"We need to start kicking ass and taking names."

 Via Ryan

A good analogy for the Trump campaign is the Battle of the Crater. The sappers (Trump haters on Left and Right) have burrowed below the mine to lay charges, and blow out a monster crater, only to send their own troops plunging into the firey crater that blew up and created for themselves, and get mowed down by the Confederates. Looking beyond that macro-picture of the Civil War, that day, the victory belonged to the Confederates who defeated the Unionists who sacrificed 3798 casualties to wound 1491 rebels.

If one is supposedly a "constitutionalist" and thinks Trump is less than to be desired for from a constitutional standpoint, look at it this way. . . the two-headed hydra in Washington, D.C. of Demorepublicucks don't check one another in any meaningful sense. They collaborate to pilfer resources from the people. They don't devolve authority and power back to its rightful fountainhead in the states and the people. If Trump gathers momentum from the grassroots, circumstance and history aligns him with "states rights" and the "Tea Party grassroots" regardless of how neocucks raise the specter of fascism and dictatorship in their sophomoric criticisms of him.

When founders like Madison writing as Publius spoke of constitutionalism he reminded us that parchment barriers don't suffice, and in Machiavellian terms, power must counter power. Right now we have no viable opposition. I can wax eloquent about piety to the Constitution and strict construction, but we have nothing but sentimentalism left for the dead hand of the past in the conservative movement. With the neocon / prog fox-guarding-the-henhouse theory of constitutionalism, tipping the scales on a 5-4 majority on the SCOTUS, now Scalia's death means the fate of liberty hands on a single Supreme Court nominee. Senator Mitch McCuck of Kentucky already started giving voice to entertaining Obama's nominee when the rest of the party was going to scuttle it. Trump represents the will to give life to Federalist No. 78 and kick the judiciary to the curb proving it's the weakest branch once more, and tip the scales back to the states, the people and a populist constitutionalism.

Samuel Francis is right in the trajectory of his "Nationalism, Old and New" article regardless of the moot specific. Small-r republicanism was the way to go once upon a time, but modernity dealt a blow to that movement and political philosophy, and now a Middle American nationalism is the insurgent strategy needed to topple the progs, and the chameleon neocons who were professing the need to get Hillary in over Donald Trump. If we rebuild American manufacturing, we rebuild the middle class political base, and make our last gasp for air, as we come back and stem the tide against the south of the border invasion.

We should admire the energetic primitiveness of the movement, and get our people in the Trump administration. The other thing is we don't need precision in intellectualism to win the day. We need power and momentum. . . it doesn't matter about debates like free trade and protectionism. . . one could make a case for economies of scale, division of labor, and all of that BS, but the reality is we're stuck with DEATH AND TAXES. Justice John Marshall famously said "the power to tax is the power to destroy." If we have to pay freaking taxes whether we like it or not, why not end this consummate stupidity like Trump says, where our corporate income tax is the second highest in the western world, and our personal income taxes hit the middle class hardest in proportionate terms of their income, and shift some of it away to duties on imports? It gives the domestic economy breathing room and puts Americans back to work. Thomas Friedman can write all the eloquent treatises he wants about the The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but the reality is if we try what Trump proposes it has to better than the failed political economy of Bush and Obama. And the will to power is more courageous than my earlier "America is doomed" don't bother to "rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic" "defeatism".

We need to start kicking ass and taking names.