The Making of Trump

AC/DC asked: “Who made who?” Well, let us ask today who made Trump? There are some interesting answers to be had here. I blame three groups.

Conservatives: The number one culprit, to be honest, is conservatives, and I don’t mean the current fringe which has only absconded with the label. No, they’re just sheep. What I’m talking about is actual conservatives... you and me. Yeah us. How did we do this?

Since the 1990s at least, we conservatives have been angered by a GOP that seemed to keep nominating people who didn’t share our values. Time and again, the GOP nominated people who favored liberal ideas, saw conservatism as a quaint theory that would never work in practice, and who longed to compromise to win the applause of a leftist establishment. There weren’t actually many of these people, but there were some prominent ones and we hated them. Indeed, we did our best to drive these people out of the party in the name of purity. We even had a name for these traitors – RINOs!

This impulse for purity, however, began the problem. First, it found a bullhorn on talk radio and later on the internet. Then it became dogma. Unfortunately, what conservatives didn’t understand was that this type of thinking was exclusionary, was based on anger, and had within it a natural tendency to keep getting more intolerant all the time.

Ronald Reagan had said, show me someone who agrees with me 80% of the time and I’ll show you someone I can worth with. What we were doing was saying, “You better agree with me 100% of the time or you’re a traitor and I’ll drive you from the party.” Enter litmus tests that involved constitutional changes and political suicide packs, and candidates swearing purity and savaging their opponents as disloyal. Conservatism shrank and got really, really angry as the need to drive out the traitors from our midsts became an obsession. Indeed, people who had been conservative champions only weeks before found themselves purged by smear campaigns, witch hunts, and whispers about a lack of purity.

This did three things which created Trump. First, it turned conservatives against the GOP establishment, which opened the door to an anti-conservative-establishment candidate. Secondly, it destroyed the ranks of potential conservative candidates because no serious or experienced candidate could pass the impossible purity test. Third, it rid conservatism of its intellectual foundations, which allowed Trump to sell anger rather than ideas. This is why a man who has no conservative credentials and who promises nothing conservative, could become the champion of modern conservatives and defeat people conservatives had been pining for as recently as the last election.

Liberals: The next culprit is liberals, specifically the liberals who “run” our culture. For some time now, conservatives have fled any occupation that influences the culture. This left liberals in charge. But liberals are stupid, obnoxious hypocrites, and the kind of culture they created reflects that. Hence, over the past few decades, we’ve seen our culture driven relentlessly toward the lowest common denominator. Enter Trump, who feels perfectly normal in a world of scripted “reality” programs about cat fights, a world of yo'-mama-so-fat contests, and a world of unfettered violence, swearing, kinky sex, and blowhardism. Trump, through his reality TV show and penchant for tabloidism, became the perfect representative of modern culture. This made Trump acceptable to the public, and it was a simple matter for him to make the jump to politics.

The Establishment: Finally, we come to the last suspect: the establishment. The establishment is the people who set up the current economic order. They replaced the free market with a social contract that traded power and wealth and influence (theirs) for economic and personal security along with an ever increasing sense of comfort (ours). To a degree, this worked swimmingly after World War II for several decades. But then it started to break. Check out these charts below.

What these charts show is that right now, corporate profits as a percentage of the economic pie are at an all-time high whereas wages as a percentage of the economic pie are at an all-time low. Said differently, while average Americans have been facing a steadily falling share of the nation’s wealth (and with it, their security and comfort) since the 1970s at least, corporate profits keep soaring. The result of this is that the public feels like “something is broken.” They can’t necessarily put their finger on what, but they know that things keep getting worse for them, while they are constantly told how things keep getting better for the glitterati. This really came to a head in 2008 when our elites shot themselves in the head with their economic gambling and then robbed us to bail themselves out.

But this goes beyond economics too. We’ve been promised security and comfort, yet we see 11 million illegals taking jobs and committing crimes without punishment. And when we complain, we are dismissed as racists and the establishment demands that more workers be allowed in. The establishment tells us never to link Islamic terrorism to Islam, but sh*ts on Christianity. The establishment has responded to racial inequality by stoking the anger of all sides. They impose only environmental regulations that affect average people, protecting big business from change. They let minority voices bully majorities with the backing of law. Yet, they deny justice to average people. And they have elevated the elitist false-apology to a slap in the face... something which feels like corporate America waving their d*cks in our faces.

All of this has caused the anti-establishment mood to boom. Enter Trump, Sanders and whoever else promises to destroy the current order of things. To their supporters, it doesn’t really matter who these people are so long as they give the establishment nightmares.

This is what created Trump. The establishment broke the social contract and made it clear that our wishes, concerns, fears and needs mean nothing to them. They even seem to be rubbing it in people’s faces. Meanwhile, liberals guttered the culture to the point that a “vulgar” bully could be considered a hero. And conservatives reshaped the GOP to become a party of narrow-minded intolerants. These three things guaranteed a Trump. It just happens that Trump became Trump before some governor did it instead.

Thoughts?