When Donald Trump started making noises about running for president, I remember thinking, well, nothing. I have never been a Trump fan. I’ve had no reason to not like him, but I’m not a consumer of popular culture. Therefore, I never had need to come down one way or the other on Trump.

My sense was that he was like every other successful pitchman I’ve known. A harmless phony that is good at making people feel good about giving them money. In the case of Trump, he is a pitchman for himself and his brand, which helps sell real estate.  Nothing wrong with it, but nothing for me to care much about one way or the other.

When Trump started talking about immigration, I cringed a little. Trump has never struck me as a deep thinker so having him lead the charge on an issue of this magnitude struck me as a bad idea. I know a lot about it so I have a certain bias toward people who share my level of knowledge on the subject.

The reaction from elites, however, changed my mind. The pearl-clutching and fainting on all sides of the ruling elite has been stunning and enlightening. I’m not alone in this. My sense is much of Trump’s support is the result of this, a result of the Trump Effect.

The most obvious example of this, one I have written about a few times, is Kevin Williamson at National Review On-Line. He has been driven to madness over Trump, writing a dozen columns calling Trump everything from an ape to a Nazi. National Review finally put an end to it, apparently, as he is back to writing about unicorns and flying carpets.

I used to enjoy his articles, but his bizarre Trump columns, and to a lesser extent the strange Sanders columns, had me wondering about his sanity. Williamson was not alone; he was just the guy leading the parade. All of the allegedly conservative cognoscenti were making unhinged ad hominem attacks on Trump in what looked like a coordinated assault.

People notice things and a lot of people noticed that the Professional Right was treating Trump like a black guy at a Newport yacht club. Trump was Rodney Dangerfield and the members of the Professional Right were taking turns being Judge Smails. It was country club snobbery, not thoughtful and respectful criticism.

The other thing people noticed was that the hooting and bellowing sounded just like what they heard last decade from the Left with regards to George Bush. Kevin Williamson called Trump a “witless ape” and that sounded a lot like when the fever swamp types called Bush a chimp.

Seeing the blonde harpy from Fox prattle on about the “war on women” did more for Trump’s candidacy than anything else, I suspect, because of the images it conjured of bygone battles with the Left. She sounded like a cast member from MSNBC, ranting about Dick Cheney and the Haliburton Hurricane Machine destroying New Orleans.

The galling aspect of the Cult’s dismissal of Bush was the condescension. It was the beautiful people versus the normals. It was not George Bush they were dismissing, but his voters and their issues.The Left regularly made sport of the rubes and hicks they blamed for George Bush.

We’re seeing the same thing here with the Professional Right and Trump. The sneering dismissals don’t even bother to discuss immigration, the plight of the middle-class or the war on traditional culture. Our betters will not stoop to that level. It’s just sneering condescension.

There’s an aspect of the Trump Effect that makes it different from the reactionary support of George Bush by many middle Americans last decade. It is who is doing the hooting and to whom they are hooting it.

Normal middle Americans who watch Fox News, for example, are horrified to learn that the genteel types on their television think they are stupid prols that better know their place – or else. Jonah Goldberg thinks the listeners of Rush Limbaugh are not worth his time as they are insignificant bugs.

The biggest criticism — in terms of quantity, not quality — is that I am a RINO squish faker fraud no-goodnik lib sucking at the teat of the establishment blah blah and blah. These usually take the form of angry tweets and e-mails. So I’ll fold my response to this silliness into my responses to the longer-form stuff. One of the most popular rejoinders comes from the Conservative Treehouse, a site I’ve liked in the past. But if it weren’t for the fact that Rush Limbaugh enthusiastically plugged it on air, I’m not sure it would merit much of a response.

A 2,000-word “Open Letter to Jonah Goldberg,” written by someone named “Sundance,” it devotes barely a sentence to responding to anything I actually wrote. Nor does the author really defend Donald Trump — or his supporters — from my criticisms. Instead it is a long and somewhat splenetic indictment of the “establishment.” Sundance writes: “The challenging aspect to your expressed opinion, and perhaps why there is a chasm between us, is you appear to stand in defense of a Washington DC conservatism that no longer exists.” He then proceeds to conflate the GOP’s record with “Washington conservatism” as if they are synonymous.

This strikes me as projection and deflection and nothing more. The whole thing is a non sequitur masquerading as a rejoinder. He lays down a tediously long list of questions

The sneering is impossible to miss. Jonah’s view of himself is as a man of the sophisticated class. His critic is a man of the servant class. The snotty reply is not intended to correct or even educate the critic. It is a dismissal.

Goldberg’s audience in that piece is not the critic or the critic’s readers. The audience is his coevals in the chattering classes, who have locked arms in defense of their class against the Trumpian onslaught.

That’s the Trump Effect.

What offends the tender sensibilities of Jonah Goldberg is not the issues Trump has championed. To Jonah, those are not to be taken seriously. What offends Jonah is that Trump is a low-class prol rallying the field hands in a revolt against the master and his house boys. If you look carefully at Fox, you can see George Will and Charles Krauthammer clutching at their pearls, muttering “how dare he!” whenever Trump is the topic.

I don’t think the people supporting Trump think of him as their champion. My guess is most would rather vote for someone less caustic and improvisational.But, it’s not really about Trump and I think they know it. Trump is a means to an end, they hope.

Middle Americans are looking through the windows of the farmhouse and seeing Progressives and Conservatives sitting together eating and drinking together as one. They cannot tell the Conservatives from the Liberals because their faces seem to be the same and they are saying the same things.

There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover’s old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.

One of the things I’ve often noted is that the above the waterline social commenters scan the fringe for ideas, without ever mentioning the fringe people they were farming for ideas. The most obvious example is how good thinkers on the Right borrow from Steve Sailer whenever they need to write something smart about education or crime. I don’t recall seeing anything that smacks of plagiarism, but I’ve seen lots of stuff that was “inspired by” Sailer.

Anyway, I saw this in my twitter feed and immediately thought of myself and Sailer. I’ve been making the class traitor argument for a while with regards to Trump and Ted Cruz. I don’t think that’s particularly clever of me as it seem obvious. This sense of betrayal was at play with Bush and his overt Christianity. I know Sailer has made the same argument with regards to Trump and it looks like he saw the same story as he has posted about it.

Ross Douthat plays an odd role in the conservative ecosystem. His job, as far as I can tell, is to let the other chattering skulls know what fringe ideas are OK to appropriate without risking the wrath of the Cult. I don’t think it is intentional, more like serendipity. He writes for the NYTimes and he is aware of the alternative writers so he has become a gatekeeper for mainstream conservatives. He also seems to get that and he takes it seriously, but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

This bit got my attention:

This does not mean the two parties are interchangeable, a Republicrat conspiracy against the public. A clash between powerful elites can still be a very real clash, as recent Supreme Court decisions attest.

Nor does it mean that elites always get their way, even where there is bipartisan agreement. If they did, the Simpson-Bowles entitlement plan and comprehensive immigration reform would have passed many years ago.

But it does mean certain ideologies and worldviews get marginalized in national political debate. The libertarian who wants to cut defense spending, the anti-abortion voter who favors a bigger welfare state, the immigration skeptic who wants to keep Social Security exactly as it is … all these voters and many others choose the lesser of two evils every November, because neither party’s leadership has any interest in representing their entire worldview.

Guys like Douthat venture to the fringes of the media reservation, but they never wander far from the perimeter. They can’t as that inevitably means they get proscribed and sent to Sailer’s basement. They fear that more than anything because there’s no rehabilitation for managerial class heretics. Once you turn on your own, they lead you to the edge of the compound and slam the gates behind you. You’re effectively dead.

In this case, it means repeating the company line about there being real differences between the parties. The reality is our parties are just two versions of the consensus of the ruling elite The rich give to both parties equally. More important, they fund the media wings of both parties. Ironically, Trump has talked about this when asked about his political contributions. He buys pols from both parties just to be prudent.

At the end, Douthat repeats something I’ve been writing about here for a while making me think he is a reader.

and he’s coming at all these issues, crucially, from a vantage point of privilege — which his critics keep highlighting as though it discredits him, when in reality it lends his populism a deeper credibility. He’s the Acela Corridor billionaire (albeit tackier than most) who promises to reveal what the elites are really up to, the crony capitalist who can tell you just how corrupt D.C. really is, the financier who’ll tell you that high finance can afford higher taxes. It’s precisely because he isn’t a blue collar outsider that he may seem like a credible change agent: Because he knows Wall Street, and because he doesn’t need its money to campaign, it seems like he could actually fight his fellow elites and win.

He won’t, of course, but it matters a great deal how he loses. In a healthy two-party system, the G.O.P. would treat Trump’s strange success as evidence that the party’s basic orientation may need to change substantially, so that it looks less like a tool of moneyed interests and more like a vehicle for middle American discontent.

In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.

Since the founding, America’s party system has been two parties representing broad cultural and economic coalitions. The two parties jostle over building the majority coalition, with spells of Yankeedom trying to impose its communitarian culture on the rest of he country. Otherwise, the parties are coalitions representing the broad political consensus, one left of center and one right of center, but both very close to the center.

What’s happened in the last 25 years is something new in that one party has become an ideological party and both parties now represent the interests of the global elite. This works well for the Democrats because they have always been about the top and bottom versus the middle. Now they are just an explicitly ideological version of that old leftist strategy, financed by the super rich, buying grace on the cheap.

The Republicans are trying to figure out how to exist in this new arrangement. Their success in 2010 and 2014 is entirely due to the middle class having no alternative. That’s why the big fight is happening on that side. The American middle class is sensibly rejecting the dreary technocrats offered up by the party, giving Trump the opportunity to be the leader of a revolt that I doubt he understands.

There’s a lot wrong with his piece, but the fact is he has green lighted a discussion of the contextual issues regarding the Trump phenomenon. So far “conservative” writers have been limited to calling Trump a Nazi over and over because they were afraid to mention the dreary awfulness of the GOP. My guess is we will see discussion of this reality in the media.

Way back during L’affaire Cecil, I was struck by something I saw from friends and foes and that is they set their opinion based on the opinion of others, rather than their own reading of things. John Derbyshire did a few segments on the issue in his broadcasts. The “reaction” from the right was anticipatory as Progressives were slow out of the gate. Once the SJW’s joined the party, there was an echo reaction on the Right. Derb’s revisiting the topic two weeks after his initial reaction is a good example.

My reaction to the reaction was this post where I sort of laid out my views on the lion murderer. I still got a few responses pointing out that I was on the side of the fat angry lesbians who stalk bad thinkers on-line. Some people simply can’t find themselves on the same side of an issue with the black hats, not matter what the facts may dictate.

I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. There’s something about it that bugs me. It’s the same vibe I get when reading the neo-reactionary guys. Just the term “neo-reactionary” bugs me. The term “reactionary” has been an epithet used by the Left since the 18^th century. It implies an irrational response, not a logical one and certainly not a dispassionate one.

My opinion on the lion murderer was neither passionate nor irrational. It certainly was not reactionary as I held those same opinions before I ever heard of the lion murderer or his victim. If someone had asked me ten years ago about what I thought about big game hunting, I’d have said most of the same things. I would have said the same thing about a theoretical someone who boasted of killing animals in order to scandalize people. In other words, I came to those opinions without regard to who was on which side.

I have no interest in re-litigating the Cecil issue, as the cool kids would say. It’s just a handy reference point. I’m an anti-reactionary. By that I mean my opinions about the world are independent of alternative views. I think what I think about the Cult of Modern Liberalism based on what I know about it and what I know about human nature. If the Cult of Modern Liberalism did not exist, I’d still hold the same opinions about humanity.

The fundamental flaw of the modern Right, and certainly of the neo-reactionaries, is to give the Cult of Modern Liberalism what amounts to a heckler’s veto over their mental landscape. If the Left is deciding where the Overton Window is, for example, they control the debate. Any reaction must take place within that window and that’s a loser on every level.

You see this with the recent spree shootings. The deranged white kid shoots up a black church and the entire debate is about whether or not it is emblematic of white racism. A black lunatic shoots a couple of white coworkers, and the debate is about whether racism drove him to do it. Ideologies built on a reaction to the Left are forever locked into debating issues chosen by the left on the terms of the Left.

It’s why the Left has marched steadily through the culture for the last fifty years. They have been handed the agenda, knowing their opposition will only react to whatever they are doing. The most obvious example of that is the Muslim Wars in the Bush Years. The Left rallied its anti-war elements, locking the Conservatives into a pro-war position that was irrational and self-defeating.

The anti-reactionary alternative is on display with Trump in the GOP primary. For all his faults, Trump is his own man, and he has his own opinions about how to do things. In contrast, the 17 other candidates have built their entire political resumes in opposition to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Their positions, career choices and priorities are all about what they think the Left will think of them. They are not men; they are shadows.

It’s not an alpha male versus beta male thing, although that’s a related topic. What plagues the modern Right is that they have no reason to exist other than as the Left’s nagging old lady. Some new fad sweeps the fever swamps of the Left and conservatives are right there to lecture everyone about the foolishness of it. That’s fine, but Osama bin Laden was right people. Given the choice between the strong horse and the weak horse, people pick the strong horse. Given the choice between the cad and his nagging old lady, people take the cad.

We live at an unusual crossroads culturally. The Left’s internal contradictions may very well be tearing it to pieces. Its solution to being at odds with human nature is a cultivated paranoia that encourages escalating internal warfare. This time black women take the mic away from Bernie Sanders. The next time they take away Bernie. A mass movement based on revenge has to end in disaster.

The logical alternative, however, is not an alternative. The Modern Right defines itself in opposition to the Left. As the Left collapses, it will take all its reactionary dance partners with it. What will fill the void will be the strongest anti-reactionary movement left standing. Whether that is the Gucci populism of Donald Trump or something else, I don’t know, but something will fill the void.

I must admit I have enjoyed the Trump-a-palooza this summer. The truth is, I have thrown in the towel on America, so I don’t think our elections mean very much. It’s just a question about how fast we intend to drive into the abyss. Being old I should be rooting for slow as that means I can reach escape velocity before it gets ugly. On the other hand, life is for living and sticking around long enough to see the collapse has its attractions.

I can go either way, so the elections are just entertainment at this point.

Six months ago, I was thinking the Democrats would anoint Hillary, after the usual dalliances with a true believer, who excites the fever swamp types. It’s the GOP’s turn so this is when the party hands out their lifetime achievement award. The GOP would be figuring out if they can run Bush or if they have to find someone with the same polices, but a different last name.

Now, I think something is happening here. Clinton is now immersed in what could very well be the scandal of the century. There’s no way to wriggle free of the mishandling of classified data. You can finesse financial laws and ethics rules. You can’t finesse this stuff. News reports suggest there may be dozens of people who have violated the law and conspired to hide their involvement. This is Watergate level stuff given her position.

On the GOP side, Donald Trump just gave a speech in a stadium. If you are a member of the Party leadership or an advisor to one of the candidates, you should be in a panic. Trump went from sideshow at the start of the summer to leader of a revolution at the end of the summer. In-between, the GOP took their best shots at the man and did not leave a mark. Watching Trump’s crowd last night I kept thinking, “something is happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

One thing that is clear is I was the only guy to figure out that Trump was Beppe Grillo. The other thing is the ossified and blinkered chattering classes are wholly unprepared for what’s happening to them right now. They spend their time reading each other’s tweets, promoting each other’s work, and chatting with one another at play time. They are not even aware of the vast network of writers, bloggers and troublemakers out there complaining about the status quo.

The best evidence of that is the deranged ranting of Kevin Williamson at National Review with regards to Donald Trump. It’s like watching a robot whose CPU errors out and the robot goes berserk, smashing itself into walls. When it is a bunch of metal it is funny. When it is a human being having a nervous breakdown, it’s sad and pathetic. In this case it is emblematic. Conservative Inc. is cracking up over what’s happening outside the Acela corridor.

Trump may turn out to be a poor spokesman for the massive crowds mobbing his events. I’m not a big fan of his style and I don’t think he has thought much about any of these things, other than immigration. That puts him way ahead of the dreary dishrags running for office, but the leader of a revolt needs a coherent platform. Maybe that comes, maybe not, but the crowds are not going away.

That’s why the rest of the candidates should be scared. To get these crowds for Bush or Walker or Kasich, you would have to round up the people at gun point. Even then, you would probably have to lock the gates to keep the people from fleeing the arena once the dreary dullard started talking. Those people at the Trump rally are not buying what the GOP is selling, even if they may not be sold on Trump as a candidate.

I don’t know what they do at this stage. These things can burn out on their own or they can break up like the Tea Party. The trouble is the GOP had corrupted the grass roots long ago so they could tear apart the Tea Party movement without too much trouble. The trouble here is this is ad hoc and completely outside the control of the “grass roots” organizations that exploited the displeasure over Obama. This is a revolt against those organizations, especially the GOP establishment.

I’m skeptical about Trump. I think his lack of restraint will be his undoing. But we’re seeing a collapse of the middle. The parties and the press are now bullhorns aimed at the public and the public gets it. This is not about Trump. He’s just the flag around which the dispossessed can rally. You can take down the flag and the people may disperse, but the dispossessed are still there. Someone will come along with a new flag eventually.

Mathew Continetti has a piece up in The Washington Free Beacon that is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that it is a direct rip-off of Sam Francis without ever mentioning Sam Francis. VDare picked up on that aspect, but they assume it is because Francis was purged back in the early 90’s. Many of the old guys on the Dissident Right still nurse a grudge over it.

My interest here is to point out that Continetti is 34 years old and so the 1990’s were like a long time ago. When Francis was purged, Continetti was 14 and probably more concerned with his new Sega Genesis. In our solipsistic age, there’s what we experienced and then there is the long long time ago, which no one has time to remember. Continetti relies on Newsweek as his source because that’s what he found on-line.

That sounds mean, but it is a strange aspect of our age. The past is mostly imaginary, where emotionally charged events loom large and feel like they happened yesterday. Other events are swept away into the distant past or simply airbrushed out of existence. Still others are invented to confirm current mythologies. The latter habit has become increasingly popular.

The other interesting thing about the piece is it gives some insight into how the establishment is noodling through their Trump problem. Placing him into the line of past failed efforts to topple the accommodationist wing of the political class is probably more comforting than correct.There’s a dismissive tone there suggesting wishful thinking more than hard headed analysis.

To my eyes, Trump is more like an indictment of the political class as a whole, while Perot and Buchanan were mostly about the corruption of the Bush clan. Perot really hated Bush and Buchanan hated what Bush represented. Trump, as far as I can tell, has avoided making it about the GOP establishment or about any of the candidates. He’s just taping into the general unhappiness in the public with the ruling elite.

This incredibly long sentence is also interesting to me:

What Republicans are trying to figure out is not so much how to handle Trump as how to handle his supporters. Ignore or confront? Mock or treat seriously? Insult or persuade? The men and women in the uppermost ranks of the party, who have stood by Trump in the past as he gave them his endorsements and cash, are inclined to condescend to a large portion of the Republican base, to treat base voters’ concerns as unserious, nativist, racist, sexist, anachronistic, or nuts, to apologize for the “crazies” who fail to understand why America can build small cities in Iraq and Afghanistan but not a wall along the southern border, who do not have the education or skills or means to cope when factories move south or abroad, who stare incomprehensibly at the television screen when the media fail to see a “motive” for the Chattanooga shooting, who voted for Perot in ’92 and Buchanan in ’96 and Sarah Palin in ’08 and joined the Tea Party to fight death panels in ’09.

This is incredibly condescending and says more about the writer than his subject. My read is people are cheering Trump because it is a good show and the people moaning are mostly barnacles and parasites. John McCain would be living under a bridge if not for government checks. Most of the people in Conservative Inc. have no marketable skills, beyond the sort of ball washing you see in the political press.

In other words, the Trump surge has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with the people he upsets. Mathew Continetti can be forgiven for not accepting this reality. He and his coevals in the chattering classes like to think they are tribunes of the people, helping educate the hoi polloi, speaking truth to power and other delusional nonsense. In reality most people detest the media with the intensity of a thousand suns.

The other interesting thing about this is that the commoners are finding out that their masters hate their guts. You see it in the comment section at NRO, which reprinted the article. The glory years of America after WW2 gave Americans a sense that ours is a uniquely egalitarian meritocracy. Finding out that it is no longer that way is tough to swallow so people are understandably ticked off about it.

Since the founding of the country there has always been a tension between egalitarian democracy and aristocratic republicanism. Founders like Jefferson, Adams and Madison talked about liberty, but they certainly did not mean democracy or even social equality. But, the new country needed the support of the Scots-Irish rabble, as well as the Yankee commoners, the result being a republic.

When the balance gets out of whack we see political instability. The growing divide between the ruling elite and the people is throwing off this balance. Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have written about this growing divide. I refer to it as the Cloud People versus the Ground People. Murray and Putnam think all that’s needed is a little tinkering, but history seems to say otherwise. We’ll see.