William F. Buckley, Jr. quoting Richard Weaver's definition: "A paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation." is my favorite.
[From article]
City Journal had to my way of thinking a really sound explanation for Trump’s popularity:
What rankles most among workaday white Americans is that, even as their incomes and life expectancies decline, and even as the protections promised in the Fourteenth Amendment are eviscerated in favor of new minority carve-outs, they’re accused of benefitting from “white privilege.” The rise of Ferguson’s Michael Brown and Baltimore’s Freddy Gray -- the first a thug, the second a small-time drug dealer -- as black icons of white oppression, exemplify the perversions of Obama’s America.
[. . .]
[Arthur] Schlesinger’s fears have largely come to pass; we’ve become what he called a “quarrelsome spatter of enclaves.” Schlesinger was too much a part of the elite to imagine that the class he always thought of as representing the best of the future would come to be despised by a broad swath of Americans for its incompetence and ineffectuality. But what Schlesinger saw on the horizon seems to have arrived, with no sign of abating: we are in the midst of a soft civil war."
[. . .]
Washington conservatives -- Cable News Conservatives -- overlook the fundamental principle of conservativism, and that is giving everyone the same opportunity. America is best when she is a capitalistic society that builds railroads and industry. The idea that only career politicians are qualified to hold public office is not conservative.
But this year's election is not about conservativism or liberalism. The survival of the nation is.
[. . .]
a magazine that has supported without question in the general election GHWB, Bob Dole, W twice, McCain and Romney has no business acting as though Trump is so far out of bounds they need a symposium to not just disagree with him, but stop him.
[. . .]
Like the unhealable wound of the Fisher King,
[. . .]
Well Trump is one hell of a competitor and will use fair means or foul to win. The Democrats haven’t seen anything like this in 30 years. And they aren’t going to be up to it.
All they can do is rally the really red and the safely dead, their greedy, illiterate minority base, their vile unions and those desperate for the governmental tit and hope the demographic distribution and their media echo chamber can pull off a victory.
[. . .]
In a sense we are like the blind men trying to describe an elephant. Do we trust the polls, can we really decide who is the most “electable” candidate except by crowd size? What will the candidates do if elected? Surely we know by now that whatever candidates say to win, their promises will be tempered by the facts on the ground at the time. I think voters know this and are more interested in how they view the personal attributes of the candidates. Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder famously noted, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Experience teaches that political promises rarely survive the shifting moods of the electorate and Congress, economic exigencies, and the actions of our enemies.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/a_soft_civil_war.html
January 24, 2016
A Soft Civil War
By Clarice Feldman
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