From Roger Kimball this morning:
What is the swamp?
The word has a long history, aided by the serendipitous contingency that Washington, D.C. was actually built on a literal swamp.
But the term, like a Chinese virus, underwent a “gain of function” makeover in 2015 when Donald Trump first strode onto the center stage of American political life.
“The Swamp”: that is the bureaucratic Washington establishment, the alphabet soup of agencies whose personnel, though unelected and largely unaccountable, run our lives right down to the latest permit, regulation, tax, fee, impost, and woke government requirement or interdiction.
But it’s also something more.
“The Swamp” names an attitude, an assumption, about power, about politics, but also about certain basic human realities.
Above all, perhaps, “the Swamp” rests and feeds upon the progressive assumption that the mass of citizens is incapable of self-government.
I call that assumption “progressive” because from the time of Woodrow Wilson on down to the latest Davos mandarin, the neofeudal bifurcation of humanity into elect and (ever the majority) subservient has been the guiding if unspoken nutrient.
The litany of Donald Trump’s policy achievements is long and distinguished.
It begins with his judicial appointments, some fruits of which we saw last month with the Supreme Court decisions on Roe v. Wade, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Second Amendment, and includes his attention to our Southern border, energy, taxes, the Middle East, and a host of other issues.
But more than any particular achievement, Donald Trump was the tocsin that awakened millions of people—those whom Hillary Clinton dismissed as “deplorable”—to the two-tier reality of political life in the United States.
(The emphasis is my own)
And that, my friends is precisely why the establishment of both parties hate both Trump and his supporters, to the degree they do. Their lofty positions are threatened to the precise degree that the American people are aware of their collective misdeeds.
Rogers comment about Davos rings particularly true, given my comment about that on Facebook yesterday:
It strikes me as amusing that so many of the working class are willing to say things like “eat the rich”, “tax the elite out of existence”, and so on… and yet, they will take the bait when those self-same elites tell them to give up their rights their freedoms their automobiles their cheap energy etc.
There is a disconnect which the mainstream media ignores. For all the complaints about the rich, the extreme left never seems to complain much about names like Soros, Gates, Biden, Gore, Obama, Pelosi, and so on. This would seemingly lead us to the conclusion that being wealthy is only problematic for the extreme left, when the wealthy are not in lockstep with the extreme left. When they are in locked up with the extreme left, their words are taken as gospel even when it’s proven to be absolute garbage… as such as global warming, for example.
But I suppose that when you have the mainstream media working as your publicity agent constantly hammering home how important you are to the lives and livelihoods of Joe and Jane Average, it’s a lot easier to pull something like that off.
The question before us between now and November is how we the people react.