Excerpt from Big Agenda in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: https://t.co/ROAQl98P0V— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) February 19, 2017
Ironically, it was a billionaire businessman who broke the mold in the 2016 presidential campaign and brought a new voice into Republican politics. Donald Trump took up the cause of the forgotten working class, promising to restore America's industrial prowess and bring back the jobs that a corrupt elite with a globalist outlook had negotiated away in reckless trade deals that sent Americans to the back of the bus and squandered the prosperity they had created over generations.Most excellent.
Equally groundbreaking was Trump's bluntness in confronting the corruption of both parties for participating in a rigged system that left their constituencies out in the cold. The failure to secure the borders was a national disgrace in which both parties were complicit. In focusing on the criminal aliens who had not been blocked at the borders and were not deported, he broke the silence imposed by the politically correct party line. In calling Clinton a "crook," a "liar," and the enabler of a sexual predator, he took her off the pedestal on which her gender and the Democrats' fantasy of a Republican "war on women" had placed her. By speaking out against the Democrats' rape of the inner cities and their treatment of their black constituents as second-class citizens, Trump burst a bubble that had protected Democrats from the consequences of their actions and opened the ranks of the Republican Party to "people of color."
Trump's readiness to go for the Democrats' jugular rallied Republican voters frustrated by their leaders' long-running deference to Democratic outrages and their willingness to keep their party on the defensive. It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a "movement." It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats' collectivism and in defense of individual liberty. Perhaps Trump's most significant innovation as a Republican candidate was the moral language he used to indict his Democratic opponent. Previously, Republicans would have been too polite to call their opponents liars and crooks - even when the evidence clearly showed that they were. If their opponent was a woman, they would never have dreamed of using such language, so deferential were they to the stringent rules of political correctness. Trump broke free of this constraint. But Republicans need to take this a step further and create a unifying theme that has a moral resonance with which they can characterize their opponents and level the political playing field.
That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not "fairness," as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom. Compulsory public schools are not a service to minorities and the poor but are infringements on their freedom to choose an education that will allow them to pursue the American dream. Obamacare is objectionable not only because its mandates drive up the costs and diminish the quality of health care, as Republicans have argued. Far more important is that government-controlled health care takes away the freedom of individuals to manage their own health and secure their life chances. Onerous taxes and massive government debt are not accounting problems; they are a war on the ability of individuals to work for themselves instead of the government and are therefore an attack on individual freedom. This is the moral language Republicans need to use if they are going to defeat the progressive agenda...
RTWT.
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