The presidential victory of Donald Trump in November of 2016 has been under systematic assault by Democrats, their institutional and media organs, and their followers in an effort to delegitimize him. Why? Progressives thought they had won the battle and would be in power in perpetuity. The election of President Trump demonstrated otherwise. Consequently, Progressives responded with protests, marches, riots, and sustained rage in an effort to undermine his effectiveness in order to restore Progressive governance, now and forever.
Their purpose is to delegitimize not just President Trump but all Republicans and Independents that oppose a Progressive agenda and its stranglehold of policies that undermine American democracy, free speech, and constitutional liberties. Just consider how easy it is to boycott and ban conservative speakers on university campuses these days under the guise of concerns about safety. The result is the loss of divergent opinions that lie at the very heart of liberty.
Progressive outrage is directed against President Trump and is unrelenting. Nearly all television, Internet, and newspaper coverage—save for Fox News and conservative outlets—has become a series of hit pieces that make no pretense of impartiality or fact-driven analysis.
Why the vitriol? Progressives believed their revolution had succeeded under President Obama and that Hillary Clinton would ipso facto secure the mandate. What would that encompass? It would include national health care, a European-style socialism, an emphasis on open borders, and a focus on global initiatives at the expense of national issues that responded to the needs of ordinary Americans and their desire for better jobs with the potential of higher incomes. Why was the Progressive agenda rejected by so many voters? It failed to address the anguish of many Americans whose incomes in 2015 remained the same—as measured in real dollars—as 1999.
Progressives never understood the significance of that indicator or the pain that ordinary Americans felt. Consequently, President Trump won and his victory signified the dismantling of the Progressive dream of socialist revolution and replaced it with the hope of reinvigorated capitalism.
Despite the onslaught of attacks against Present Trump’s administration, it’s important to understand that these are but a proxy war for the real villain, the Republican Party and its supporters. The objective in demonizing President Trump is to turn the American tide so decisively away from conservative values that no Republican-leaning leader will ever win again. To this end Americans must never hear, read, or understand the opposing perspective. Social media, television, news, and the Internet must be saturated with a sustained and unrelenting war against conservative beliefs unanchored by pesky facts or true evidence. The outcome, if Democrats had their way, would be nothing less than a perfectly executed coup d’état resulting in 1,000 years of Progressive rule.
What would Progressives advocate? Above all, a foreign policy in which our national goals are sacrificed in favor of interests characteristic of a post-American world. To that end, Progressives would promote measures aimed at ameliorating the conditions of the underprivileged everywhere. However, these improvements typically come not from social directives, but through sustained and systematic changes in the infrastructure that alter the nature of labor, the products produced, and their inherent value. Thus, global socialism, even if it were commendable, would not measurably enhance people’s lives overall. Meanwhile, America, saddled with this global mission, would no longer pursue objectives that would benefit our citizenry and improve their social and economic circumstances.
How would Progressive values be manifest here at home? Socialized health care would replace best practices with palliative care, thereby jettisoning medical advances and excellence. Governmental programs would encourage individual and familial dependence on the state at the expense of empowering Americans to achieve their own economic success. Our educational system would focus on multiculturalism, instead of universal national values committed to excellence. America would be rendered economically and militarily powerless due to its inability to create wealth, enforce borders, and support mandates that champion democratic freedoms both here and around the world.
The case for what was is at stake in the 2016 election was pervasively argued by Michael Anton, a senior staffer at the National Security Council, under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus in his essay “The Flight 93 Election.” It was published in September of 2016 on the website of The Claremont Review of Books, a conservative journal associated with the Claremont Institute.
Anton’s premise—“charge the cockpit or you die”—was bold and to the point. Failure of the Republican Party to align behind Trump in the 2016 election, he argued, was analogous to doing nothing as terrorists hijacked a plane. Failure to act, he implied, would result in death for everyone onboard and, if the metaphor was extended nationally, imperil our country. Sadly, many Republicans and Independents have yet to heed Anton’s message.
Why weren’t Americans outraged of the recent evidence of wiretapping and the “unmasking” of Trump and several of his advisors during the campaign and the transition to the presidency? Why weren’t Americans distressed by the illegal public disclosure of national security documents leaked by governmental officials with associations to the former Obama administration that targeted President Trump and some of his team?
These were actions that breached our national security and suggest illegal practices that dwarf the Nixon administration’s 1972 illegal break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C. Watergate complex. What will it take to unite the Republicans, Independents, and fair-minded Democrats against a Progressive agenda intent on a dictatorship-style coup d’état through the illegal use of national security information to bolster a failed regime and its misguided agenda?
Dr. Diana E. Sheets is a Research Scholar at the University of Illinois. She writes literary criticism, political commentary, and fiction. Much of it can be read on her website, www.LiteraryGulag.com. Her latest book, The Doubling: Those Influential Writers That Shape Our Contemporary Perceptions of Identity and Consciousness in the New Millennium, is published by Nova Science Publishers.