Whatever people think they mean when they prattle about "Free Enterprise", Entrepreneurialism, or "Capitalism", could not survive without the "Rule of Law"
Whatever people think they mean when they gush about "democracy" would not last two generations without constitutionalism - the halting historical process of "rule of law" which is necessarily irksome, compromised, and troubled but has nothing in common with some urgent fetish for a yellowed document few trouble themselves to read.
The upper echelons of our courtier press are just now getting around to working themselves up into a pleasant little tizzy about Trumpulism which is indeed a mortal threat to the underpinnings of what's worth salvaging in our suicidally kleptocratic society.
But what Trump represents is a symptom of an underlying pathology that could be much less virulent if it were to be openly recognized and soberly addressed.
The problem is not wealth or income inequality. "Free marketers" are annoyingly correct that such is both inevitable and salubrious for a dynamic economy. The existential threat to formal democracy and "free enterprise" is the extreme type of excessive wealth concentration that afflicts us now as malignantly as it once plagued us before the Great Depression and the New Deal.
And the so-called "under-educated" Trumpulists are quite right to blame the liberal establishment for enabling this pathology of concentrated wealth that drains their security and dignity the way a tumor sucks life from the healthy tissues it disfigures.
It's important to remember that the "Red Scare" Anti-Communist Witch Hunts of the 40s and 50s were initiated by prissy liberal democrats who later recoiled at the buffoon antics of Tricky Dick Nixon and Tailgunner Joe McCarthy whom liberal Dems later scapegoated for the whole fiasco. But we could blame this illiberal liberalism for starting the slippery slope of discrediting The New Deal.
The concentrated wealth of the Idiot .1% is THE fundamental threat to constitutionalism and the institutional rule of law that guarantee formal democracy and economic opportunity. But we could blame JFK's tax cuts for starting the slippery slope of the actual institutional dismantling of the New Deal and Progressivism.
What we label "Reaganism" arguably began during the Carter Administration. And it was a series of Democratic legislative majorities that actively enabled Reagan, the Bushies, and Clinton to skid the rails with supply-side Voodoo and pushed us to the perdition we face today.
Trumpulists hate liberals for being bossy scolds, but even more for being cowardly hypocritical self-serving liars. Trump is indeed a grotesque and menacing monster, but the liberal establishment (including The New York Times and the Clintons) is his craven, handwringing creator.
Calling Dr. Frankenstein!
Don't Blame Trump for Threatening "The Rule of Law". (Blame the Concentrated Wealth of the Idiot .1%)
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