Trumped!

A Lone Author's Quest to Understand Donald Trump and his Phenomena

Part I: The Failure of the Right

We've touch upon this before but it's worth delving into again.

The writer is part of the 1990's generation of Young Conservatives. We were a new breed of conservative. Our ideas were plentiful and our women were hot. About those ideas, well we had one for everything. School reform, tax reform, faith based charities, covenant marriages, welfare reform, and on and on. We got our policy chops at Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute, CATO, we read Alvin Tofler. We were policy wonks and Newt Gingrich was our gran-pooh-ba (its a Gen-X thing).

Problem is, complex ideas about reforming the school lunch program don't translate well into plain English, especially not when the other side bellows, 'You want to starve Children!'. You can have all kinds of great pie graphs about how a few reforms in Medicare will save us $700 billion over a decade while still increasing spending by 6% per year, but they don't do you much good when Bill Clinton is hollering, 'You want to throw old people out on the street.'

Oh sure, you can explain, but as Ann Coulter has said and the author here has experienced, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Conservatism has spent too much time explaining complex ideas when whittling them down to a a catchphrase or two would have done much better.

Remember the Iraq Campaign? Conservative arguments about policy in the Middle East, Sunni vs Shia, al Qaida, the Taliban, supporting moderate elements, upending the balance of power...and so on, simply didn't hold up against, 'Bush Lied, People Died.' Now in response to the slogan a conservative might launch into a detailed explanation about Saddam's capacity for manufacturing WMD, his Sarin gas shells, his medium range missiles....As Mrs Thatcher once said, No! No! No!

This is what you say, 'Bush Lied, People Died, huh? Yeah? You want Saddam to still be in power? Why do you want to lose the war? Everything may not be going perfectly, but at least I want to win, unlike you, who would rather lose a war than an election.'

Then you lean back and shake your head, not so much in anger but in sorrow and disappointment.

Oh sure, have all the wonkish policy papers you want in your blazer, might as well throw them on the fire for all the good it'll do you.

You want to win? Stop explaining and start calling the other guy a bunch of bad names. Let's start with communist sympathizer....