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Life's tough when you're a leftist. 

By: De_Composed in GRITZ | Recommend this post (1)
Thu, 28 Nov 24 3:41 AM | 12 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Grits Breakfast of Champeens! 		Msg. 01034 of 01035
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November 27, 2024

Columnist at The Nation stares, utterly stupefied, at Trump's growing popularity and desperately struggles to figure out why

by Monica Showalter
AmericanThinker.com

The left is in bad shape. President Trump won the election despite an unprecedented campaign of lawfare, cheating electoral officials, media bias, Zuckerbucks, mass mail balloting, and other riggings and attempted electoral thievery. They're finished. And they don't know what hit them.

On the low-I.Q. side of the leftist spectrum, Kamala Harris has taken the catbird's seat and has since become a figure of fun:


On the three-digit I.Q. side, a columnist for The Nation, Chris Lehmann, looks upon President Trump's soaring approval ratings which have just kept rising past Election Day and desperately tried to parse out 'why.'

This is his lede:
The November air is still thick with postmortems of the 2024 election, but there’s already another mystery of public opinion that deserves at least as much scrutiny as the dismal outcome of presidential balloting. Americans beholding the squalid, bottom-feeding composition of the Trump cabinet in waiting—a grim panoply of grifters, self-dealing hacks, and sexual assaulters—report that they like what they see. The net approval rating for the Trump transition is 18 percent, according to a CNN poll—compared to just 1 percent during the transition into the first Trump White House. Fifty-three percent of respondents say they’re optimistic or excited about the prospects for a second term—a photographic negative of the initial dawn of the Trump era, where that same majority said that it scared or concerned them.”
He rants on about his dislike of President Trump's cabinet picks, as if the menagerie of freaks, weirdos, Sorosed-up layabouts, wokester fanatics and others brought in by Joe Biden were somehow unremarkable.

Then he gets to his thesis: That Trump hates meritocracy. And that's where he runs into trouble.Yet, once the shock of the CNN finding wears off, it’s worth pondering the deeper causes behind a public embrace of government by corruption. The reliably excitable pundit team of Jim Van De Hei and Mike Allen at Axios theorize that Trump’s “bad-boys fixation” in cabinet picks is a hit with male supporters who rally to brash confrontation as a political virtue. Yet Trump still remains quite popular among white women voters—and characters like Musk, Oz, and Ramaswamy are hardly swaggering studies in traditional machismo.

No, what seems to lie behind the pronounced appeal of Trump’s cabinet team is the same force that fuels Trump’s own popularity: his frontal assault on the ideology of meritocracy. Throughout the 2016 primary cycle, Trump whaled away at the pieties of credentialed Beltway expertise, insisting that the whole political and business establishment was rigged against any semblance of the public interest.”

He goes into great detail to develop that idea, focusing on the progressive-era creation of the supposedly political neutral civil service (which has since incubated the deep state), never imagining for a minute that there might be some kind of growing problem there, that of a politically neutral corps of civil servants becoming raveningly partisan and not so very politically neutral at all.

He criticizes Trump's appointments of loyalists as "cronyism" as if Trump's previous term, loaded with plotters and connivers and leakers, all of them with impressive resumes, all of them trying to take him down, was somehow a better thing.

Loyalty-challenged creeps of the type Trump appointed earlier are not gonna happen this time, given how they damaged his capacity to govern last time. If loyalists are what it takes to prevent sneaking, plotting, leaking and conniving against Trump, then it makes sense to the rest of us that he hire loyalists. Maybe the meritocrats can learn to be as professional as they claim to be if they want to have any value. Their claims to neutral 'professionalism' are in fact lies, which is where the problems lie. The voters are onto it.

Here he is in his progressive-era nostalgia:This view of rank favoritism as the central political dynamic in America is a deliberate trashing of the model of impartial and impersonal governance handed down in the liberal tradition from the goo-goos and Mugwumps of the late 19th century. Appalled by the self-dealing excesses of Gilded Age governance, these crusading reformers promoted civil service reforms and the abolition of the party bosses’ spoils system, while also extolling extensions of voter sovereignty via measures like ballot initiatives and the popular election of senators.

But behind many of these innovations was a covert bid for a more high-minded brand of class rule, in which experts and educated elites would lay claim to the public wealth on grounds of general enlightenment; the vision that would later be identified as meritocratic, following the criticism of civil-service rule by British socialist Michael Young. This Progressive model of reform gained broader popular traction during the New Deal ...”
Just the fact that it's another progressive-era idea doesn't give him pause at all -- he takes its supposed greatness as objective fact, not recognizing that the whole concept of meritocracy is objectively broken with the rise of wokesterism. What's more, Trump is not a progressive, (a badly misnamed characterization, by the way), and thus, doesn't embrace progressive ideas.

An analysis like this does explain how Kamala Harris -- who recently abandoned her DNC staff to sudden layoffs without severance and broke her promise to keep them on payroll through the end of the year, as she lounged in a Hawaiian luxury mansion -- could claim to voters that Trump was "in it for himself" as her loyalist peons were driven to raising gofundme cash to tide them over until the next year. Speaking of peasants. Speaking of Gilded Age excess ... Perhaps he can look a little closer at Kamala Harris.

In the end, he does admit that something is wrong with this meritocracy, given that so much of the public is repelled by it. While he mentions that the working class does have a perception of self-dealing. Bill Clinton, he notes, a key Kamala Harris ally, is the classic defender of meritocracy:“In demonizing all establishments,” [Bill Clinton] explained to Jonathan Capehart, “and all people who wear a tie, like you and me, to work, we are breaking down the legitimacy not only of people who may be too sanctimonious and too set in their ways in the past, but also of people who actually know things that are very important for us today, and very important for our continued growth and prosperity and harmony.”
The great defender of this claimed meritocracy speaks.

But do these supposed meritocrats know things?

These guys with rows and rows of medals who brought us the Afghanistan pullout, not a one of them censored or fired?

The architects of the open border, assuring us all was "secure"?

The charmers who brought us FEMA's inaction, partisan dispersal of aid, illegals prioritization, and missing money in North Carolina, Florida, and Hawaii?

The geniuses at the Department of Transportation who were always missing in action during a toxic train spill in Ohio and a massive supply chain crisis? Those meritocrats?

The creeps who shoved old people into COVID-infected nursing homes and then wound up with major public health positions in the Biden administration, pushing mutilation onto small children as "gender affirmation" as their encore? Those meritocrats?

The champing-at-the-bit censors straight out of The Lives of Others who colluded with social media to stop 'disinformation,' meaning, the First Amendment? Those meritocrats?

Seems the meritocrats have delivered one massive failure after another, making a mockery of the word 'meritocrat.' Everything they do is a disaster even as they go home to Beltway mansions in the highest salaried region in the country. That's not meritocracy, it's thievery. And people like this need to be thrown out until they can produce something useful, something effective, something with added value. Right now, they do none of that. In the private sector, the world of double-entry bookkeeping, they'd be out on their ears. But all they get from left is elevation as somehow better than most of us.

Lehmann is not stupid and does admit some of this is a problem, citing the working class "perception" of cronyism. He notes that Bernie Sanders with his ties to the working class might be competition for team Trump and a viable path to go on.

But who shut Bernie down, back in 2016 and 2020? That's right, the defenders of the so-called meritocracy of mediocrity and failure, like the grotesque Clinton machine, and the leaders of the Democrat party.

Bernie, with his socialist solution, would only lead to the kinds of failure seen under all socialist regimes, with mass poverty, mass flight, capital flight, an end to risk-taking and investment, and Cuba-style oppression to keep the regime in permanent power.

Democrats have long shunned the socialist and communist label, given that it, too, stinks to the public.

That can only leave this revolting brand of meritocracy, which Lehmann knows is problematic. Maybe they should just throw in the towel instead and join the Trump train. Trump's popularity is rising because he has his finger on the pulse of the American people and sees the scope of the problem. What's more, he's advocating for their interests. That's why so many have jumped on.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/11/columnist_at_the_nation_stares_utterly_stupefied_at_trump_s_growing_popularity_and_desperately_struggles_to_figure_out_why.html

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