The Triumph of the Donald

Eight years ago, Dr. Thomas Fleming, then editor of Chronicles Magazine, wrote that no matter who won that year’s presidential election the outcome was known – the victor would be the worst president in American history. This was an understandable prediction. The candidates that year were John McCain for the Republicans and Barack Obama for the Democrats. The former was a warmongering hawk who was likely to have started a World War. The latter was a man who had an agenda of racial division and strife that he tried to hide behind a façade of substance-free, positive sounding tripe about hope and change.

This year the Democratic Party put forward as their candidate someone who was a combination of the worst elements of both John McCain and Barack Obama – Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mercifully, it is Donald John Trump and not her, who has just been elected the next president of the United States.

The media, which has treated Trump’s campaign as a joke from day one, and has predicted his failure every step of the way up until this last evening when it became evident that he would win the required number of electoral college votes is now trying to figure out how they could have been so wrong and how to explain Trump’s victory.

They need look no further than the writings of a late colleague of the aforementioned Dr. Fleming, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, one-time award winning editorial columnist with the Washington Times and political editor of Chronicles. A traditional Southern conservative and a sworn foe of political correctness, Sam Francis was also a brilliant student of Realpolitik and the Machiavellian elite theory of power politics as articulated by ex-Trotskyist-turned-Cold Warrior James Burnham. Accepting Burnham’s thesis in The Managerial Revolution, that the paths of socialism and capitalism had converged and a new type of society that was neither and both had emerged led by a new elite of technocratic managers and bureaucrats, Francis attributed the problems he saw in late twentieth century America to this new elite. He brilliantly diagnosed the combination of the breakdown of law and order and border security with the tyranny of political correctness, bureaucratic overregulation, and the surveillance state as anarcho-tyranny – a synthesis of anarchism and tyranny. In the theories of liberal sociologists Donald Warren about MARs – Middle American Radicals – Francis believed he had found the solution to the problem. The exportation of their jobs through free trade, the importation of their replacements through mass immigration, and their being heavily taxed to pay for a welfare state while being targeted by anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and political correctness in general, had potentially radicalized middle class white Americans. A populist nationalist could tap into this potential to fight against the new order. Francis’ friend Patrick J. Buchanan, columnist and former speech writer for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, attempted to do this three times in 1993, 1996 and as a third party candidate in 2000.

Buchanan, unfortunately, came nowhere near the White House and so Sam Francis, who passed away eleven years ago, did not live to see his arguments bear fruit.

The reason why the same populist, nativist, platform that failed to produce a Buchanan presidency has carried the Trump train all the way to the White House is evident in this year’s presidential race. To win, Trump had to first fight off all the other contenders – each preferred by the Republican Party’s own establishment over himself – for the Republican nomination. Then in the general election he had to fight the Democratic Party, a united mass media, the powerful financial interests behind Clinton, and more often than not the establishment of his own party. To do this required a particular combination of credentials which only Donald Trump possessed.

First, as a very successful businessman he was extremely wealthy – enough so that he did not have to rely upon the financiers to whom he would otherwise be indentured and no different from any other politician. The same could be said of Ross Perot – but Perot chose to run as an independent and third party candidate, paths that lead to nowhere.

Second, as the host of the popular reality/game show The Apprentice, Trump was a world famous celebrity and therefore not someone who could simply be silenced or ignored.

Finally, Trump had the combination of sincere patriotism, sheer egotism, and unrelenting determination sufficient to weather everything that his powerful enemies threw at him.

It was only someone with this particular combination who could capitalize on Francis’s MARs strategy and carry it through to victory.

I cannot recall a time when the outcome of an election pleased me more than this one. That may seem odd, coming from someone who is neither an American nor a republican, but is rather a Canadian Tory who can only tolerate popular democracy when it is mixed, as it is in our parliamentary system, with hereditary monarchy. For that matter I have long been of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s opinion that the ideology which is nationalism is a dangerous substitute for the virtuous sentiment that is true patriotism. Donald Trump does not strike me as being an ideologue, however – it was amusing to hear a representative of the Democratic Party interviewed on CBC after the third presidential debate talk about Trump’s ideology, as if he had one – and on practical matters such as immigration and free trade the difference between patriotism and nationalism is somewhat moot. There is a certain amount of schadenfreude in this, I confess – I have long loathed Hillary Clinton, everything she stands for, and the type of people who have been backing her. It is very satisfying, however, to see someone who has his country’s good at heart, on matters like trade and immigration, win out over the forces of globalism and political correctness that have seemed undefeatable for decades.

On November 8th, 2016 the American voting public sent a very clear message – to both Hillary Clinton and the politically correct, corporate globalist elites. That message, put simply, was “you’re fired!”

Now that Donald Trump has been elected president the question will be whether he will do all the things he has promised to do. There are many that say that he won’t – but they also said through this entire race that he would never be able to win this primary or that one, that he would never be able to secure the Republican nomination, that he would never be able to defeat Hillary Clinton – and he proved them wrong at every turn. Hillary Clinton, with her combination of all the bad traits of both John McCain and Barack Obama, had she won, would have been the worst American president in all of history. Donald Trump, if he accomplishes even a fraction of what he has set out to do, may very well go down in history as their greatest and best president ever.