ROGER KIMBALL: Thoughts on the Swamp.
There’s something to be said for repetition.
In 146 BC, Rome besieged and then sacked Carthage. According to some accounts, the only thing left standing was a funerary monument.
The European Union is still moldering along, but at least the proximate goal of Hannan’s campaign, Britain’s exit from that soul-sucking Leviathan, has been accomplished.
With those victories in mind, I’m thinking of concluding all of my speeches with the phrase “palus delenda est”: “the swamp must be destroyed.”
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.
Exit quote: A reckoning, that is to say, is coming. It cannot come too soon. In the meantime, join me in chanting palus delenda est.“