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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 864, March 20, 2016 Matthew Quigley for President!
Individuation
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise I’m not ordinarily very much for so-called “dirty little secrets”, unless they happen to be the kind of secrets that people mostly keep hidden from themselves. But this particular secret—so glaringly obvious in hindsight—helps to explain three things about American politics, and they are (A), why Democrats seem to do better than Republicans at the polls so often; and (B), why Donald Trump seems to be traveling at Warp Nine compared to his Republican compatriots, also (C), how it happens that he’s easily beating Democrats at their own game. They all hate him hysterically for that. For the most part, it is by no means a conscious game that the Democrats are playing, but simply another example of the historically established fact that, “comes the revolution”, those who labored the hardest to make it happen (intellectuals whose words and deeds are unpredictable), are among the very first to be stood up against the wall. Consider the Republicans whom we’ve watched and listened to over the past six months (it hasn’t seemed like a moment less than six years). They are, as demagogues of various stripes and flavors loudly declaim, almost uniformly White and male, reflecting nothing more than the politics associated with the demographis in America at the moment. (There aren’t very many black libertarians, either, nor black members of the John Birch Society or the Foundation for Economic Education.) That’s certainly not the fault of anyone at all except the missing candidates, with perhaps an assist from the public education system that teaches neither rational economics nor ideologically untainted history. That being the case, all the Republicans seem to have rented the same crappy blue suit and boring tie. They are a tone-deaf, faceless gaggle without a shred of personality among them. I probably couldn’t pick Mitt Romney or John Kasich out of a Vice-Squad lineup. The only recognizable quality Marco Rubio possesses is that he’s short. Ted Cruze looks like Dorothy’s Scarecrow pal, impaled above the cornfield on his stick. I’m a political junkie, but policywuse, I can’t tell these stiffs apart. It’s difficult to express how disappointed I was with Rand Paul’s campaign. I kind of liked Ben Carson, but he turned out to be an idiot. I liked Carly Fiorina, and I’m sorry she dropped out. All in all, Republicans are a posse of indistinguishable store dummies, soldier-clones shoulder to shoulder for the collectivist state. Now consider the Democrats. Despite the Maoistic socialism they all preach, one way or another, individually, from Bella Anbzug to Madeleine Allbright, they are flamboyant. Although it contradicts their fundamental uniformitarian doctrine, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Hillary Clinton, they are (regrettably, perhaps) unforgettable. And the males—from the great Franklin himself, with his sonorous phony accent and Ayn Rand cigarette holder to Waco Willie Clinton with his Elvisian sneer and pompadour—only slightly less so. Nobody ever looked funnier (read “peculiar”—another word, like “particular”, for individual) than Henry Waxman, unless it’s shiny-pated Jerry Brown. While the Republicans are striving for what they vainly imagine looks like respectability, contradicting their lip-service-only respect for individuality, the Democrats don’t give a hacker’s damn what they look like; they want you to remember them. That’s why they win. Donald Trump stands as the exception to all of this. Neither a libertarian nor a conservative, I don’t think ideas mean very much to the Donald. He is, first-and-foremost, a salesman, a wheeler-dealer, a mercantilist who makes the vile Romneys and the evil Bushes (I wonder what ever happened to the Cabots and Lodges) look like amateurish pikers. There is nothing he wouldn’t build—a giant red brick Statue of Liberty with tassles on her golden pasties—if somebody gave him enough money. I do believe he’d dress up in a Bozo the Clown suit and walk a slack wire to get whatever he wants. Make of that whatever you will; it’s certainly no worse than those running against him for President. Whatever happens next, America is in for another wild and woolly roller-coaster ride. It’s hardly for the first time. For those with long enough memories, it has survived vastly worse. Remember that the first President known to use the IRS as a political weapon wasn’t Barack Hussein Obama, but Lyndon Baines Johnson. In any given election year, none of us ever gets what we really want. That’s in the basic nature of democracy; we all get what the worst of those among us deserves. The humbling truth is that the most Presidential figure in America today is everybody’s old friend Tom Selleck: former Thomas Sullivan _Magnum_, on _Blue Bloods_, sitting now behind the large mahogany desk of Francis Xavier “Frank” Reagan, New York City’s Commissioner of Police. Matthew Quigley for President!
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