CONVICTED BY THE ‘RATIONAL STATE:’

Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in New York last week must be understood in terms of a political war that has been going on since Watergate. This 50-year fight—between the American people and an increasingly powerful ruling class—is the last stage of a project that began over a century ago, when progressive intellectuals imported German political science into America with the explicit aim of transforming the Constitution. In place of a representative government chosen by the sovereign American people, a new ruling class claimed superior intellectual authority, derived from “rational” empirical science and its methodology. The Constitution may continue to exist in name, but it has mostly been replaced by an administrative state of bureaucratic experts.

Trump is the greatest threat to this ruling class since Richard Nixon. He has therefore aroused more raw political passion than anyone in recent memory. Making him a convicted felon is a calculated gamble to keep him from returning to the White House. There is a risk it could backfire. But the ruling class knows that Trump is entirely alone in the political establishment. He has the support of millions of voters—almost certainly a plurality of the American people. But he is opposed by virtually all of the influential social, economic, political, and cultural interest groups that determine the outcome of elections.

When most elected Republicans and conservatives accepted the legitimacy of the globalist interpretation of the 2020 election, they abandoned the rule of law for hundreds of American citizens. These citizens were called insurrectionists and were denied basic rights by a Congress and courts that funded and conducted what was clearly an elaborately staged hoax. The first, and still the greatest, political hoax in American history was Watergate, which first confirmed to the expert class that it could rule without consent. The official interpretation of Nixon and his legacy has dominated public opinion for the last half century. To this day, the delegitimizing of Nixon has given powerful support to the “rational structures” in government which have replaced the Constitution.

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Yet the authority of the rational bureaucracy remains insecure until the threat of Trump can be neutralized. He threatens to unite the country around an understanding of the older America—an understanding that denies the authority of the rational bureaucracy. What they have done to Trump, and his response, has now made the problem political in such a way that it cannot be resolved without a fight.

As America’s Newspaper of Record notes, the left are fully prepared to have it out in the name of, err, democracy: