John C. Wright's Journal

The same author who penned the excellent ‘Flight 93’ election article responds to his critics. Please note that the critic’s criticism are all Leftwing in tactics and tone, that is, personal attacks, attacks, attacks, and attacks, without an ounce of wit or substance.

I have said before: we live in a Dark Ages. Before Trump, I had never seen the Right behave in the same low, craven and illogical fashion as the Left.

Decius makes this remark, which bears repeating:

I urge readers to go back through John Marini’s argument, to which I cannot do anything close to full justice. Suffice to say here, the current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually doanything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify Marini (and Aristotle), the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

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I have an honest question for any of my disgruntled brothers among the GOP who have decided for whatever reason that it is better to withhold your vote and throw the election to Hillary, rather than compromise your principles and vote for a man who promises an end to unconstitutional, imperial government; an end to Obamacare; a flat tax for business; a hardening of our power grid against EMP attacks; a reconstruction of the VA; a rebuilding of our depleted military; a revision to pro-China trade deals; a rational foreign policy that stops apologizing for American greatness; and the enforcement of current immigration laws.

How and why your conservative principles are against these rockribbed core conservative values when and only when Trump voices support for them is an argument for another day. (I am as in favor of free trade as any other student of Ludwig von Mises; I just do not consider buying the products of slave labor from a slave state to be free trade.)

Let us grant all your argument is true.

Let us grant that Trump is a Trojan Horse, a Democrat in sheep’s clothing, a mountebank, a huckster, a traitor to the the flag and a man who never saved anyone’s farm from bankruptcy or never aided in flood relief efforts while Obama golfed.

Let us pretend that he is as unwilling to name or to grapple the enemy with whom we are at war as Obama and Hillary.

Let us pretend he is not serious about the immigration issue, and that he will grant mass amnesty to 30 billion illegal foreigners and ensure a Democrat majority of English-illiterate voters for ever and ever, just as Hillary will.

Let us say all his campaign promises are false and he will appoint the same four Supreme Court Justice Hillary would have, who will bury the Second and the First Amendment forever.

Let us grant all your worst thoughts about him are true.

But, even granting all that….

… would it not be a heaven-sent relief NOT to have a president calling you a Racist bigot for the next eight years?

Aren’t you tired of being called deplorable by your leaders?

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