You can’t beat something with nothing.
It’s a modern adage that conveys timeless truths about the power of ideas, clarity of purpose and determination.
In 2016 it was evident that the presidential election would turn on three key issues; the death-spiral of the Obama economy, out of control immigration and the one-way trade deals that were wreaking America’s economic core.
Only Donald J. Trump championed these issues in the plain language of main street and working class Americans who had developed a smoldering resentment and anger with the elite ruling class, consisting of both Democratic and Republican politicians, their cronies, the chattering and intellectual class, and corporate plutocrats who would rule America – all of whom seemed to have a fully developed indifference, even hostility, for the very people that made the country work.
Average citizens were bewildered that their concerns and economic well-being had become largely irrelevant in the national conversation, and that the legal and political systems were being systematically ransacked and rearranged to make sure that there was very little recourse for taxpayers against the avalanche of unpopular schemes generated in Washington.
The election of 2016 was less about Mr. Trump than about the forgoing. He didn’t convert these voters so much as he spoke for them. That election unleashed a furious counter-attack not just against him, but against the citizens that dared vote for him over Hillary Clinton.
The past two years and the 2018 elections have clearly marked the battle lines. The scorched-earth strategy of the Democratic Party’s fanatical anti-liberty, anti-life and anti-American hostility can no longer be veiled publicly. And the last two years have also completely unmasked the corporate media complex and social media monopolies as the hard left operatives that they’ve always been in private.
The background for the 2020 elections will be the nuanced radicalism that Barrack Obama mainlined into the party with his institutionalization of the “fundamental transformation” of the country. That process has busted out of its seams and graduated into the monster of the “in your face” radical socialist agenda that is the real heart of the “progressive” radical movement.
The former liberal Democratic Party is dead, murdered and buried by its own children.
In addition, the 2020 elections will be increasingly weighted towards several new generations of voters who have come out of the nation’s depressingly radicalized schools and universities, with too many embracing a twisted and malevolent view of American history, with little understanding of the nation’s founding or the root causes of its prosperity and success.
The late Professor Allen Bloom famously wrote in the last century, “Education is the movement from darkness to light.” Tragically, in the new century that process is a movement from darkness to a foreboding fog. The “hate America” crowd of modern Democrats – and their patrons in Hollywood and the plutocracy – finally have a ready-made audience.
The confluence of these two events insures that 2020 will be a street brawl. A knock down, no-holds-barred battle where the radical left intends to directly challenge the very precepts that have created the most productive, most generous, most diverse, most wealth-spreading, and freest nation in human history.
The radical left will attack free markets, free associations, citizenship and nationalism, while at the same time they will devalue family, charity and faith. The language of the radicals will be counter-intuitive. They will talk about fairness, prosperity and ‘spreading the wealth,’ when they really mean lowering expectations, managing outcomes and taking someone else’s property.
They will lecture about kindness, goodness and generosity, while they belittle personal responsibility and promote death, the dark inspiration of their public religion.
The broader conservative movement and the Republican Party cannot prepare for the 2020 election as detached forces; the radicals believe they are on the cusp of winning the hundred year ‘long march’ to wipe away the founding and the Constitution, and more importantly the Judeo-Christian moral under-girding that supports both.
There is no time to waste; the coalition of conservatives and Republicans have to build a fifty state, national agenda for the conservative movement that can be summed up in three simple words:
Prosperity. Security. Freedom.
Since Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, there really has not been any coherent and unified national strategy to win an election. Candidates for president and Congress have largely been left to brand their own politics. However, if there was ever a moment for a unified, clear national message, it has to be the 2020 elections.
Political opportunity is knocking and the question is whether the local, state and national Republican Party and its constituent pieces are willing or capable of mounting a fifty state campaign that will re-elect Donald Trump and reclaim control of Congress. If so, that plan and the energy that fuels it will need to come from the grassroots up, not the top down.
(In three follow-up articles, Prosperity, Security and Freedom as broad themes will be examined.)
