Namely, these (here):
[Trump] is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.
Well, so long as you accept the income tax, Decius, as you clearly do in your Flight 93 Election essay, YOU pose no serious challenge to the administrative state, either.
And secondly, you don't even recognize the fact that, or the reasons why, our "representative institutions" stopped being representative a long time ago. Conservatism today, including yours, does not recognize that the income tax is essential to funding the administrative state, and it does not recognize that our representatives are remote from the people by design from the 1920s.
Trump is adequate for the moment, and necessary if there is to yet be a chance to fix these problems, but there is no one, no one, who is really working politically to restore the Republic either by cutting it down to size or by expanding the input of the sovereign people to a level imagined by the constitution. The people may yet have their day on immigration and trade because of Trump, but after Trump, what?
What an Obama has done by fiat can be undone by a Trump. But that buys you four, maybe eight, years. And then? The next president can undo it, and probably will.
That means we already live under a tyranny.
Conservatism Inc. doesn't have a clue, and neither do you.
