Who is your hero? Recently the New York Times surveyed 21 Democratic presidential candidates about their hero. The winner was Republican and Mount Rushmore President Abraham Lincoln with 5 votes. Tied for second with two votes each with Democrats John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King was another Republican and Mount Rushmore President, Teddy Roosevelt. Combined the Republican presidents garnered 7 of 21 votes or one-third of the Democratic total.
No survey was taken of the Republican Party since it no longer exists at the national level. In the Trumpican Party which replaced it, neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt are admired. In the Trumpican Party the founder rules. Since the present Trumpican president has had the greatest two and one-half years of any American president ever and should be president for 16 years as one other president was, the choice was obvious.
Trumpicans bring a different set of values to their attitudes towards and expectations of the President. Trumpicans do not care that their lord and savior is submissive to Putin. They do not care that he cannot tell the truth. They do not care that he squandered a $413 million inheritance. They do not care that he is the biggest financial loser in American history. They do not care that he was a failure as a manager of an airline, a casino, and a hotel. They do not care about his tax returns. They do not care about Mueller’s testimony. They do not care that he is an adulterer and perhaps a rapist. They do not care that he is a stupid ignorant moron. They do not care that he is devoid of sympathy and empathy. They do not care that he is a narcissist. They do not care that he is dedicated to helping to the rich get richer. Therefore any attempt to connect with or sway Trumpicans based on any of these considerations is a waste of time. What then do they care about?
Consider what Individual #1 said during the big Republican Presidential debate on August 6, 2015 (at 9:18 ET in case you are curious):
I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.
The following month he repeated the call to arms against the politically correct this time in South Carolina:
I’m so tired of this politically correct crap.
True, he was the not the first to raise the flag against the threat of the Politically Correct. President George H.W. Bush lambasted the politically correct culture in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 1991:
The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off limits, certain expression off limits, even certain gestures off limits. What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship … Throughout history, attempts to micromanage casual conversation have only incited distrust. They have invited people to look for an insult in every word, gesture, action. And in their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.
Flash forwarded 25 years and that “laudable” desire has become an assault on America by university-based elitist zealots ready, willing, eager, and able to dispatch the Thought Police on anyone who does not speak the correct terms, think the correct ideas, and act the correct way. Trumpicans care when condescending arrogant self-righteous elitists tell them how to speak, how to think, and how to act. Trumpicans want a leader who will fight for them against the Politically Correct. That desire trumps all other considerations.
As an example of how far removed from reality the analysis of the impact of the politically correct in American politics is consider this obviously incorrect article from August 11, 2016 on the presidential election by Peter Weber, senior editor The Week. Its title is
Donald Trump is losing his war on political correctness
The details of the article are irrelevant given the election results, the situation today, and that he did not lose the war. If anything the battle lines now are even more sharply drawn. We are back to the trench warfare of the War to End all Wars. Far from losing the battle against the politically correct as the article suggests, he can claim total victory within the former Republican Party. It has been transformed into the Trumpican Party where heroes and Mount Rushmore Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt have no home. The party of “malice towards none” is dead. The party of “the last best hope of earth” is dead. The party of “speak softly and carry a big stick” is dead. Republicans don’t battle for the Lord, Trumpicans battle for THE DONALD.
Consider this current battlefront in Minnesota. The headline in the New York Times was “Resettled Refugees Unsettle a Mostly White City: Anti-Muslim Backlash Against Influx of Somalis” (printed June 21, 2019). As one participant in the battle said:
If we start changing our way of life to accommodate where they came from, guess what happens to our country? If our country becomes like Somalia, there is nowhere for us to go.
Now imagine the impact if the Trumpican Party starts playing Black Hawk Down on the Fox channels there as a campaign tactic.
The New York Times reporter interviewed people on the ground there and summarized the results as follows:
[M]any repeatedly outlined more fundamental fears, including the belief that an influx of people who were nonwhite and non-Christian posed a cultural threat.
Several of the group’s members and their allies said their stand against immigration was a small part of a broader national conflict, in which the rising tide of a multicultural, multiracial Democratic Party must be opposed.
See how successful the Politically Correct have been in delivering the message that the multicultural multiracial people are not real Americans, they are hyphens. Native-born white Americans understand that the message of the Politically Correct is an attack on them. These people “’see themselves in a fight for survival’” where the problem is discrimination against white Americans. After all isn’t that what elitists and colleges teach: from Columbus to the present, all problems today are due to the heterosexual white man.
Now suppose you are a Democrat and have had it with these deplorables. You are not going to back down before these bigoted racist troglodytes. Instead you counterattack with “WHITE PRIVILEGE, “REPARATIONS,” and DOWN WITH COLUMBUS DAY, UP WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S DAY. And even when you do not say that, Fox will every day all day claim that you did. Not just in Minnesota but throughout the nation. Plus if you have a private health insurer you are going to lose it and we are going to end up like Venezuela. How is that for a winning political strategy!
Let us put aside for the moment the issue of whether school busing helped desegregate or segregate schools. Let us ignore how elitist white people countered by sending their children to private schools or by living in wealthy white communities. Let us ignore how elitist white people exploited vulnerable children by removing them from their own neighborhoods to bus them into communities that did not want them. Instead, keep in mind that while the Democratic presidential debate continues, the nation’s #1 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck is watching and waiting to unleash his brutally cruel vicious junior high school tantrums to save his deplorables from the Politically Correct.
So who is your hero today? For Trumpicans the answer is easy: their lord and savior, the very stable genius, the smartest person in the room at the morgue or in a nursery school class with no teacher. For Democrats the answer is all over the place and may remain so for a while. The loser is We the People. The losers are the American people who love their country, who are proud to be American, and who believe in America’s role in human history. We have no candidate and neither party cares about us. As we approach the celebration of the birth of our country, we should think about what it means that none of the Mount Rushmore Presidents could even be nominated today yet alone elected.
