As Wisconsinites head for the
polls, our Beltway elites are almost giddy. For they foresee a Badger State
bashing for Donald Trump, breaking his momentum toward the Republican
nomination.
Should The Donald fall short of
the delegates needed to win on the first ballot, 1,237, there is growing
certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone
acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in
the race.
But this city of
self-delusion should realize there is no going back for America. For, whatever
his stumbles of the last two weeks, Trump has helped to unleash the mightiest
force of the 21st century: nationalism.
Transnationalism and globalism
are moribund.
First among the issues on which
Trump has triumphed – “We will build the wall – and Mexico will pay for it!” –
is border security.
Republican candidates who failed
to parrot Trump on illegal immigration were among the first casualties.
For that is where America is, and
that is where the West is.
Consider Europe. Four months ago,
Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year for throwing open the gates to the
“huddled masses” of the Middle and Near East.
Merkel’s Germany is now leading
the EU in amassing a huge bribe to the Turks to please take them back, and keep
them away from the Greek islands that are now Islam’s Ellis Island into Europe.
Africa’s population will double to 2.5 billion by 2050. With 60 percent
of Africans now under 25 years of age, millions will find their way to the Med
to cross to the Old Continent where Europeans are aging, shrinking and dying.
Look for gunboats in the Med.
If immigration is the
first issue where Trump connected with the people, the second is trade.
Republicans are at last
learning that trade deficits do matter, that free trade is not free. The cost
comes in dead factories, lost jobs, dying towns and the rising rage of an
abandoned Middle America whose country this is and whose wages have stagnated
for decades.
Economists who swoon over figures
on consumption forget what America’s 19th-century meteoric rise to
self-sufficiency teaches, and what all four presidents on Mount Rushmore
understood.
Production comes before
consumption. Who owns the orchard is more essential than who eats the apples.
We have exported the economic independence Hamilton taught was indispensable to
our political independence. We have forgotten what made us great.
China, Japan, Germany – the second, third and fourth largest economies
on earth – all owe their prosperity to trade surpluses run for decades at the
expense of the Americans.
A third casualty of Trumpism is the post-Cold War foreign policy
consensus among liberal interventionists and neoconservatives.
Trump subjects U.S. commitments to a cost-benefit analysis, as seen from
the standpoint of cold national interest.
What do we get from continuing to
carry the largest load of the defense of a rich Europe, against a Russia with
one-fourth of Europe’s population?
How does Vladimir Putin, leader
of a nation that in the last century lost its European and world empires and a
third of its landmass, threaten us?
Why must we take the lead in
confronting and containing Putin in Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia? No vital U.S.
interest is imperiled there, and Russia’s ties there are older and deeper than
ours to Puerto Rico.
Why is it the responsibility of
the U.S. Pacific Fleet to defend the claims of Hanoi, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and
Brunei, to rocks, reefs and islets in the South China Sea – against the claims
of China?
American hawks talk of
facing down Beijing in the South and East China Seas while U.S. companies
import so much in Chinese-made goods they are fully subsidizing Beijing’s
military budget.
Does this make sense?
Patriotism, preserving
and protecting the unique character of our nation and people, economic
nationalism, America First, staying out of other nation’s wars – these are as
much the propellants of Trumpism as is the decline of the American working and middle
class.
Trump’s presence in the race has produced the largest
turnout ever in the primaries of either party. He has won the most votes, most
delegates, most states. Wisconsin aside, he will likely come to Cleveland in
that position.
If, through rules changes, subterfuge and faithless
delegates, party elites swindle him out of the nomination, do they think that
the millions who came out to vote for Trump will go home and say: We lost it
fair and square?
Do they think they can then go back to open borders,
amnesty, a path to citizenship, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and nation
building?
Whatever happens to Trump, the country has spoken. And if
the establishment refuses to heed its voice, and returns to the policies the
people have repudiated, it should take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make
violent revolution inevitable.”
