culture and help shape opinion, they are partially responsible for what is the root cause of our problems: unserious voters.<\/p>\n

Whatever our candidates may or may not be, they just reflect us, an unserious civilization in serious and unstable condition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since Donald Trump rose to front-runner status in the 2016 GOP presidential field, we\u2019ve heard dismissive talk about how he\u2019s not a \u201cserious\u201d candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":1632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[166],"class_list":["post-1631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-volume-45","cat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15943,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions\/15943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}