It has come to this

Originally Published by American Thinker

[Author's note. This is the original version of my article, and differs slightly from the text published in AT.  I am, frankly, astonished at how well this article was received and how widely it has been distributed. I seem to have hit a nerve. To address a few points I have seen in comments elsewhere:
1. Yes, it is perfectly possible I have underestimated Trump.
2. My support for Cruz is contingent on him getting within the margin of error of a tie.
3. Yes, electing a strongman is indeed a dangerous thing. And the alternative is not?
4. To persons making the common progressive counterarguments (Whaaa, boo hoo, etc.): I wish you luck! Graduating from the 7th grade will be quite a challenge -- but I know that you can do it!
5. To those who have praised the article in various ways: You have my heartfelt thanks. You give me courage and renew my hope.                -emc  ]

The United States of America that we grew up in, and in some cases fought for it – no longer exists.  I would like to write something stirring in defense of our Constitution, but it isn’t under attack.  It is simply ignored.  Some have proposed that we have a Constitutional convention to add new amendments.  What would that accomplish?  Would our present Federal government respect a set of new amendments when they don’t respect the old ones?  What good does it do to insist on one’s rights as a citizen, when in fact mere citizenship has lost its meaning?  Americans have no rights officials in Washington feel bound to recognize.  Both Republicans and Democrats overrule majority opinion as a matter of course.  They do not doubt for a moment that they are the best and brightest, and that our voting franchise is merely an antiquated inconvenience.  My elected representatives represent no one but themselves.  They make war on my culture, my faith, and my security – then they insult me in front of the elitist media on TV.  The executive branch, the congress, and most of the judiciary have no more respect for me as a human being than the government of the British Empire had for the most backward and primitive of its subjects.  The elites that live inside the beltway and in the bubble of academia should try living in Ohio or Missouri for a few years.  “White privilege” isn’t doing all that well in rural West Virginia.  We are here, now, in this country at this time.  We are real people with real lives.  We are not statistics in a sociologist’s model, nor are we third and fourth generation perpetrators from some politically reconstituted version of history.  It is all too obvious that our most unrepresentative of representative governments neither knows us nor respects us.  They despise us.  It is too much to ask us not to despise them in return.

I am tired of being told by Barack Obama on the one hand, and Bill O’Reilly on the other, what my American values are or ought to be.  I can work those out for myself.  I am tired of living in the dumping ground for whatever group of hostile immigrants the social engineers in Washington import to ease their guilty consciences.  Let them move their Mexican underclass and angry Syrian colonists to Martha’s Vineyard or Marin County north of San Francisco.  Maybe this would help our legislators and “opinion makers” alleviate a bit of their never-ending narcissistic angst.  I am tired of nameless, self-righteous bureaucrats levering open the restrooms of my local schools to the confused transvestites that a liberal education churns out, then lecturing me about tolerance and individual rights.  Where is their tolerance of my culture?  Where is their respect for my rights?  Where is the brotherly concern shown to my neighbors?  I am tired of living in an ill-planned social experiment.  Of taboo words and taboo ideas.  I am tired of being called a racist by people who are, themselves, the worst of racists – and who have denuded the word itself of any meaning.

To be quite honest, I have no particular love for Donald Trump – but he is what we have.  He doesn’t speak well.  I don’t think he has any idea what a republic is.  Then again, his last two predecessors didn’t really understand the concept of a republic either.  No doubt it’s not a word they use at Harvard.  Although I may not especially like the erratic, often juvenile Mr. Trump, it isn’t lost on me that he at least doesn’t hold me in contempt.  He may make war on illegal immigration and Muslim fundamentalism, but most of the alternatives are making war on me.  Twenty years ago I would have worried about a man who scares resident aliens, and even a few citizens, to death.  You will forgive me if I have come to the epiphany that protecting absolutely every minority’s feelings is not a rational government’s primary purpose.  You will forgive me, too, if I stop ignoring fourteen centuries of Islamic history, the stark brutality of Islamic scripture, and the barbarism of contemporary Islamic states.  Give me a gated, crime-free  community to live in, and maybe I can have the luxury of worrying about the planet’s weather.

I would prefer to have a genuine conservative candidate to vote for, and will probably vote for Cruz if he looks viable enough.  But if Donald Trump is what it has come to – I will happily take the risk and check the box next to his name.  Republican, independent, or Bull Moose party – I could not care less.  Conservatives don’t have a party.  We cannot be choosy.  Better Trump than the Democrat’s mad rush to national harikari.  And better Trump than the Republican establishment’s facilitation of the same national harikari, plus the now intolerable old lie that “it’s the best that we could do.”  It has never been impossible to build 700 miles of security fence.  Eisenhower built most of the interstate highway system in under a decade.  It has never been impossible to balance the budget.  Over the course of American history balanced budgets have actually been the norm.  Moral cowardice has never been an attractive trait, and no amount of clever advertising really makes it so.  Ivy leaguers like Hillary who fail, then get congratulated for their failures by the ivy league talking heads, do not impress me more than Trump.  Frankly, George W. Bush set the bar pretty low for ivy leaguers and Barack Obama took the bar down altogether.  It is sad to say that Trump would not be our first celebrity president.  Yet for all of his ratings appeal and flamboyance, he did at least accomplish something in his lifetime other than being popular and being famous.  He is, at least, a competent businessman.  That’s better than having such credentials as “I made a great speech at the ‘04 convention,” or “I married Bill Clinton,” or, the perennial favorite, “I waited my turn.”

We have nearly died of the disease of too much compromise.  Of “reaching across the aisle.”  Of “building a coalition of our Muslim allies.”  We have no real friends in either quarter.  How can a free people compromise with totalitarian ideologies, either socialist or Islamic?  Let’s not fool ourselves.  America has bitter enemies – both foreign and domestic.  Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, must do.  He speaks his mind.  He understands and acknowledges at least the plainly obvious.  Most of all, so far, he doesn’t scare.