It’s not about sexism: Camille Paglia on Trump, Hillary’s “restless bitterness” and the end of the elites

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Salon:

Is it 1968 all over again?

 

Violent clashes between antiwar protestors and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic Convention boomeranged against the New Left and sabotaged the presidential hopes of the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, a genial, compassionate populist. The American electorate, repelled by street chaos, veered to the Right and made Richard M. Nixon president. The new crossover Nixon Democrats laid the groundwork for the two conservative presidencies of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

 

In our current campaign, the obvious strategy by Democratic operatives to disrupt Donald Trump’s rallies and link him to brewing fascism (via lurid media images of wild-eyed brawlers) has backfired with a bang. The seething demonstrators who blocked Trump’s motorcade at last week’s state GOP convention in Burlingame, California, forcing him and his retinue to ditch their vehicles and sprint to a rear entrance on foot, managed to alienate mainstream voters, boost Trump’s national momentum, and guarantee his sweeping victory in this week’s Indiana primary. With the withdrawal of Ted Cruz, Trump is now the presumptive GOP nominee. Great job, Dem wizards!

 

The helicopter TV footage of Trump and his Secret Service detail on the move was certainly surreal. All those beefy men in shiny, dark suits rapidly filing through narrow concrete barriers (like cattle chutes at a rodeo) and then scrambling up a grassy knoll! It reminded me of the flight through the woods by scores of elegantly dressed Mafiosi after police raided the 1957 gangland convention in Apalachin, New York. (True, I have a special interest in that colorful event: Bartolo Guccia, who told the cops he was just delivering fish, ran his store out of the ground floor of my paternal grandparents’ house next to the Sons of Italy in nearby Endicott, my home town.) The optics of the aerial photos made Trump look like a late Roman emperor being hustled to safety by the Praetorian Guard, which over time had become a kingmaker, supplanting the authority of the Senate and the old patrician class.

 

Trump has knocked the stilts out from the GOP establishment and crushed the pretensions of a battalion of political commentators on both the Left and Right. Portraying him as a vile racist, illiterate boob, or the end of civilization as we know it hasn’t worked because his growing supporters are genuinely motivated by rational concerns about border security and bad trade deals. Whether Trump, with his erratic impulses and gratuitous crudities, can morph toward statesmanship remains to be seen. We don’t need another bumbling rube like George W. Bush, who bizarrely ambushed German chancellor Angela Merkel by grabbing and massaging her shoulders from behind as she was seated at a G8 Summit meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006.

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The bitter agony of the establishment's defeat.