National Review, Trump, and the new elite.

Gerry T. Neal, the erudite and thoughtful Canadian owner of the blog Throne, Altar, Liberty writes of the retreat of National Review from being the cutting edge of American conservatism and its recent decision to cast Donald Trump into the Outer Darkness for being a populist not a conservative.

The "predominate elites" who have done their best to undermine constitutional government, marriage, and the right to life are, he says, the same elites who have energetically exported jobs to the third world and imported workers from the third world.

Thus,

That conservatives, of all people, should be opposed to policies that are radically changing the character of our countries, is something of which the present editors of National Review are clearly aware. They therefore do not argue for an outright open-borders position but instead complain that Donald Trump’s proposals are unworkable, his position irresponsible, and his rhetoric vulgar.

The question that remains, says Mr. Neal, is what does National Review really believe:

1. in the old consensus on immigration that a nation has every right to control who enters and to keep the number of immigrants at such levels as they will not permanently transform the nation, in which case the objection to Trump is merely that he's a vulgar populist; or
2. the new one-world, liberal consensus of open borders, in which case they're dishonest in trying to bring down "the first man in decades who seems capable of shattering the new, liberal, consensus?"

Alternative #1 makes no sense at all. If it's just that Trump's vulgar and a populist, then there would be plenty of evidence that National Review is an energetic champion of sealing the borders and deporting all illegals. If there is such evidence, I'm not aware of it but that doesn't mean much as it's been decades since I subscribed. I can guarantee, however, that most "conservatives" you see in the MSM are, at best, likely to be at most slightly miffed over the sophistry of "comprehensive immigration reform," the sellout inherent in "a path to citizenship," and the border that is at this moment still wide open while tens of thousands of U.S. troops patrol the borders of nations on the other side of the world.

Moreover. it's not that America doesn't lack for people who eat peas with a knife so it makes no sense to devote such energy and brain power to try bring Trump down. They protest too much.

Then, too, there's National Review's banishment of Peter Brimelow. He was and is a fierce and well-informed opponent of open borders and the magazine didn't get rid of him because his tie didn't match his socks.

And don't forget my own running compilation of anti-Trump invective, which invective borders on the scurrilous and to which National Review luminaries have contributed some choice examples. No. Trump has touched a raw nerve running down the leg of the globalist elites and their step-and-fetch-its have leaped to do their bidding.

Neal also has a clever take on the liberals movement out of the traditional consensus on immigration to paying lip service to it to their current position now that the full catastrophe of nation-busting immigration is becoming abundantly clear. He's also instructive on where Enoch Powell and Jean Raspail entered the fray. Q.v. X 2.

Some clever person once observed that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. I can't think of a similar witticism to capture the essence of National Review but it's enough perhaps to say that now the one-time conservative flagship isn't conservative and it isn't a flagship. I suppose it occasionally stumbles over a conservative thought just like the political establishment occasionally seems to consider the interests of the founding (i.e., white) people of this U.S. A feature not a bug.

The failure to consider the interests of the majority population and the interminable fawning over minorities and foreigners who either despise us, wish to live as parasites, or take our jobs has finally registered with what looks like a rather formidable collection of whites (and some minorities) who think, correctly, that they and the country they love are being prepared for a suffocating transformation in something unrecognizable and, shall I say it, distinctly un-American. Populism takes root in such circumstances where the elites become as disconnected with their "own" as they have in the last 50 years.

Trump is the current embodiment of this gathering rage but no one in the ranks of the smug elite should think this rage will abate. If the RNC can connive at Trump's defeat this time around the Trumpinator will "be back" as a new and more powerful version. Maybe with a different face.

This foolishness has gotten very old indeed.

Notes
^[1] "A Question of Style and Substance." By Gerry T. Neal, Throne, Altar, Liberty, 1/27/16.