printDr. Sean Gabb is director of the Libertarian Alliance, based in the United Kingdom. He is a prodigious libertarian writer and scholar. Dr. Gabb writes the following on the popular Libertarian Alliance blog (to which I contribute):
Our own Ilana Mercer was one of Mr Trump’s earliest and most vocal and consistent supporters. When he announced he would run for election, and when she immediately went into drum majorette mode, I thought she had gone a little funny in the head. Here was a businessman and television personality, trying to break into the closed shop of American politics. I thought Ilana was funny in the head, and I thought Mr Trump a bit of a joke.
Then he showed his teeth, and I sat up. I began to read Ilana with more attention. I said nothing to her when she strained our charitable status to the limit. I watched astonished as the crowds began to gather, and as the most unlikely candidate anyone could have imagined began to tell truths I never thought to hear in front rank politics. Until close to the end, I doubted he could win. I thought Ilana would be terribly depressed by his losing, and that she would go away and sulk for a decade.
But he’s now President-elect Trump, and Ilana was right all along.
I think we should be grateful to Ilana for two reasons: …
… “God Bless Ilana” is at the British Libertarian Alliance. Subscribe to the RSS feed.
Still in the Trump context, historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson has blessed “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) with a review in Chronicles magazine, the flagship publication of principled paleoconservationism. “Sounding The Trump” appeared in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles (subscribe). A short excerpt:
In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest hope” that “an utterly different political animal, Donald Trump, might actually do some good for the countrymen he genuinely seems to love.”
It is not Trump who is transforming American politics, the author asserts; “it’s the people of America doing the transforming.” Trump is the first politician in a long, long time who has regarded America as a country rather than a “proposition” and has actually spoken to and for “the people.” Far from being “divisive,” his plain speaking has enthusiastically united large numbers of Americans. …
… “White Lives Matter Less” has been, in Mercer’s words, “the creedal pillar” of our public life. Without ungraciousness to any, Trump has shown that it is OK for white Americans to declare that they have had enough of “the pigment burden” that has been piled on their backs. This paleo-libertarian author does not disguise her disgust at the fashionable statism, indistinguishable from the collectivist left and without a clue to what “free trade” really means, that passes for libertarianism today. …
… as Mercer points out with tough realism, … In this post-constitutional time, it may be that “the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counter-action, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.” A president hoping for reform will face 160,000 pages of federal laws and regulations and relentless sabotage by the Banksters, Bombers, Bureaucrats, and Busybodies who now govern us. He cannot be a moderate if he hopes to accomplish anything.
On “Mercer’s Menckenesque ability to coin memorable phrases describing the empowered fools of our time,” Professor Wilson’s asks: “Does any contemporary writer do it better?”
Finally, a reviewer with a sense of fun; someone with the good sense to have a hearty chuckle at this verbal swordplay:
Mercer on the media: “news nitworks,” the “War Street Journal,” “idiot’s lantern,” “unsharpened pencil,” “tele-tarts,” a “circle jerk of power brokers,” “one-trick donkeys,” “celebrated mediocrities,” “another banal bloviation,” the “cable commentariat as a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.”
Mercer on our rulers and would-be rulers: “parasites in waiting”; “nation-building at the point of the bayonet makes [Hillary] barking happy”; “Banana Republicans”; “dwarf-tossing” (William Kristol’s promotion of nonentities as Trump alternatives); the “quaint expectation that voters, not party operatives, would choose the nominee”; the “silent majority that dare not speak its name”; “what our crypto-leftist conservatives are ramming down our proverbial gullets are dogmas, not values”; the “master-servant relationship between Republicans and the Religious Right”; the “think tanks’ industry for the god of war”; “neoconservatives speaking like Tocqueville but acting like Robespierre”; “neoconservatives standing athwart every valid form of American conservatism yelling stop.”
What a review and what an honor! Subscribe to Chronicles here.