Posted on January 27, 2016

The Rejection Election and the Crisis of the Regime

Patrick J. Buchanan, VDARE, January 25, 2016

With the Iowa caucuses a week away, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who leads in all the polls, is Donald Trump.

The consensus candidate of the Democratic Party elite, Hillary Clinton, has been thrown onto the defensive by a Socialist from Vermont who seems to want to burn down Wall Street.

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Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. And, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other Republican campaigns are now channeling Trump’s.

This then is a rejection election. Half the nation appears to want the regime overthrown. And if spring brings the defeat of Sanders and the triumph of Trump, the fall will feature the angry outsider against the queen of the liberal establishment. This could be a third seminal election in a century.

In the depths of the Depression in 1932, a Republican Party that had given us 13 presidents since Lincoln in 1860, and only two Democrats, was crushed by FDR. {snip}

The second seminal election was 1968, when the racial, social, cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and Vietnam War, tore the Democratic Party asunder, bringing Richard Nixon to power. Seizing his opportunity, Nixon created a “New Majority” that would win four of five presidential elections from 1972 through 1988.

What killed the New Majority?

First, the counterculture of the 1960s captured the arts, entertainment, education and media to become the dominant culture and convert much of the nation and most of its elite.

Second, mass immigration from Asia, Africa and especially Latin America, legal and illegal, changed the ethnic composition of the country.

White Americans, over 90 percent of the electorate in 1968, are down to 70 percent today, and about 60 percent of the population.

And minorities vote 80 percent Democratic.

Third, Republicans in power not only failed to roll back the Great Society but also collaborated in its expansion. Half the U.S. population today depends on government benefits.

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Still, whether we have a President Clinton, Trump, Sanders or Cruz in 2017, America appears about to move in a radically new direction.

Foreign policy retrenchment seems at hand. {snip}

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Second, Republicans will either bring an end to mass migration, or the new millions coming in will bring an end to the presidential aspirations of the Republican Party.

Third, as Sanders has tabled the issue of income equality and wage stagnation, and Trump has identified the principal suspect–trade deals that enrich transnational companies at the cost of American prosperity, sovereignty and independence–we are almost surely at the end of this present era of globalization.

As in the late 19th century, we may be at the onset of a new nationalism in the United States.

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For the Sanders, Trump, Cruz and Carson voters, the status quo seems not only unacceptable, but intolerable. And if their candidates and causes do not prevail, they are probably not going to accept defeat stoically, and go quietly into that good night, but continue to disrupt the system until it responds.

Unlike previous elections in our time, save perhaps 1980, this appears to be something of a revolutionary moment.

We could be on the verge of a real leap into the dark.

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