Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Trump Won by Articulating Principles, Not Policy. This Guides POTUS’ Cabinet Picks

Democrats, Donald Trump, Education, Media, Political Philosophy

I’m no fan of the voucher fetish, having likened it, in 2002, to tweaking the educational Gulag. Free-market schooling throughout—primary, secondary and tertiary levels—is the only solution to our centrally planned miseducation.

But when Senate Minority Leader Chucky Schumer says President Trump’s pick to lead Education, Betsy DeVos, is the least familiar with education policy, Schumer is making the same case against DeVos EVERYONE (including Fox News, you forgetful Fox News fans) made against the POTUS.

President Donald Trump, like candidate Trump, won by articulating principles over policy.

Amen.

Beware The Values Cudgel

Conservatism, Government, IMMIGRATION, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Islam, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics

“Beware The Values Cudgel” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller (founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson). An Excerpt:

… When you hear an appeal to “permanent values”—”the values that make our country great,” to quote Hillary Clinton—know you are dealing with world-class crooks. These crooks want to swindle you out of the freedom to think and believe as you wish. For in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police.

The American government is charged purely with upholding the law, no more. Why so? Because government has police and military powers with which to enforce its “values.” A free people dare not entrust such an omnipotent entity with policing values, at home or abroad, because values enforced are dogma.

When incontestable majorities call on government to curb Islamic and other in-migration because this imperils American lives, President Trump’s unswerving opponents—the Obama, Clinton, Ryan, McCain, Graham, Schumer and media mafia—will invariably intone, “That’s not who we are.”

When you hear that manipulative mantra, tell them to shut up, mind their own business, and stick to their constitutional mandate to protect the people, not police their minds.

Remember that through an appeal to values, the State aggrandizes itself.

A limited government, serving an ostensibly free people, must thus never enforce values. …

… Read the rest. “Beware The Values Cudgel” is now on The Daily Caller.

If you’d like to feature the Mercer Column (criminally underexposed in paleolibertarian and paleoconservative quarters), in your magazine, paper or pixels, contact me at ilana@ilanamercer.com. My gratitude to the wonderful, intellectually honest publishers who’ve taken the leap.

Buchanan On Trump Challenging The Golden Calf Of Democracy

Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Political Philosophy, Republicans

“An Establishment in Panic” by Pat Buchanan:

… It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.

Having fixed the future, the establishment finds half of the country looking upon it with the same sullen contempt that our Founding Fathers came to look upon the overlords Parliament sent to rule them.

Establishment panic is traceable to another fear: Its ideology, its political religion, is seen by growing millions as a golden calf, a 20th-century god that has failed.

Trump is “talking down our democracy,” said a shocked Clinton.

After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment installed “democracy” as the new deity …

Read the rest of Pat Buchanan’s must read on Trump’s challenge to the Golden Calf of democracy.