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America is defined by political terminology, which is constantly changing according the conventional wisdom and popular trends of the time. The definitions of, say, 1960 or 1980, let alone 1900 or 1920, would have almost no relevance today. A few things remain constant; a progressive socialist in 1916 is virtually unchanged from a progressive socialist in 2016, but everybody, except perhaps Bernie Sanders, and everything else have changed with the times, along with the world since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Eugene Debs. Before you cast your vote in November, you might want to know how your favorite party, faction, issue, demographic, or cause is defined in the current political climate and how far afield your own views might be from these 30 essentials of 2016.
Republican Party: The party of traditionalist Americans, primarily those over the age of 40 and of European ancestry, that has an almost insurmountable demographic barrier to winning the White House. Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections but have not lost the vote of white Americans since 1964. More than 90 percent of its voters in 2016 will likely be white and Christian, an overwhelming majority of the electorate in 1960 that is rapidly becoming a minority. Republicans with their present economic and social views seem unable to expand their base and risk eventually passing into oblivion along with the Federalists, the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings. It is a divided party that is struggling to find its place in the 21st century, but somehow has managed to retain and even expand majorities in the U.S. House and Senate.
Democratic Party: The party of liberal, progressive, multicultural Americans, primarily ethnic and racial voting blocs, unmarried women, immigrants, college-educated men and women under the age of 35, and anyone who supports expanded government services and increased regulations to manage the economy and the health care system. The coalition includes an overwhelming majority of the 100 million Americans, not including Social Security recipients over the age of 62, who rely on some form of government assistance for their livelihood. This pool of voters, who pay virtually no income tax, have little interest in supporting any candidate who favors smaller or limited government, which may mean reduced benefits, and tax cuts, which will by definition benefit tax payers. At its core the government dependent is the heart and engine of the Democratic Party and its future as a majority party. This is the party of victimization since all of their varied racial, ethnic, gender, and class elements claim in some form to be victims of the larger white-heterosexual-male-dominated society. It is a strategy that wins elections and has won Blue majorities in many of the battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, and Oregon, in every national election since 1988. Any Democratic candidate for the White House begins with 200 assured electoral votes, and sometimes, as this year, with 240. If it was a game of poker, they would merely need two pair or three of a kind to win; the Republican candidate needs an inside straight.
Libertarian Party: A political party of college-age males, primarily white, who favor drug legalization and disengagement abroad, and older males, primarily white, who favor drug legalization and disengagement abroad, and are nostalgic for the unfettered free enterprise of the Gilded Age. The 2016 Libertarian platform and/or positions of presidential candidate Gary Johnson are a list of irreconcilable contradictions. They call for an end to borders and open immigration from the Third World, while at the same time proposing a small, limited government that government-dependent immigrants will find incomprehensible. They promise to remove government from our private lives, while forcing bakers and photographers with religious objections to provide services at same-sex weddings. They promise disengagement abroad and return to pre-1941 isolationist America, while proposing drastic reductions in military spending. Their patron saint is the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand. Libertarians, who proclaim that they are principled in a world of the unprincipled, draw supporters from the radical Left and paleo-Right, but offer nothing attractive to voters in the mainstream of American life. This year may be their best ever, winning perhaps 8 or 9 percent of the popular vote in some states, but most of that vote will be a protest (see “Protest Vote”) against the major party candidates rather than an embrace of Libertarianism. Libertarians will never be a major political force in American life, but they can, and will, on occasion (perhaps in 2016), serve as spoilers as other third parties and candidates have done in the past.
Socialism: The economic, social, and political philosophy of two 19th-century impoverished German authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, that has been the most influential and persistent bad idea of the last 150 years. Socialism has seen a resurgence in the 2016 election season with former Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders attracting widespread support as an unabashed Democratic Socialist. Much of the Democratic Party platform reflects Sander’s socialist proposals to redistribute wealth from the mythical 1 percent of income earners and provide free stuff to almost everyone else. Socialism relies on a dangerous lack of historical and economic knowledge, particularly among the young, to win elections. It has failed in spectacular fashion in all the countries that have applied it, from the Soviet Union and Maoist China to Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Socialism — for all the lives it has ruined, the liberties it has trampled, and the economic damage it has inflicted — apparently will never disappear from the political discourse as social envy and the desire to get something for nothing are integral parts of human nature.
Green Party: The party of pure cultural Marxism that is found primarily on university campuses and college towns. Its presidential candidate, Jill Stein, promises to reduce military spending by 50 percent as a start, phase out all nuclear weapons, mandate the end of the use of all fossil fuels as a power source, and do all that is necessary, including turning off the lights and central heating for lower-income Americans, to keep the polar ice caps and glaciers of the world from melting. The hard-core supporters of the Green Party are radical university students, primarily from well-to-do families, and aging New Left academics and hippies left over from 1960s. This year they may benefit from a protest vote against the major party candidates, winning 2 to 4 percent of the popular vote, and serve as spoilers.
Conservatives: A wide-ranging subsection of the U.S. population who are generally patriotic nationalists and free-market advocates with at least some traditionalist social views. William F. Buckley Jr. and the staff of National Review created the modern conservative movement in the mid-1950s. It was a movement made up of anti-communists, Austrian School economists, Catholic Jesuits and evangelical Christians, and, as Mr. Buckley himself described it, those “standing athwart history” to slow down or halt the decline of Western civilization and its values. Since 1955 the conservative movement has grown from a handful of people to perhaps a quarter of the electorate. As a consequence of this success, the conservative movement has fractured into three major factions: the nationalists, represented by Donald Trump; the values voters, represented by the Tea Party and political figures such as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin; and the establishment conservatives (see “Neo-Cons”), which have led the Republican party in every presidential race since 1988, until this year.
The Constitution: The founding document of the United States, ratified by the states in 1787, of which almost everyone possesses strong opinions as to the meaning of its words and very few people have ever actually read.
Trumpisms: Offhand remarks or hyperbolic sound bites made by presidential candidate Donald J. Trump that offend, insult, shock, or outrage members of a racial, ethnic, religious, or gender groups.
Hitler: The artistic son of an Austrian Customs official and extreme nationalist rabble-rouser who persuaded a nation of educated Western people to abandon democracy and follow him into a world war. In 2016 the name has become a common Leftist pejorative for Donald Trump.
“Crooked Hillary”: A pejorative coined by Donald Trump to remind the public of the numerous scandals — financial, political, and personal — that have surrounded Hillary Clinton and her husband for the last 40 years.
Amnesty: Another term for comprehensive immigration reform that will give legal status and an eventual road to citizenship for the 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States. The prime beneficiary of any form of amnesty will be the Democratic Party, which will gain millions of new voters and a permanent lock on the White House. The primary loser will be the Republican Party, which simply cannot survive as a viable political party in a country with the demographics of California, or even of Colorado. Amnesty will remain a hot button issue for at least the next 50 years until the current wave of immigrants are assimilated into the national family or a grand compromise is reached between the Left and the Right on this issue. The current prognosis is for a permanent stalemate without assimilation or deportation and the real danger of a giant Kosovo or Catalonia emerging in the American Southwest.
Teacher’s Union: A labor union composed of public school employees who are tasked with the job of educating the nation’s youth. Unionized teachers, a relatively new idea that came after 1970, became the most loyal supporters and reliable financial backers of the Democratic Party. They can be relied on to oppose all education reform, including pay based on performance, charter schools, federal and state school vouchers, and any reductions of health care and retirement benefits, no matter how much more generous they may be from those of tax payers in the private sector. It may be considered, for practical purposes, a branch office of the Democratic Party.
Syria: A Middle Eastern country, independent since 1945, that has fractured since 2011 into a civil war between secular factions and religious extremists, similar in its ideological intensity and involvement of outside forces to the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Governed in Damascus by Dr. Bashar Assad, a British-educated ophthalmologist with a fondness for napalm-packed barrel bombs, and in Raqqa by an Islamic psychopath who has proclaimed a trans-national Islamic caliphate (ISIS or ISIL, as it is sometimes called), Syria has become a vast killing field for Christians, Kurds, anti-Assad fighters and their families, and countless innocent bystanders who have fallen victim to the Syrian and Russian air forces and the capricious violence of warring factions with little or no compassion for those who happen to be in the way. It is a war of all against all that has killed an estimated 400,000 people and turned half the population into homeless refugees. There is no end in sight and no conceivable winner except for the Russians, who will retain their Mediterranean naval base at Tarsus no matter what the cost.
Refugees: Individuals or families that have been displaced by war, revolution, or religious or ethnic persecution, referring in the 2016 race to primarily Muslims from Syria. Approximately 11 million people in Syria, or roughly half the pre–civil war population, are now refugees and 4.7 million of those are living outside the country. The vast majority of those who fled Syria since 2011 are living under marginal conditions in squalid refugee camps inside Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, but more than one million, the overwhelming majority young males under the age of 30, have migrated to Europe, where their presence has led to an increase in crime, terrorism, and social welfare costs. The issue as it relates to U.S. politics is how many of these people, if any, do we take in as immigrants. The Obama administration has offered to take in 10,000 as a start, and the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has promised to accept five times that number. Some of them, probably at least 20 percent according to European estimates, will be Islamist sympathizers and a smaller number, perhaps 5 percent, may be potential jihadi terrorists. Many others will have attitudes toward women, gays, Jews, and the Bill of Rights that are incompatible with Western values. In the mean time, none of the wealthy Persian Gulf states has offered to take in a single Syrian and neither has Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, or the Vatican. When it comes to the global refugee crisis, the accepted international view of all self-proclaimed humanitarians is that they should migrate to Western countries and be welcomed and supported by the taxpayers of those countries. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, pledges to accept no refugees from countries immersed in terrorism, which means, if you take him literally, no Syrians.
Islam: One of the world’s great religious faiths, founded by Mohammed, an illiterate Arabian camel merchant, around the year 610. More than 1.7 billion people on the planet currently accept the doctrines and some measure of the strictures of the Islamic faith as part of their daily lives. It is the fastest-growing faith on Earth and will at some point in this century surpass all the Christian sects combined in numbers of adherents. An estimated 10 to 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population over the age of 15 support the jihadist belief, which they believe the Koran commands, that non-believers must either be put to death or reduced to dhimmitude, a life of paying tribute — financial, servile, or sexual — to Muslim overlords. Many more individual Muslims subscribe to other viewpoints that are not compatible with traditional American values, including female genital mutilation, the justification of suicide bombings, subjugation of women, honor killings, and the death penalty for gays. Global polling has shown that 60 percent of Muslims worldwide hold views about Jews — any Jews, not just Israelis — that would not be incompatible with those of the Third Reich. Muslim Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Donald Trump will receive hardly any votes from Muslims.
Free College Tuition: A Democratic Party platform promise to provide every American youth with a college education, at no cost for families making less than $85,000 a year. No nation has ever attempted to send everyone to college. There are good reasons for this. Most high school graduates do not have the aptitude or the inclination to do college-level work and are doomed to fail and drop out. The fiscal cost of such a program would break the federal budget and prove disastrous for the national economy. It is terrible idea that Congress is unlikely to pass.
Income Inequality: The belief that a small minority, usually 1 percent, of the people in the United States are receiving more than their fair share of the national wealth. Income inequality is the inevitable consequence of economic freedom, and the only means to make income equitable is to suppress economic freedom. That simple truth is unacceptable to a huge percentage of the American population under the age of 25 and, as a consequence, this issue will remain a rallying cry for progressive candidates and voters for many elections to come. Few politicians will find the courage to tell low-information voters that the most likely reason they earn less is because they know less than wealthy people and often do not work as hard. Sometimes they are just not as lucky, but that means telling these voters that life is unfair, which is really a hard sell.
$15.00 an Hour Minimum Wage: A Democratic Party proposed increase in the national minimum wage that would eliminate a large percentage of the entry level jobs in the United States. Few small businesses could afford to provide low-skill jobs at that wage scale. The teenage after school and summer job would virtually disappear with teenagers no longer able to learn basic skills and valuable work habits. Automation and self-service would replace workers in a number of areas, notably in fast food restaurants and supermarket checkout lines. This is another terrible idea, whose consequence —presumably unintended — will be to cripple and distort the U.S. economy, while damaging the lives of countless young Americans.
NATO: Also known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Formed in 1949, a 28-nation alliance of Western powers created to deter or resist a Soviet or Russian conventional or nuclear attack on Western Europe. By the terms of Article Five in the NATO covenant, an attack on one is an attack on all. Thus the United States is committed by treaty and national honor to defend Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland from Russia; Turkey from an attack by Russia, Syria, or Iran; and a pacifist Germany and disarmed Netherlands from an attack by anyone. NATO may soon expand to include Finland and Sweden, if not Georgia, Kosovo, and Ukraine. No NATO nation, aside from the United States and Turkey, spends more than 3 percent of their GDP on national defense. Many spend in the neighborhood of 1 percent; most spend between 1 and 2 percent of their GDP. Currently there are some 62,000 U.S. military personnel in Europe under NATO command, functioning (as the 28,000 U.S. military personnel do in South Korea) as a trip wire to ensure that Americans are killed on the first day of any war. NATO has been the most successful military alliance in history, never having to fight a major war, but it is also, at present, a hollow shell that has never been tested by fire.
Guns: Firearms, more commonly known as guns, invented in the late 14th century, are handheld small arms firing high-speed projectiles propelled by gunpowder, a concoction brought to Europe from China by Marco Polo around the year 1290. Codified as the right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the private ownership of guns has been blamed by much of the media and the Leftist political class for the rising homicide rates in American cities, rather than blaming the gangs, sociopaths, and career criminals who commit the vast majority of murders in urban America. Curiously, the greatest number by far of firearm-induced deaths occur in municipalities with the strictest antigun laws, and the lowest numbers occur in communities with widespread gun ownership.
Gun Control: While Republican presidential candidates generally support a literal interpretation of the Second Amendment, Democratic candidates, including the 2016 party nominee, favor laws that would effectively ban the sale of all combat-style assault weapons — usually defined as semiautomatic, short-barreled rifles with an ergonomic design — and limitations on concealed carry laws, which allow private citizens to conceal a pistol or revolver on their person or in their vehicle. The most vocal opponents of gun rights and advocates of a government monopoly on firearms include persons of private wealth or political power protected by armed bodyguards and those living in gated communities guarded 24 hours a day. For the rest of the public, there is presumably the option of calling 911.
African-American Vote: Thirteen percent of the American electorate in 2012 and a key part of the Democratic coalition, African-Americans typically vote 95 percent for the Democratic candidate in presidential races and less than 5 percent for Republicans. This has not always been the case. From the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression Republicans won overwhelming majorities of the Black vote in national and state elections. As late as 1960, Richard Nixon won more than 30 percent of the African-American vote in the race against John F. Kennedy. Republican candidates rarely spend the time, money, or effort going after Black votes, writing them off as a hopelessly lost Democratic voting bloc. In 2016 Donald Trump has tried to upset the apple cart and win the votes of at least some of those African-Americans who are victims of urban crime and the Democratic liberal policies that limit educational choice and produce generational poverty. Trump would only need to win, say, 15 percent of the Black vote to win some key battleground states. It remains to be seen if he will have any success this year. He is currently polling around 2 percent with likely African-American voters, which means he has a long way to go and not much time to get there.
Latino Vote: A general, if not entirely accurate, description of voters who trace their family lineage to the Iberian Peninsula or any of the former American colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. This far-from-homogenous population includes South Americans from Columbia, Venezuela, and Brazil; Cubans and Puerto Ricans from the Caribbean; Central Americans from El Salvador and Guatemala; Mexicans; Spanish-speaking Europeans; and native-born Americans whose ancestors lived within the present borders of the United States prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is an astonishingly varied subgroup of the U.S. population, approximately 23 percent of the total and 12.5 percent of the eligible electorate in 2016, and it does not now — and probably never will — vote as a single bloc in national elections. While voters of post-1970 Mexican origin, who number almost two-thirds of the Latino population, vote more than 3 to 1 for Democratic candidates, likely 4 to 1 in 2016, Latinos of South American, European, and Cuban origin, and those whose families lived in the United States before 1960 are still very open to the Republican message. Some of them, probably more than a third, will likely vote for Donald Trump, along with others who may still be persuaded. Overall, the concerns and major issues for Latino voters mirror those of the U.S. population as a whole. The exception are Mexican Latinos, who list immigration reform, usually defined as a path to legal status and eventual citizenship for illegal migrants, and keeping immigration laws favoring chain immigration of family members over other factors, such as education and English language skills, as major interests. The Democratic Party has done its best to cater to those interests.
Millennial Generation: The youngest generation of U.S. voters born between 1981 and 1998, who came of age between the turn of the century and the 2016 election. For the first time, the number of millennials is virtually equal to the number of baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964. Each of those generations numbers more than 69 million eligible voters, but from this time forward the percentage of boomers will start to shrink and the percentage of millennials to increase. By 2020 this generation will comprise one in every three adult Americans, and that will change the politics of the United States, not necessarily for the better. Millennials voted for Barack Obama by a factor of two to one in 2012, and that was across racial, gender, and ethnic lines, and are expected to vote for Hillary Clinton by a similar or greater margin in 2016. The millennials were the driving force behind the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, whose support was overwhelming from the under-30 demographic. According to polls, the 69 million millennial voters are the most Leftist of any generation of Americans, farther to the Left than even the boomers in the Age of Aquarius. Only 15 percent self-identify as Republicans, while 44 percent self-identify as Democrats, and almost two-thirds regard socialism or communism as a preferable and more humane system than free-market capitalism. More than any other demographic factor, it is the millennials who are the greatest potential threat to the viability of the Republican Party. Unless the Republicans can start to change this voting pattern, the result is likely to be that history will record that George W. Bush was last Republican president of the United States, just as Millard Fillmore was the last Whig president.
Clinton Foundation: A charitable foundation created by Bill and Hillary Clinton with a stated mission to help people facing privation in the Third World, attracting sizable donations from the rich and powerful around the world. Foreign governments, Arab royalty, and corporations that made substantial donations to the foundation often received access to Hillary Clinton while she served as Secretary of State. Indeed, half the VIPs she met with in her office as Secretary of State had made contributions to the foundation of six figures or greater. While no evidence of a quid pro quo exists — a difficult thing to prove — the appearance of corruption is undeniable.
Trump University: A seminar program, erroneously referred to as a university, created by Donald Trump in 2005, to make money from individuals seeking to get rich from investing in real estate. Ceasing operations in 2010, Trump University faces a New York State ongoing investigation and two class-action lawsuits by former students claiming that the school was a scam that did not deliver what Donald Trump had promised it would. They appear to have a legitimate case that will cast a shadow over Trump throughout the campaign season and beyond.
Globalization: The means by which the U.S. economy has been deindustrialized and blue-collar workers have lost millions of manufacturing jobs over the last 40 years. More than one-third of all American manufacturing jobs disappeared in the first decade of the 21st century, as many of those jobs moved to Third World countries with far lower wage scales and much less environmental regulation. The primary beneficiaries of globalization have been China, Mexico, India, and nations on the Pacific Rim, which has given the American consumers not engaged in manufacturing cheaper products from the global marketplace and a higher standard of living than they would ordinarily have enjoyed. It has been a double-edged sword, devastating the lives of low-educated manual laborers and making many educated high-tech workers and investors wealthy. Donald Trump has promised to renegotiate trade agreements and bring at least some of those manufacturing jobs home. It will be a very tough thing to do. Import tariffs, like the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, almost always transform temporary economic downturns into depressions and sometimes lead to world wars. For this reason, the United States has been the leading advocate of free trade in the world since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. Whether we will continue to be so remains to be seen as both the Nationalist Right and the Progressive Left have become highly skeptical of trade deals like Trans-Pacific Partnership and wary of making further deals that open U.S. markets to foreign-manufactured goods.
Taxes: The most contentious issue that has divided Republican and Democratic presidential candidates since the election of 1980. Taxes are, in the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the price I pay for civilization.” The argument has always been just how high that price should be and who should be paying it. The Democratic Party position is that the wealthiest Americans, or top quintile of taxpayers, are not paying their fair share of the federal income tax, but the facts simply do not bear this out. According to reliable sources the top 1 percent of taxpayers with an average annual income of over two million dollars pay at least 43 percent of the federal income tax and the wealthiest quintile, or top 20 percent, pay almost 87 percent of the total. The bottom 45 percent of income earners pay no federal income tax, but do pay FICA “contributions” for Social Security and Medicare and numerous excise taxes for such items as cigarettes and alcohol. In 2016 the marginal tax rate for the highest income earners is over 39 percent. Hillary Clinton will likely ask Congress to raise that rate to 45 or 50 percent. While that is still lower than the 71 percent marginal tax rate that existed from 1963 to 1982, the available deductions at that time were far more liberal to mitigate the high rate of taxation. The result of a Democratic presidential victory in 2016 may be the final rollback of all the Reagan fiscal reforms of 1980s and a permanent return to the economic stagnation of the 1970s, which, of course, is what we have experienced since the 2009 financial meltdown. There is no sharper difference between Republicans and Democrats than on the issue of taxes. If you envy the rich and want to see them financially soaked by the government, then you are almost certainly a Democrat and will be voting for Hillary Clinton. If you feel that even Clinton is too soft on the wealthy, you may choose to support Progressive candidate Jill Stein. If you want to see marginal and corporate tax rates sharply lowered and a flatter income tax imposed, then you are probably voting for Donald Trump, who has made this a central part of his economic agenda.
North Korea: An Orwellian state in north Asia founded in 1948 by a Stalinist Korean veteran of the Soviet Red Army, Kim Il-Sung, who, though dead since 1994, still remains officially the president of North Korea. The present chairman of the Workers Party of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and head of government, Kim Jong-Un, pursues a national strategy of devoting almost all the nation’s meager resources to the development of increasingly sophisticated nuclear weapons and the long-rang missiles to carry them. He dreams, like his father and grandfather did, of uniting all of Korea under his rule. From Kim’s worldview, the major impediment to achieving this dream is United States military power in the region. This impediment, Kim and his generals believe, will be removed, or significantly reduced, when North Korea has the capability to strike North American cities with nuclear missiles. No matter who wins the race to the White House in 2016, North Korea is on a sure path to be an existential threat to the United States. Donald Trump’s policy proposal that the problem of North Korea be placed in China’s lap is, quite frankly, absurd. China fears, above all else, an implosion of the North Korean state and a U.S. ally on its land frontier. For them North Korea serves a useful function being a foil to U.S. interests and a buffer between themselves and South Korea. The problem, and it grows larger with each passing year, is ours, not China’s, and we will receive only grudging and limited help from China in confronting it.
Vladimir Putin: The three-term nationalist president of the Russian Federation who has defied international sanctions over his annexation of the Crimean peninsula and challenged Western interests in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, the Baltic and Black Seas, and in Syria. An ethno-Russian patriot above all else, Putin believes that the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aimed to bring about regime change in Russia, as he believes they did in Libya in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014 and tried to do during the 2012 Russian parliamentary elections, using pro-democracy NGOs to promote mass street demonstrations against him. Whether all of this is true — and some of it is — is beside the point. Putin believes it to be so, and he has apparently decided to retaliate by intervening in the 2016 U.S. presidential race through the release of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server and other sources during the time she was Secretary of State. The conduit for this embarrassing cyber correspondence is the internet gadfly Wikileaks, founded by pseudo-journalist Julian Assange, who currently resides in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and has close ties with Russian intelligence. Donald Trump sees Putin as a fellow nationalist with whom he can do business from a position of strength and perhaps forge an alliance in Syria to combat ISIS. His “America first, peace-through-strength” foreign policy mirrors, in some ways, Putin’s own ethno-Russian strongman chauvinism, which has undoubtedly contributed to their apparent mutual admiration and respect. Putin undoubtedly would rather deal with the realpolitik of a noninterventionist like Donald Trump than with an internationalist busybody like Obama or Clinton. As a consequence, we will almost certainly read more of the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s exposed secret correspondence through the Wikileaks pipeline from Moscow. Whether Russian intelligence will utilize its considerable cyber capabilities to further intervene in the 2016 U.S. election remains to be seen.
TRENDS
No matter who wins the presidential election of 2016, the national debt, currently at 19 trillion dollars with another 70 to 100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, will continue to grow, probably without even slowing down to any appreciable extent. The day of reckoning when the national treasury is no longer able to fulfill its obligations is now all but inevitable. That is called national bankruptcy, and it will mark the end of U.S. economic hegemony that has dominated the world since 1945.
The country will continue to fracture along lines of ethnicity, race, social class, and ideology into enclaves that have little in common with each other and make the kind of national unity we experienced after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 all but impossible to achieve.
The Democratic Party, assuming a victory in 2016, will have captured the White House in three successive national elections. Such a result all but overturns the Reagan Revolution of 1980 and sets the country on a path to the most progressive period in U.S. history. It is proof beyond doubt that demography is destiny.
Whether he wins or loses his bid for the presidency, Donald Trump has changed the face of American politics, and it will never be quite the same again. Trump will not disappear, even in a defeat that he will call a victory. His America-first nationalism will remain the strongest force inside the Republican Party, and those who challenge it by calling for a return to mainstream conservatism do so at their own risk. Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, and others who failed to support the nominee in 2016 will find they are finished in national politics, just as the Republicans who failed to support Barry Goldwater in 1964 —including Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Scranton, and George Romney — found themselves with no ground to stand on in 1968, eclipsed by Goldwater supporters Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, if elected, will have achieved a lifetime ambition of being the first woman president of the United States, a goal she could not ever have achieved without her husband’s easy charisma blazing a path. Under the shadow of scandals that go back decades, she will push for an agenda of social justice and gender equality that will weaken the armed forces and hamstring the economy even further than it has been. The great battles to come will be over the confirmation of Supreme Court justices, a radical expansion of programs and spending increases for education and health care, and how much the most productive citizens and corporations should be taxed to pay for a new era of big government that President Bill Clinton once pronounced dead.
The Democratic Party, America’s oldest political institution, will increasingly be offering older and older candidates for younger and younger voters. The youngest voters, especially those 60 percent who attend college, are not campus rebels. They may sound like radicals, but they are only repeating the politically correct dogma they have heard since grade school coming from teachers and professors who did come out from the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the counterculture on college campuses, and indeed in the country at large, is conservative and Republican. Those are the voices that the campus thought police and the academic establishment are trying to shut down, often successfully.
The world at large will increasingly become more chaotic, violent, extremist, and unstable as U.S. military power and diplomatic influence retreat from the rising tide of Islamic extremism, Russian chauvinism, North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions, and the growth of Chinese military and naval power on the rim of the Asian continent. The odds of nuclear weapons being used in warfare before the middle of the century are now better than even. Sooner or later some government or terrorist entity will acquire an operational fissionable device and use it in an attempt to achieve a geopolitical or apocalyptic outcome in their favor.
There is a tsunami on the horizon that will sweep the old order away and end the world order that has endured since the end of World War II. It is the most powerful geopolitical force of the 21st century: the rise of ethno-religious nationalism. When Secretary of State John Kerry tells an audience of college students, as he did recently, that they are about to graduate into a world without borders, he is not telling them the truth. What he means to say is that the United States and the nations of the European Union will be without borders, open to all, but in all other lands borders will be fortified, fenced, guarded, defended, and marked with signs to keep out or risk being shot or imprisoned.
In a country that has endured 16 years of economic doldrums since the dotcom crash of 2000, the opportunities to find safe and profitable investments for retirees and young investors are increasingly scarce. There may be nothing that is really safe . . . maybe nothing ever really was. For the uncertain future in the post 9/11 and post-Obama America, I see only missile technology and high-tech defense hardware, guns and ammo, gold and gold mines, tobacco and alcohol, food, and eventually natural gas and oil as the best places to invest. I also happen to like the future of Amazon.com, as soon half of all retail sales will be online. Going to the mall to shop will simply be too inconvenient and, in an environment of rising violent crime and terrorism, too much of an unacceptable risk. No matter what happens, human beings will eat, drink, smoke, require reliable sources of energy to keep the light on, and kill each other. That is a constant of history.
It has been 15 years since the shock of 9/11. Our success in preventing another such shock has made us complacent as a nation. It is only a matter of time before another such day comes to America. If it is an act of terrorism, the perpetrators will be Islamic, whether we wish to call them that or not. It is what they will call themselves, and it is the belief system and the ideology that will lead them to do whatever cataclysmic act of nihilism that is probably, even now, being planned somewhere. If it is the act of war of a hostile nation state, the shock will come in the form of a cyberattack or an EMP burst from space that will shut down the power grid for a large part of the nation and cause unprecedented economic dislocation, mass death, and hardship for millions. We are doing little or nothing to keep this inevitable shock from taking place, which makes it all the more likely. As on 9/11, there will be plenty of blame to go around.
None of these trends were discussed, certainly not at any length, in the first presidential debate or the only vice presidential debate, nor will they be in the two upcoming presidential debates, and that is the saddest trend of all.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin. In the 2016 presidential election, Ray will be voting for . . .