Some Thoughts on the 2020 Election
by
Eric Paul Nolte
I am
predicting that Donald J. Trump will win the 2020 presidential election that is
to be held tomorrow, although I do not think the Democrats would likely concede the
election then.
How can I predict a win by Trump when most of the polls predict that the Dems will win?
The polls are notoriously inaccurate, and I know countless people who do not want to confess that they will vote for Trump, but will do so anyway.
Think of the anemic rallies at Biden and Harris events. Think of the astoundingly massive and thunderous rallies for Trump all across this land. Do a web search for videos of some of these Trump rallies! These rallies are astonishing!
Think of 2016.
Think of the British Brexit election that declared their independence from the European Union, which won in a landslide that was opposite the predictions of the pollsters.
Without going into detailed analysis, I will simply state my conviction that the reason the Democratic Party should lose, and probably will lose, is because they have unleashed their Inner Totalitarians in this election. Never have I seen such tyrannical policies being advocated as in their Green New Deal, which promises something like a communist takeover of industrial civilization for the suicidal and crackpot goal of ending fossil fuel consumption in order to stop carbon dioxide emissions and thereby “save” the planet from Homo sapiens. The possibility of the Democrats’ winning the presidency and both houses of Congress, as widely predicted today, fills me with a deep dread.
My own politics amount to a cry for individual rights and freedom:
Who owns you? You do, of course. All individuals own themselves. Our rights to our own life, liberty, and property are sacrosanct and are an aspect of our very nature as human beings. Our rights are not gifts from generous governments, our rights precede the formation of any government, as John Locke formulated the matter in 1690. Rights cannot be rescinded by any government, although every government in the world today attempts to negate our rights with varying degrees of despotism, grounded in the argument that rights are merely the arbitrary conventions granted by the largesse of the state.
As I always asked my daughters when they were growing up, "Why are you on this earth, girls? You are on this earth to live your lives and be happy, so long as you are respectful of the same rights in everybody else." Live and let live, lend a helping hand to others by your own lights as you are willing and able. Unfold your own gifts for your own happiness--happiness meaning, as I now tell them, since they are adults capable of understanding such a higher abstraction, Aristotle's Eudaimonia, the satisfaction that comes with the achievement of a good life across the span of a whole life. Without unfolding your own gifts and achieving your own happiness, you have nothing to offer the world. Be makers, not takers. Be producers, not moochers or looters. In other words, be honest traders and capitalists, trading value for value with others to mutual benefit. Don't be communists, forcing other people against their will to do your bidding in order to make the world into your idea of a better place. The fundamental evil in this world is to use other people against their will to obtain a predatory advantage. What else is murder, but using someone else against his will, to gain a predator's gain? What else is rape, but using someone else against her will, to obtain a predatory gain? What else is slavery, but this same predation? Theft? Fraud? Every evil is an instance of this terrible predatory impulse.
Now, as for Trump—he is clearly a coarse man of limited sophistication in his grasp of many matters. He has, for example, a misunderstanding of tariffs and trade in the context of wealth creation. And yet, I believe he has done more good for the country than Leftists grant him. He rubbed Arab noses in the nonsense of Obama’s policies in the Middle East. Unlike Obama, he did not bow before the King of Saudi Arabia when they met (Obama bowed waist deep!) Trump browbeat the Europeans into paying more of their fair share for their own defense in NATO. He rescinded piles of meddlesome and crippling regulations in the US and thereby attracted countless American companies to repatriate, a policy which also attracted other firms, foreign and domestic, to flock here with venture capital for companies to create an economic boom not seen for decades. Trump withdrew us from a disastrous Paris climate accord and from the terrible Iranian deal in which Obama granted the Iranians the power to build a bomb after ten years (I will defend these controversial views in another post.) Far from instituting racist and sexist policies, he created an environment that resulted in the highest wages that Blacks and Hispanics have enjoyed since the beginning of record-keeping. He saw to it that predominately Black colleges and universities received generous new funding (not a policy that would be approved of by libertarians who want government out of subsidies altogether, but can certainly be seen as a policy guided by the good intention to support and fan the flames of ambitious Blacks.)
Trump was savagely attacked by Leftists long before his election. Think of "Russia, Russia, Russia," absurd impeachment grounds, and on and on and on. I see no convincing grounds that he was guilty of any of these charges, although most on the left believe every accusation against Donald Trump. Moreover, the dishonest attacks against him that came from the deep state machinations of the preceding administration have been characterized by many thoughtful observers as serious enough to make Watergate, by comparison, look like a trivial burglary of no great import—although the Watergate affair resulted in the tarnishing in shame and the taking down of a president and the jailing of something like 40 individuals associated with President Nixon.
Now, think of just one little snapshot, among the flood of terrible leftist assaults on the Trump administration and their unwarranted defense of their own transgressions. Think of James Comey’s Congressional testimony in July 2016, listing a long string of felonious crimes by Hillary Clinton, and concluding that no prosecution was warranted because her “intent” was good.
One picture stands in my mind as emblematic of these attacks against Trump and of the apparently unbridgeable chasm between the left and the right today:
At Trump’s State of the Union speech this year, after he gave an account of so many good things then going on in the country, especially the fact, as I said, that we were enjoying the all-time highest wages of Blacks and Hispanics since record-keeping began--here is the whole Democratic side of the House sitting in silence from beginning to end, except for their loudly booing the president now and again. Finally, after President Trump finished speaking, here is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, standing behind the president, ostentatiously ripping apart her copy of the president’s speech, a few pages at a time, her face a mask of contempt.
There is more. Consider the irony of Antifa's alleged anti-fascism, which is overwhelmingly Orwellian in the reversal of Antifa's stated goals and its actual nature and actions. We have seen nothing quite like these assaults since the period between the world wars, when fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were steering their countries towards all-out war.
There is avowed Marxism among the leaders of Black Lives Matter, such as that of the co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who proudly claims to be a "trained Marxist" (which I presume must mean a more rigorous and scholarly Marxism, not to be confused with the merely emotional or casual Marxist beliefs of so many.) I found this claim of hers on the website of Black Lives Matter some weeks ago, and now this statement of Cullors' is apparently no longer there--as if they knew that such a claim might alienate some among those multitudes they have attracted by their false claim to be an anti-racist organization, and may therefore have removed this statement from the website of BLM.
Despite everything wrong with Donald Trump, I hope he wins because he offers genuine hope for real progress and because I believe that a victory by the Democrats this year would be the biggest disaster in this country since the ugly rise of the Jim Crow South, in the wake of the Civil War.
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