Your analysis deserves to be at the top of a post.

There’s a saying from someone to the effect that things that can’t keep going the way they are, won’t. In both cases (1920’s Germany and twenty-teens U.S.) the government lost the confidence of the people and therefore its legitimacy. It’s a time when the government becomes ineffective and can no longer cope with the world. Therefore the establishment spends all its energies simply staying in power and preventing change.

The people, from their perspective, see the status quo as unsustainable. They see the collapse of their dreams and a future that offers only increasing strife. They see the country getting worse every day and them having absolutely no control over anything, especially their lives and livelihoods. They see a government that exists solely to enrich and enhance the lives of the establishment at the expense of everyone else.

So the people start clamoring for change and the louder they demand change the harder the establishment fights against. Every agent of change that comes forward is immediately and ruthlessly crushed by the establishment and its agents (read as democrats, the mainstream media, the education system, the unions, even the republican establishment) who are deathly afraid that any change they don’t manage will reduce their power, influence, status and incomes.

So the people finally give up trying to elect their desired agents of change and become willing to accept any agent as long as he/she doesn’t represent the establishment. Thus the acceptance of Hitler in the thirties and Trump today. I’m not equating Trump and Hitler, I’m equating the reasons the people backed people they would not normally have backed.

In the words of Victor Davis Hanson: “Something has gone terribly wrong with the Republican party, and it has nothing to do with the flaws of Donald Trump. Something like his tone and message would have to be invented if he did not exist. None of the other 16 primary candidates – the great majority of whom had far greater political expertise, more even temperaments, and more knowledge of issues than did Trump – shared Trump’s sense of outrage – or his ability to convey it – over what was wrong: The lives and concerns of the Republican establishment in the media and government no longer resembled those of half their supporters. “

Here, in my opinion is how it came to be Trump. The establishment put forth their candidate (Bush and later Kasich) who represented a slight shift to the right but essentially the status quo power structure. They were managers when the people wanted reformers/revolutionaries. The people felt that the situation was so dire that a manager would be ineffective and the downward spiral would continue. The managers had none of the outrage the people felt.

A number of other candidates (read as Rubio, Fiorina, Cruz and the others not Trump) represented varying degrees of real change, almost any of whom could have been acceptable to the people. Because they were all acceptable agents of change the establishment fought them the hardest. The establishment managed to wound each of them enough to keep them from getting real traction.

The establishment and the democrats thought of Trump as a buffoon, a distraction, and no real threat. That’s why they all held their fire on him and even actively promoted him when he faced the ones they considered the real threats. This holding fire and active promotion enabled the entertainer Trump to get enough votes against the wounded and split field that he ended up being the last non-establishment type standing. The establishment were sure that once it came down to their candidate (Bush or Kasich) and Trump they would have an easy victory. As Victor Davis Hanson implied, the establishment misjudged how they no longer represented the people.

The democrats also misjudged the people’s desire for change. Hillary’s shoe-in status went by the wayside and she’s had the fight of her life, first with Sanders and now with Trump.

Now we find ourselves here. We have two candidates with such flaws that under normal circumstances neither of them could survive a school board election. We have the democrat, a power and money mad criminal, and we have the republican, an ego driven, blowhard male chauvinist pig. You can add your own pejoratives to each and I probably wouldn’t argue with any of them.

Neither of them is acceptable to the people, nor should they be. But they’re all we have. So how do we decide?

Looking at the last 50 years or so, the congress and the people have managed to restrain the presidents from doing irrecoverably stupid things. The only exceptions to me were three really bad things:

1. Clinton requiring the banks, under threat of federal lawsuits, to make bad loans and having FannieMae and FreddieMac consolidate them in one place. Bush got distracted by 9/11 and the war and was very weak anyway so he did nothing to stop the coming disaster. This directly led to the economic crash at the end of Bush’s term and destroyed our economy for many years.

2. Bush going into Iraq when he didn’t really have adequate support. The democrats voted for it but immediately turned against him and used it as a club from then on. This reduced Bush’s power and credibility, diffused our war on militant Islam, depleted our military and took up all the funds that could have been used either to expand the economy or at least prevent the collapse at the end. And while it seemed like a victory in the end, it set up a situation where Obama, who refused to consolidate the gains made by Bush in Iraq, was able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and turn the ragtag militant Islamists into a force that threatens the entire western hemisphere.

3. Obama’s disastrous overreaches that a republican party, weakened by Bush, the economic collapse and the war, and a consolidated democratic party enabled. Examples are: Obamacare, that had the federal government take over 1/6 of the economy and did to it what they have done to every other major program in history (read as VA healthcare, welfare, unsustainable Social Security, Medicare); Obama’s burdensome ever expanding and overreaching bureaucracy (Dodd/Frank, EPA, Justice Department); the doubling of the national debt; the loss of power and influence all over the world, especially the mideast; the disastrous recovery that has wasted over a trillion dollars and put almost half the country out of work and on welfare; and finally, and to me most important, caused the people to lose faith in every agency of government (read IRS, EPA, OSHA, Justice Department, Secret Service, FBI, and even the Supreme Court).

You can probably think of a few others but to me these were the major ones.

I see every sign from both the democrats and the republicans in office that a Trump presidency would be constrained at every turn. It’s possible he’d be completely neutered as an agent of change. There might be 4 years of fighting back and forth with stagnation in every area but in the end in 4 years we’d be right back where we are.

Looking at the last 16 years I see no signs that a democrat in office, such as Hillary, would be constrained in any way. Obama was able to effectively play the race card against his opponents in the same manner that Hillary would be able to play the gender card.

In the words of Mark Stein talking about the democrats and Hillary: “Think of what the last eight years have wrought – Obamacare, a weaponized IRS, six-figure fines for homophobic bakeries – and then pitch America forward to 2024. Picture the most absurd scenario you can concoct – say, a federal transgender-bathroom regime. Oh, no, wait, we’ve already got that. The left is serious about power, and they don’t waste time. The idea that the most personally corrupt candidate in modern American history will govern as some sort of benign moderate centrist placeholder until the wankers who thought Jeb Bush was a superstar shoo-in come up with their next inspiration is utterly preposterous.”

For these reasons I’m convinced that Trump is the best chance for this country’s survival as a constitutional republic. At best he might effect a few of the needed changes while at worst he’d be a loud-mouthed buffonish placeholder.

So, when the people go into the voting booth there are two possibilities. They will either be distracted by the establishment (all of them including establishment republicans) and their daily revelations of how mean, stupid and piggish Trump is and vote against him, or they will see this election as the last possible chance for change before the country crumbles and descends into social chaos and/or economic chaos and/or civil war and/or international war.

I think this is the most important election since Lincoln for the future of this country. So please, vote your conscience and pray for this country; we’ll need it either way!

I don’t think I’ve said anything of the sort as to “all”, or at least I’m not clear how that would be the implication, for on the contrary, I simply don’t believe this is so. Sin, I never mentioned, and don’t believe I would.

I’m not an expert in logic, but I think you’ve made an assertion, not an argument.

If you want me to agree that tyranny resides in the soul of all of us as fallen, sinful creatures, I’m with you.

But Neo was making an equivalency between the rise of National Socialism and the rise of Trump and the potential for some excesses to manifest themselves.

She was surprised I didn’t see the danger. I need an example of how that would play out for me to see the danger.

It’s really pretty simple.

I addressed the Sessions issue back in February of 2016 when Sessions endorsed Trump. My post is here.

So, take a hunter (who isn’t a tyrant insofar as he’s out hunting for his dinner, but stands in the proportion as if he’s in the postion of the tyrant): the hunter on different occasions goes into the forest after deer, and once in the forest on one occasion clothes (camouflages) himself in species oak branches (solely), and on another occasion in species maple (solely) and yet another in species hickory.

The oak, or maple, or hickory are each beings quite apart from the uses the hunter makes of them — they’re machines for making more oak, or maple, or hickory in a manner of speaking; this is “their” rule. The aims of the oak or the maple or the hickory aren’t adopted by the hunter: he’s just chunking them off of trees for concealment. He’s out for deer.

That’s interesting. Sessions was working with Cruz to stop a lousy immigration bill and yet he endorsed Trump.

You think that said something about Sessions. It’s possible it said something about Cruz.

But it does raise an interesting dilemma. Is it possible for a candidate to be completely honest and transparent and win a presidential election. Is Hillary right that you need to have a public position and a private one.

What you’re suggesting is that Sessions cynically endorsed Trump for some selfish reasons. Surely Cruz would have offered Sessions a cabinet position for his endorsement if Sessions had asked and there would be nothing wrong with that.

There was something else going on.

I can perhaps suggest a book, but even that is a bit out of the way.

Those are a lot of words you’ve put in my mouth. All I’m asking is that you convince me with an example of how you expect the right to tyrannize their opponents.

Actually, it was not the first time Alinsky’s rules were used against our own.

They were used against Romney in 2012, on many blogs. And Newt Gingrich was doing something not all that dissimilar to Romney during the primaries—trashing him (see this and in particular this, about his attack on Romney for Bain Capital, a topic on which I wrote several posts).