Trump CAN’T Save America and Here’s Why

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Social order, Trump, and priority, job number one. You know, it’s easy nowadays, especially the way social media works, it constantly being inundated with human beings behaving badly. You’ll see some video at an airport or on an airplane or in some restaurant or whatever it may be, somebody acting in a horrible, horrible fashion.

gets caught on camera and it gets posted on the internet. And the easy thing to do, easy thing to do is to obviously make fun, repost, make some sort of snide comment. I probably, I’ve been guilty of doing that in my life. And I try not to do that. I not to do that. I constantly reminded podcasts I listen to every single day done by father.

Mike Schmitz, Bible in the Year, and he always talks about that, you know, we have forgotten, and this is from Mother Teresa, we have forgotten that we all belong to one another. And I wanted to share with you a column, this is New York Times column, David Brooks talking about where we’re at and some of the points that he makes here. Now David Brooks is a guy that…

Again, I don’t agree with all the time. is, you know, supposedly one of the conservative guys over at the New York Times, but he does. He makes some unbelievable points here in the article. And he talks about the main political argument of the 20th century was basically how big should government be? The left, the donkeys, basically tried to use government to

We want to inequality. We want to offer safety nets. And again, I have been highly critical of their ideas and what they want to do because to me they were counterproductive. We talked about Cato Institute studies and the various different social pathologies that go along with handouts and giveaways. If there’s no strings attached and they keep going on forever and ever and ever. And I don’t want to rehash that right now.

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But anyway, on the right, people tried to reduce taxes and regulations to boost growth and the social dynamic, allowing our economy to grow. It’s a belief system that I hold. It’s over.

I mean, let’s be honest with each other. And I mentioned this lately, some of the things that Donald Trump is proposing are, again, something that Elizabeth Warren would propose, something that Ayok would propose, something that Bernie Sanders would propose. Donald Trump is a big government guy.

He’s a big government populist. There’s no more small government conservatism anymore. He’s got Congress going in lockstep outside of, like I said, Rand Paul’s, Thomas Massey’s of the world. Again, he’s using the power of big government tariffs.

basically wants to rejigger trade flows, doing the same thing, same thing that Joe Biden did, okay, using industrial policy to pick winners and losers, using government power. He wants to get involved with colleges and universities, makes a point too. The Trump Defense Department just spent $400 million to become the largest shareholder

of a private rare earth elements company, the US Steel deal. Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Man, I remember Reagan, but man, I feel old, but this seems much, much older.

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than that if you actually think about it. We have an administration that’s all about the power of the executive branch of government, relentless federal action, executive branch action. let’s be honest, he’s not the first, I mean, took a look at George W. Bush and what he steamrolled through with the war on terror.

and the use of military force. We don’t declare wars anymore. The Patriot Act, spying on people. mean, and again, you have all the trained seals, all the trained seals and monkeys at Fox News and all the other so-called, they call themselves conservatives, like, ee, ee, ee, ee, trained seals out there. Yay, yay, spy on Americans. Yay, yay. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. That’s their job. They just cheer it on.

Brooks asked the question, how did the Republicans move so far so fast? Well, a 20th century argument over the role of government happened at a time when people basically thought America was working, when society seemed stable. The individual is seen as the primary political reality. How can we support individuals so they can rise and prosper? Tax cut here, new social program there. But today, most people think America’s broken.

According to recent surveys, public trust in institutions is near historic lows. Two thirds of Americans agree with the statement, society is broken.

Two thirds. And if I was asked the question, I’d say, yeah. Yeah, it’s broken. And if I was asked why I thought it was broken, well, I could say, you know, I grew up in the 70s and 80s. This ain’t it.

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This is just not it. A myriad of different things, know, allowing crime to run rampant, black lives matters, riots this, riot that, riot not enforced. mean, it just, you know, doesn’t translate. It’s like bizarro world for people like myself. Between 1983 and 2007, the share of Americans who were satisfied with

Quote, the way things are going in the United States hit peaks of about 70 % and was often above 50%. Now again, up to 2007, what happened in 2008? Yeah, we had the great recession, financial crisis. What happened there?

Yeah, we got sold down the river by the powers that be that bailed out all of the financial institutions. We saw what transpired here and nobody was held accountable.

That is a massive, that’s a massive gut punch, massive gut punch to the country. We saw it in real time. It affected the entire country. We all saw what happened. Bailout, bailout, handout, check being written. Didn’t matter, didn’t matter whether it was a Democrat, didn’t matter whether was Obama, didn’t matter whether it George W. Bush, they all did the same thing. Just throwing that out there.

Okay, from 2007 to 2022, the number of Americans who were satisfied with the way things were going was frequently down to.

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25%.

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What does that say about social order here in this country? And Brooks makes a point that that’s the difference. It’s actually made all the difference. He writes, the French mystic Simone Weil once wrote that order is the first need of all. She emphasized that the social order is built on our obligations to one another. Again, like I said, Mother Teresa.

the understanding that we all need to, we all belong to one another. The texture of our trustworthy relationships. Humans need to grow up in a secure container, which they can craft their lives. The social order consists of a stable family, a safe and coherent neighborhood, a vibrant congregational and civic life, a reliable body of laws, a set of shared values that neighbors can use to help

build healthy communities and a conviction that there exists moral truth. Yeah. How often do I talk about this here? Can’t live in a free society unless people have values, morals, ethics. It just doesn’t work. How, is that neighborhood, that community of yours that, you know, has got bought up by Blackstone, BlackRock, some private equity company.

Nobody can afford to live there anymore. You got commercials on TV for reverse mortgages because senior citizens can’t afford to live in the houses that they paid for, that they own outright because the property taxes have gone up. This is good for society.

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He talks about a book written in 1974, The Roots of American Order written by Russell Kirk. And Kirk showed over the centuries, certain values, practices and institutions emerge gradually forming the basis of American social order. Kirk wrote that the importance of the social order was best appreciated by imagining its opposite. A disordered existence is a confused and miserable existence. If a society

falls into general disorder, many of its members will cease to exist at all. And if the members of a society are disordered in spirit, the outward order of the Commonwealth cannot endure.

This is.

where many of us feel we’re at.

Am I wrong in that assessment? Was Brooks wrong in that assessment? Families broken apart, families that are not formed.

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many areas of the country, you’ve neighborhood life decaying, wild, a of empty churches. That’s, again, that pendulum is starting to swing and God willing that continues.

Just, you know, drugs. Drugs. I mean, for years, I’m banging the drum here on this show, nobody really paying attention. know, 80,000 people died this year, 100,000 people died this year, over 100,000 people died this year. And I was like, my God, when I was in the 1980s, cocaine was the thing and crack and the crack epidemic. And you know, the highest death totals that they had during that whole period was around 10,000.

Yet, we don’t do anything. We watch videos online. The videos online of these areas in Philadelphia, people on Trank or whatever it is, they’re hunched over, they can’t move. How is this okay?

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Anyway, downtown’s becoming vacant, a national elite growing socially and morally detached. We have privatized morality so that there is no longer shared values. Nope. And again, got a lot of this through the university system as well. The educated class increasingly far, far left.

The man, they’re so far left, they’re so nonsensical, they feel like they’re from another planet. Am I wrong there? The ideas that they push?

Now, when the social order is healthy, nobody notices. When it’s in a rubble, it’s all anybody can think about. Once the social order was shredded, small government conservatism, I guess doesn’t make sense anymore. Right? If society’s not doing well, why would you want a small government to do nothing?

If you think society is in moral and civic chaos, why would you think this or that tax cut or this or that government program is gonna make a difference?

People who feel that society is fundamentally rigged, unfair, and chaotic turn to—

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Populism is an ethos that cuts across the categories of the big government, small government debates. Populists can be very conservative on social issues and isolationists and nativists on immigration issues, but very progressive when it comes to redistributing wealth. Sound familiar?

Sound familiar?

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Anyway.

He talks about Trump in this sense. This word is called misarchist. Misarchist. It was a new word for me, too. Misarchist is a leader who is hostile to government and the people who run it, but is willing to use state power to enforce order and traditional morals. Misarchists often see a public office as their personal property, which they can use, however they want to take down their enemies. And again, Trump.

concentrate state power so he can go after the managerial class. Again, people believe and not necessarily wrong that, you this class has betrayed America, destroyed a lot of the social order and they played a part. Again, too many administrators, bloat, civil servants, go on and on and on. Again, this modern ruling class.

Again, you can go too far. You’re too far, but Trump supporters feel that this is what’s going to restore order. Brooks says the central argument of the 21st century is no longer over the size of government. The central argument of this century is over who can best strengthen the social order.

Republicans right now, they’ve got the people that they think can do that. I quite frankly don’t like what they’re doing. I don’t think it’s the way to go. Democrats, they don’t have anybody. They really don’t. Sense of progressive error. Democrats have seen society through a government policy lens that is often oblivious to the pre-political social fabric that holds or does not hold society together from the bottom.

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Democrats have often been technocratic, relying excessively on social science, policy wonkery. They are prone to the kind of thinking that does not see the news, the minutiae of common life, the stuff that cannot be quantified. They are the party of the elite managerial class, and it’s hard for these types to really understand the overall disgust, rage, and alienation that envelop the less privileged as they watch this social order fall.

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Some good points made by Brooks. just, I don’t feel, and these are points, again, these are points that I’ve been talking about for some time. I’m sorry, I don’t think this type of strong arms, can people call for it?

They call, I mean, they call for it. It’s biblical, know, man to the king. Yeah, people call for it for these types of things that I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t. We do not need a command and control economy. There’s going to be blowback. The pendulum will swing back in the opposite direction if you allow it to do so. Even

Even the left is starting to recognize this outside of their fringe.

Even they understand that direction is not working anymore. Again, issue number one, yeah, yeah, we got to understand that we all belong to one another and restore that social fabric. Priority job one, and it ain’t gonna be easy. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.