[TTPer Mike Ryan recently posted on the Forum a remarkable argument for what could be called the Trumpean Synthesis.  Skye suggested it be a featured article – even though he has a critical objection (which is the same as mine).  I can only agree – thanks, Mike! –JW]

This is what the political situation looks like to me, where we are now, how we got here, and where we are going.

To nutshell it, a synthesis of the Conservatism of Edmund Burke and John Locke created and sustained America until it was wrecked by Progressives over 100 years ago, and subsequently revived by Ronald Reagan.  This synthesis is despised by the Republican Elite which are all Burke and no Locke.  Thus we need a new synthesis which Trump may represent.

Allow me to introduce myself.  For over 25 years, from 1981 to 2007, I was the Founding Director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy.

As such, I handled information-disclosure policy issues on the dozens of Clinton Administration scandals that arose within public view, as well as two that did not.  Since retiring, I have taught government secrecy law at American University’s Washington College of Law.

This past week has been a milestone of sorts for those who closely follow the continuing saga of Hillary Clinton’s wrongful use of email systems during her tenure as Secretary of State.  But the kind of milestone it was depends on where you stood when the week began.

If you’re for Trump, you’re rejoicing; for Sanders, you have regrets; die-hard for Hillary, you’re rationalizing.  But if you’re a more mainstream member of the Democrat Party?

You, my friend, are simply scared to death, terrified even, for reasons that are truly unprecedented.  

In his best-selling book The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain described his 1867 visit to Ottoman Palestine as it was known then as a land of “unpeopled deserts” and “mounds of barrenness,” of “forlorn” and “untenanted” cities (chapter 48).

The Palestine of Mohammedans (as he called Moslems) is a “waste of a limitless desolation,” he concluded, “desolate and unlovely” (chapter 56).

The same is true today of the Palestinian Museum which opened in Ramallah on May 18 with much fanfare and one slight problem. While admission is free, there’s nothing inside for any of the visitors to see except the bare walls. The Palestinian Museum had been in the works since 1998, but has no exhibits. The museum cost $24 million. All it has to show for it are a few low sloping sandy buildings indistinguishable from the dirt and a “garden” of scraggly bushes and shrubs.  It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for Palestine. 

Palestine is an empty building with nothing in it. It’s a political Potemkin village. There’s a flag, an anthem, a museum and all the trappings of a country. But if you look closer, there’s nothing inside.

Over the course of the last two and half years, the Chinese government has shown signs of increasing nervousness and wariness of the growth of Christianity.

In its latest grasp for control, the Communist government has taken Christian churches in Zhejiang province to task, by removing the crosses that adorn some 1,700 churches. Citing breach of building codes, the government sent in police SWAT teams to remove the crucifixes from spires.  Zhejiang is an important province of 55 million, adjacent to Shanghai, China’s and the world’s most populous city of 25 million.

Early last month, Xi Jinping made a speech on religious policy stating, “We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringement by extremists.”

This stance is in line with the CCP’s long-held objective of controlling belief systems. A Pew Research Center report estimates that there are close to 68 million Christians in China — an astonishing number considering the growth of Christianity has largely been by way of faith conversion – while the BBC estimates there are as many as 100 million.

And it’s worth noting that Christianity is hardly a recent “overseas infiltration.” Chinese have been adopting the Christian faith since 635 AD during the Tang Dynasty.

This summer brings the 50th anniversary of the full deciphering of the genetic code — the four-billion-year-old cipher by which DNA’s information is translated and expressed.   The genetic code was the greatest of all the 20th-century’s scientific discoveries.

Fifty years on, the discovery of the genetic code has produced a cornucopia of good and very little harm. It has convicted the guilty and exonerated the innocent in court on a huge scale through DNA fingerprinting. It has enabled people to avoid passing on terrible diseases.

It has led to the development of new drugs, new therapies and new diagnoses. It has given partial sight back to a blind man through gene therapy. It has increased the yield of crops while reducing the use of chemical pesticides.

Yet still we are bombarded with scares about Frankenstein foods, biological warfare, designer babies, genetic discrimination and the return of eugenics. We have a virtual ban on GM crops and put huge obstacles in the way of GM vaccines.

The exhaustive and cautious new report from the American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

We all got it wrong.

Everybody who wrote Donald Trump off as a political charlatan destined to flame out; everybody who called Trump a clown who would return to his reality show and leave us all alone; everybody who suggested that this circus couldn't -- couldn't! -- continue...we were all wrong.

Now it's time to take away a few lessons.  Here are five.

First, failure to utilize ideological purity tests leads to the rise of leftist candidates within your own party.

Second, ignoring social issues means that the only way to appeal to disgruntled blue-collar voters is by moving left on economics.

Third, moral narrative is far more important than policy knowledge.

Fourth, when you believe there are no good guys, character doesn't matter.

Fifth, lack of institutional trust leads to the rise of protofascists, not to a general allegiance to liberty.

Let’s discuss each.

The Green religion is dying. You can see the evidence of this in the latest Gallup survey showing the number of Americans who identify as “Environmentalist” down to 42 percent (from 78 percent in 1991).  But even more telling, I think, are the glimmers of anti-Green skepticism we’re now starting to see in movieland and on TV.

See, for example, Kingsman (2014) which cast Samuel L Jackson as an insane Malthusian bent on wiping out most of the human race for the good of the planet; and also Utopia (2013), the genius, black as your hat thriller about a similar “the Earth has a cancer; the cancer is man” type conspiracy.

Now there’s a Nordic Noir TV series I strongly recommend you watch – just out on DVD – called Follow The Money.

The Guardian hated it – which is a recommendation in itself. But what’s even better is the reason why I suspect the Guardian hated it: it couldn’t quite get its head around the fact that the bad guys aren’t in Big Oil or the Military Industrial Complex or some faceless corporation. Instead, the baddies work for a renewable energy company with the caring, sharing name Energreen.

It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books, absorbing Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships, sofas and beds.

If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not. I wanted to savor every sentence of this remarkable feast of prose.

The subtitle is: How Ideas, Not Capital or Investment Enriched the World. It is a giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the “great enrichment” of humanity over the past 300 years. It is so rich in vocabulary, allusion and fact as to be a contender for the great book of our age.

The gist of her argument is that the Industrial Revolution (which was not a revolution, for it started extremely slowly and is still gathering pace) was not caused by an accumulation of capital, or the exploitation of colonies, or science, or government policy, or a change in institutions.

All these explanations are too small or arrive too late to explain the astonishing 2,900% increase in real incomes of westerners.

The cause was a change in values that allowed merchants to engage in trade without being despised and persecuted, “a bourgeois rhetorical tsunami around 1700 in the North Sea.”

Before — and in many places, since — “the sneer by the aristocrat, the damning by the priest, the envy by the peasant, all directed against trade and profit and the bourgeoisie, conventional in every literature since ancient times, has long sufficed to kill economic growth.”

Most people don’t realize this yet, but if a Democrat gets the keys to the White House next year it’s game over for the US economy.

This isn’t just for the obvious reason that liberals like  Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton don’t understand free markets or small government.

It’s because the left has got its hands on the magic formula that enables it to do at both federal and local level all the things that lefties love to do – the meddling, the nannying, the taxing, the regulating, the confiscating, the cronyism – virtually unopposed by the people who should be opposing them.

The left is cunning. Like the Taliban – “you have the watches, we have the time” – it plays a very long game. The tactics it has been using in the environmental wars date at least back to Saul Alinsky and probably as far back as the Cultural Marxists of the 1930s Frankfurt School.

What’s certain is for several decades now – and most especially since the Fall of the Berlin Wall supposedly won the capitalist argument – the left has been using environmentalism as a cloak to disguise its usual controlling, misanthropic, puritanical, big government agenda with a kindly aura of bunny-hugging caringness.

There’s a solution to this and it’s actually pretty simple.

I live on a dairy farm. I love full-fat milk, butter and, above all, double cream. As a child I drank milk unpasteurized, straight from the cow — and I grew to be almost 6ft 6in, so it cannot have been all bad.

Nonetheless, I believed fat was bad for me because the medical establishment said so again and again. From time to time I made ineffectual efforts to take up margarine and even that watery stuff they call skimmed milk.

But cream remains a guilty pleasure.

I assumed that behind the advice to cut out the cream lay hard evidence from well-controlled trials.  Yet it turns out I have often been lied to by the diet police over the years.

There is no evidence that dietary fat is a big cause of heart disease, or obesity — and we have actually had the facts on this for decades.

It’s a shocking miscarriage of scientific justice.  The whole theory that saturated fats from animals cause heart disease by upping cholesterol is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

It always has been, we can now see.  Right from the start, in the 1950s, those laying the blame on diet for the epidemic of heart disease got it wrong.  Here’s the story.

I’ve been trying, I really have, to give a flying flatulence about Paul Burrell, former butler to the late Princess Diana, having some shares in an offshore trust based in the British Virgin Islands called Black Dragon.

But I’m afraid I find myself caring as much as I do about the Lithuanian shoe polish industry, maybe. No, I exaggerate. Not that much.

What we should care about very much though, I think, is the way that this “Panama Papers” story is being a manipulated to a particular end by politicians and the left-leaning media.

Look at Sen. Bernie Sanders – or try to without laughing, for after all his initials are BS.  The leftie media is now proclaiming that the Panama Papers are his keys to the White House.

For it plays perfectly to that notion Socialists like Sanders are obsessed with these days: that there’s a corrupt, uncontrollable elite who can only brought to account by a good old fashioned dose of the kind of hard-left politics which worked so well for Cuba, East Germany, and the USSR.

The late Sir George Martin, “the man who made The Beatles,” created substantial British exports.

Had the import of his music to America been banned to save the jobs of US musicians, Britain would have missed out on some revenue but the American consumer would have been the biggest loser, missing out on the music. Trade benefits the importing country: that’s why it happens.

Frankly, we might as well be living in the 17th century, so antiquated are our current debates over trade, both here over Brexit and in America over the presidential nominations. Many current assumptions about trade, such as Mr. Trump’s, were debunked more than two hundred years ago and then tested to destruction in the mid-19th century.

In the 17th and 18th centuries European governments were in thrall to “mercantilism”.  They sought to restrain imports with tariffs and bans, while encouraging exports with monopolies and gunboats.

Along came Adam Smith and made a different argument, that mercantilism punished consumers and the poor, while rewarding protected producers and the rich; that imports were a good thing because they raised people’s standard of living by giving them what they wanted at lower prices. It’s a shame Donald Trump never read Adam Smith.

America needs something better than a feedback loop for popular resentment. We need a real leader.

America's elite is arrogant and corrupt, but the state of the American people is just as alarming. America had 90% adult literacy in 1790, when only half of Englishmen and a fifth of Spaniards and Italians could sign their names. We had the best educated, most motivated, and healthiest workforce in the world by an overwhelming margin. Now Americans aged 16 to 24 rank at the bottom of a 22-country evaluation  of numeracy, literacy, and technological problem-solving. Poor student performance should be no surprise: America's family structure is falling apart. Nearly 30% of non-Hispanic white children are born out of wedlock, as well as 53% of Hispanics and 73% of African-Americans. When Reagan took office, 18% of all American births were to unmarried mothers. By 2014 the figure was above 40%. Catch-up ball doesn't begin to describe our predicament. We need nothing short of a great national turnaround. There are two Republican candidates who made clear from the outset that it isn't business as usual -- Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Another Romney wouldn't be relevant.

The paradox of the individualistic society is that it can only exist if individuals embrace virtues that are greater than their own needs and whims.

A society where each individual acts as a little tyrant, pursuing his desires with total selfishness at the expense of everyone else becomes collectivist as the little tyrants turn to a series of big tyrants to get what they want no matter who gets hurt by it.

As individual virtues and social compacts break down, selfish squabbles escalate. Tribalism turns into legal civil war. Laws become the means by which one group imposes its will on the other and by which one man seizes the property of another. The people come to view the system with contempt. All virtues and principles are abandoned as neighbor turns on neighbor in resentment and hatred.

Ideas can exist objectively. Feelings only exist subjectively. Identity politics resolves this problem by treating the objective response to feelings as privilege. But even subjective empathy can never truly approach the subjective experience of the crybully.

Even a member of that same identity group will differ in some way from the multiple intersectional identities of the crybully. And that difference is its own privilege. This isn't really politics. It's self-help narcissism crossbred with stale Marxism.

[This is the most eloquent and moving explanation of support for Trump I have ever seen. One caveat is that the GOP Elite does not run California, the Democrats do and totally. –JW]

During the most recent Detroit debate (3/03), even a reformed “inclusive” and “presidential” Donald Trump still was crass and vulgar. (Has a candidate ever crudely referred to the size of his phallus, and in our sick world is that a Freudian admission of doubt, or a macho reassurance in LBJ fashion?)

Trump gave more than enough evidence that his positions are liquid and change as often his perceptions of his flatterers and critics. He is a blank slate, who as president could build or tear down a southern wall with equal ease, depending on the dynamics of the political deal of the moment.

In the debate, in passive-aggressive fashion Trump pouted and pounced, furious that others had broken the Golden Rule and done unto him what he has done unto others. His entire moral universe is predicated on a preteen morality of liking those who praise him, and hating those who criticize him.

All that said, I doubt Trump will lose much of his 35-45% support in the next rounds of elections. There are quite understandable reasons why.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last?

One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand. Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Evangelical support for Trump is that he takes these positions as he runs against primary opponents who all wear their faith on their sleeves. All of his opponents have records of standing with the Evangelicals on social and other salient issues – including support for Israel. What are we to make of this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon? To understand, the Christ at the Checkpoint conference taking place this week in Bethlehem is a good place to look.

President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating is regularly accepted as a proxy measure for the level of Russia’s internal cohesion. And his support remains on a sky-high plateau, where it has stood since the explosion of jingoism caused by the annexation of Crimea in March 2014.

However, powerful and divisive forces are eroding this purported cohesion, turning Russian society into a disillusioned and apathetic crowd—resembling the nation that failed, 99 years ago, to turn the dethroning of Tsar Nicolas II into a lasting liberating moment.

Stalin’s grave on Red Square was covered with flowers last Saturday (March 5), on the day of his death; and many Russians still cherish or long for a “firm hand,” no matter the millions of destroyed lives such authoritarian leadership has historically produced (Slon.ru).

This urge to escape from the apparent dead end of the present by reliving the “glorious” past translates into a desire to ignore the disasters that mark Russia’s current decline.

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, thinks his country has a ‘profound interest… in a very strong United Kingdom staying in a strong EU.’ President Obama is planning to join in campaigning against the “Brexit” (Britain’s exit from the EU, on which there will be a national referendum on June 23).

They say this not because they think it is good for us British, but because it is in their interests that we influence Europe in a free-trading, Atlanticist direction.

Well, two can play at that game.

How would Americans like it if we argued that it is in our interests that the United States should forthwith be united with all the countries in their continent north of the Panama Canal — Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Panama — into a vast customs union governed by a trans-national, unelected civil service.

Let’s call it the American Union, or AU.

[Skye’s posts on the Forum are among the most valuable assets to being a TTPer. His is the voice of calm reasoned argument. I have treasured his friendship for well over 40 years. As someone whose IQ could not be measured by MIT as it went so far beyond the upper measurable limit of 220, Skye’s words deserve our careful consideration. --JW]

Everyone is scared witless by the potential outcome of the upcoming election.  Some more, some less – but there is more than enough reason for much of these fears. 

Conservative, libertarian, and constitutionalist Republicans fear populist Republicans.  Establishment Republicans fear all of the above and vice versa.  Establishment Democrats fear populist/socialist Democrats and vice versa.  Republicans fear Democrats, Democrats fear Republicans, and Independents fear both.

Unfortunately, these severe fears are not paranoid delusions.  The central government has become so powerful, so out of control of both the Constitution and the electorates, so deeply wrapped around the roots of everyone’s everyday life, that the “other” truly has become an existential threat.

The only hope that I can think of for escape from the onrushing Armageddon of Americans warring against Americans with the guns of the central government is restoration of constitutional restraints on the central government.

Thus the vital question: who among the various candidates is the most determined to restore constitutional limitations on the central government?

In his victory speech in South Carolina, Donald Trump vowed to sweep the twelve primaries held on Super Tuesday, March 1, and implied the race would then be over: “Let’s put this thing away!”

He also belittled rivals who claimed that as the field shrinks, they will be able to close on Trump and deny him the nomination. “They’re geniuses!” he mocked. “They don’t understand that as people drop out, I’m going to get a lot of those votes also.”

Not so fast, Donald.

Trump is the front-runner, but he has to find a way to win a majority of the delegates, and the kind of campaign he’s running is making it harder for him to crack a ceiling of about a third of the vote.

In the run-up to South Carolina, Trump came out in favor of the health-care mandate, defended Planned Parenthood, accused George W. Bush of lying about the Iraq War, and stood by his call to impeach Bush. (He later retreated on the mandate and on Bush’s supposedly lying.)

His consistent inconsistency helps explain why only four in ten GOP voters in a new Associated Press poll view Trump in a positive light. He will have trouble growing his coalition to win a majority of delegates, even as more candidates drop out.

This is a pretty astounding clip from an Obama press conference yesterday. Obama was waxing poetic about the obligation of the Senate to confirm whatever judicial nomination he throws up there when a reporter stunned Obama into literal silence with what should have been an easily foreseeable question. When Obama finally stumbled and fumbled his way into an answer, he basically admitted that he and his party were a major part of the problem with judicial nominations.

The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia has sharpened the divide between the progressives’ idea of technocratic federal power, and the Constitution’s limited government that Scalia eloquently championed for almost 30 years. This division has a long history that transcends the failed presidency of Barack Obama.

The Democratic Party grew out of opposition to the elitist Federalists, whose president John Adams was known as “His Rotundity” for his girth and alleged aristocratic tendencies. James Madison in 1792 established the contrast between the two parties that persists to this day: the Federalists were “more partial to the opulent,” and believed that “government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, [and] the influence of money and emoluments.”

Those who would become Democrats, Madison wrote, believed “in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves,” and he charged that power lodged “into the hands of the few” is “an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” In short, the Democrats were about power to the people rather than to privileged elites.

Obama’s visit to a pro-terrorist radical Moslem mosque last week (2/03) is a clear signal of how he intends to spend his last year in office. It tells us that during this period, Obama will adopt ever more extreme positions regarding radical Islam.

 Obama’s apologetics for radical Islamists is the flipside of his hostility for Israel. This too is escalating and will continue to rise through the end of his tenure in office.

 The US Customs authority’s announcement on January 23 that it will begin enforcing a 20-year old decision to require goods imported from Judea and Samaria to be labeled “Made in the West Bank,” rather than “Made in Israel,” signals Obama’s intentions.

 Part of the reason Obama is acting with such urgency and intensity is that he knows that regardless of who is elected to replace him, the next president will not be as viscerally hostile to Israel or as emotionally attached to Islam as he is.

This is true even if it is a Democrat – but far more so if it is a Republican.