To shake the earth

I watched the opening to some documentary on some early English punk bandleader -- another of those Netflix titles one bails on a few minutes in -- and this fellow was on about 1968 and feeling then like a movement was afoot. "Year Zero", again. Well, '68 was not the last word in movements, and movements are not a monopoly of the Left, and witnessing the Donald Trump ascendancy and the Waxahachie bus-blockers and the rest, I'm getting to where I almost believe "There's somethin' happenin' here," a roiling of the resurrected silent majority, reactionary and radicalized, unabashedly rightist and unreconstructed-ly retro.

If it comes to pass that Donald Trump walks out the other end of the primaries with the Republican nomination for president of the United States, then it may be that the nomination and not inconceivably the course of the greatest nation the world has seen were decided over a couple days in December, when Trump uttered some fairly strong words, and every elite and his dog damned him as worse than Hitler, but the American people declared for Trump. No slow-news party primaries in the slow-news month of December, but a December and a GOP nomination to shake the earth.

The story of the 2015-'16 Republican presidential primaries as of this writing is that when in the summer Donald Trump came out against illegal aliens and came down against them harder than was dreamt possible, he was elevated to frontrunner while those candidates who damned him fell away; then when at year's end Trump came out against Muslim immigration and came down against it harder than was dreamt possible, to universal damnation except by the people, he achieved something of a critical mass per the polls while those candidates who damned him were washed away, leaving Ted Cruz as least-distant first-runner-up, Cruz being not coincidentally the most rightward and Trumpian of the dozen other-than-Trumps in the race.

I've lived to cringe at a prophesy or two, and these most unconventional of Republican presidential primaries have defied forecasting, but for whatever little it's worth I'm persuaded and have been since December at least that the base of the Republican party are agreed and thus the Republican primaries are decided. The header on the polls of these R primaries for near enough to half a year might as well read "Trump leads," and the details of those polls have corroborated their headlines: the runners-up to Trump are not so much alternatives to Trump as alternative Trumps, in substance if not in style inasmuch as Donald Trump stands quite alone in that way. And those candidates who go by the wayside, who poll at the margin of error or worse, are very often those same candidates who damn Trump. Plus which 2016 is not 2012: where in the 2011-'12 cycle the conservative base of the Republican Party were forever flitting from one fleeting conservative alternative to the next, never lighting on one man to translate their majority to victory, in the present primaries the base are agreed, consolidating around a "conservative avenger", in Bill O'Reilly's apt coinage.

The news-and-views types are wont to make out that the Republican Party is in civil war, although they've been reporting a "Republican crack-up" for about as long as I've followed American politics and government, but like the stopped clock that's right twice a day they may at last have a point, only not much more than a point. The party has divided, assuredly, but not the base, i.e, the real people of the Republican Party as opposed to their leadership; the divide has opened between those real people on the one side and some of their leadership opposite them. And if the base of a party are agreed, agreed on principles and priorities and agreed also on a nominee, then any intraparty "civil war" must necessarily resolve in their favor. Leadership are disposable, and the base are vast enough to carry the party away with them if they bolt, although it strikes me as of this writing that the establishment of the Republican Party are at least as liable as its base to revolt.

It's been a century and a half since last a third party ascended to the Big Two, in 1854-'60, when it was the Republicans who played third party and in a short span supplanted one of the two great national parties, namely the Whigs. The new Republican Party was very like the old Whig Party, and constituted very largely of erstwhile Whigs, with the principal distinction that these Republicans insisted on the abolition of slavery and polygamy, "those twin relics of barbarism," where the Whig platform and program were for various reasons accommodationist of slavery. The hard-line abolitionist Republican Party was founded in 1854 and by 1860 had won its first election for president, those Americans who had voted Whig or might have voted Whig but demanded a stand against slavery having migrated to the novel Republican Party, and that president being an old Whig called Abraham Lincoln. 

I don't now prophesy the formation of a third party to supplant one of the Big Two, although it has to be said that in my time I've not seen any greater prospect of it. The conditions for it are present today as in the middle-19th Century, i.e., the base of a Big Two national party find themselves unrepresented by that party on the great questions of the age. But if the base are agreed and if they nominate Donald Trump as Republican for president then that nomination in itself may have the effect of supplanting the old-line Republican Party, the base having won their argument with the leadership within the party, and wrestled the old party onto a new course.

There is the question of what it is Donald Trump proposes which has precipitated this division and decision. It is an ancillary to the Trump program of turning back the effective invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World, and amounts to a moratorium on immigration to the United States from Islamic societies, although Trump has not always been so artful in his iterations. Some considerable part of the reaction to what is short-handed the "Trump Muslim ban" has run along the lines of "Go to hell," to quote a senior senator and also-ran for Republican presidential nominee, polling by the time of his remarks something like 2% in his home state. (And it's not without significance that the said senator, who damned Trump as shrilly as any Republican and in terms most like any leftist and Democrat, promptly failed out of the race altogether.)

Then there's the superficially more substantial-sounding "no religious test" objection, that the immigration system can't ask a petitioner's religion much less decide yea or nay on the answer, but that's to miss the point, that immigration law may restrict immigration from certain countries, and those countries may happen to be immoderate Islamic societies. Couch the Trump proposal with more precision as something like a "restriction on immigration from certain nations whose societies' beliefs are demonstrably harmful to the United States and its people, laws, and ways," and it's a good deal harder to protest. And then there's the "unconstitutional" objection, which may be dispatched thusly: the United States Constitution is a constitution for the United States, which is why we persist in calling it "the United States Constitution", and some Yemeni who turns up at the American border asking admittance has no Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, say, because the Second Amendment to the Constitution is a protection for Americans, citizens and residents, not for the wide world and anyone in it who knocks at our door.

And has not the question of what a President Trump could and could not do in restricting immigration been mooted by the Obamian precedent of government by executive order and administrative rule-making, which Obama and his administration have applied to immigration policy as much as any? Can the Left and the Democrat Party and the press suppose that this precedent they've championed and cheered, of government-because-I-say-so, will obtain for presidents with that "D" appended to their titles but never to presidents they don't much care for? And how would that be effected, that a President Obama could do as he darn pleased, and if he were succeeded by a President Clinton then she could do the likewise, but if Obama were succeeded by a President Trump then all those Constitutional constraints on a president of the United States dead and buried in the Age of Obama would be resurrected miraculously? How do the Left and Democrats and press propose to enforce this new constitutional order, by which the powers of the presidency vary by the partisan identification of the president? Inasmuch as the Left and Democrat Party and press cannot accept that the rules are the rules, that the Constitution obtains no less for a Democrat presidency than for a Republican one, what a President Obama could get away with could be gotten away with also by a President Trump.

Then there is the question of electability. Like the New York Times wondering in a headline at a drop in crime "despite" a corresponding rise in incarcerations, the news coverage in the wake of Trump's declaring against Muslim immigration and the reaction to it, or what I saw of that coverage, marveled at Trump's holding and indeed lengthening his lead, "despite" his "Muslim ban". When in the hours and days after the Trump declaration he was rewarded in the polling and again a week later when his polling climbed higher still to the highest yet registered in the primaries, doubling the first-runner-up Cruz who's the nearest thing to Trump, the headline-level angle on the coverage ran along the lines of "Trump leads despite..." and "Trump at new heights despite...." I suppose it may be that these newsmen know better but are compelled or cowed by political correctness to play dumb, but very obviously Trump's numbers were up and his denouncers' numbers down precisely because Trump had defied the elite and their dogma of a decade and a half post-9/11 in his novel suggestion that we not import populations from that part of the world which hates our ever-living guts or wants us all dead and burning in hell, not "despite" it.

I would venture that any voter in 2016 whose vote for president is a vote for more Muslims, would on no account vote Republican or conservative, and I'd go one further and venture that a goodly number of Americans who are reliably Democrat in their voting but not so reliably leftist in their thinking would find their teeth gritted when their party and their nominee damned Trump's Muslim moratorium, even if they couldn't depart from their Democrat tribalism or their self-interest in voting themselves Free Stuff. Trump loses not a vote that wasn't lost to him anyhow, and more that that, I fail to see why any Republican should fear the electoral politics of a Candidate Trump's proposing to protect and preserve the nation while a Candidate Clinton insists that all is well and Islam is the "religion of peace" and what America needs now is more Muslims. Oppose the Trump Muslim moratorium if you will, on some principle or imagined principle, but never as an electoral calculation. 

There's a minor cliche on the Right -- "When did we vote for this?" -- invoked on immigration policy as much as any. The question of immigration, its numbers and sources, has in these last decades in this country and the wider Western world been placed well outside the democratic process, to be determined by some nameless elite, impeccable in their multiculturalism and unaccountable to the people, on the understanding that the people are not so impeccable in their multiculturalism, not so post-nationalist.

Which goes some way to dispatching the question of "electability" and brings us to the proposed banishment of Donald Trump from Britain. It seems some "journalist" in Scotland started a petition to the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster, that one Donald J. Trump be banished from the United Kingdom, where Trump owns properties which presumably employ some number of Britons and generally enhance the place, owing to Trump's proposal of the Muslim moratorium and his general offending of elite and leftist sensibilities. (Scotland incidentally is the birthplace of Trump's legal-immigrant mother and the home of his Presbyterian denomination.) The petition was heard and the banishment was debated, notwithstanding that banishment in Britain is a ministerial prerogative outside the powers of Parliament, but Parliament of course declined the measure and the spectacle of course served to "embiggen" Trump -- the Mother of Parliaments is not debating bills to do with even Barack Obama much less Ted Cruz or Carly Fiorina or the rest of the Republican also-rans -- elevating the man to global colossus and his Muslim moratorium to earth-shaker.

The Left are generally very savvy about these things, but when it comes to Donald Trump their savvy fails them and they wind up quite involuntarily promoting Trump and his campaign and causes. The Left are great ones for bans, grand ones and petty ones, on anything they happen not to care for be it firearms or insecticides or perfumes, and they're great ones also for bringing the crushing power of government down onto heads, plus which they're liable to that totalitarian impulse of making an example, ruining the first fellow to stick his neck out and say peep against their dogmas, "pour encourager les autres", so I can only suppose all that had some part in the petition to ban Trump from Britain. 

But I can only suppose too that those leftists who drove the petition are anticipating a British Trump or in any case a British answer to the Trump Muslim moratorium, and anticipating that the people of Britain assuredly would turn back the Muslim tide if only they were offered the opportunity. Why it should matter so desperately to the Left that our countries be flooded by those people most alien and hostile to us and our ways is a question with answers political and indeed electoral, and psychological; the point here is that if Donald Trump wins the nomination and presidency and institutes his moratorium, that example may be taken up in the wider Western world, it may even amount to a hinge in history, and certainly it'll shake the earth.