ActRight

Partisan-stoked doubts about the legitimacy of the president (of whatever party) have become fashionable in the 21st century, but in the run-up to President Trump’s inauguration, their intensity has spiked. No doubt many in the media and the partisan opposition would be lobbing some of these attacks against any Republican; the claim that Trump is shockingly terrible would be more persuasive if similar denunciations had not been leveled against Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush. Nevertheless, the fierceness of the anti-Trump backlash is striking. Popular narratives to the contrary, Trump’s election is less a cause of our current crisis than a sign of it. In the months ahead, then, we need to attend to the conditions that have led to such a radical disruption in our politics. Normally, radical outsiders don’t win the presidency. In looking for a president, the American people usually balance a taste for novelty with a respect for experience. So it’s telling indeed that Trump is the first person elected to the presidency without any prior experience in elected office or other government service. Only when the mandarins of consensus have proven both so parochial and so inept could such an outsider have smashed his way into the White House. A series of institutional failures led to President Trump’s ascendancy. We have been treated to the spectacle of an elite that has promised too much and so often failed so spectacularly. Our public rhetoric has been frozen by nostalgia and an elite reliance on what Josh Barro has called “no-choice politics” to enforce a narrow consensus on immigration, trade, and other issues. Trump’s campaign was powered by denunciations of various debacles over the past decade, whether in foreign affairs, the economy, or national security. The populist insurgency takes place in the context of plummeting faith in major institutions, from Congress to large corporations to the press. Partisan political organizations aside, many institutional agents in American life resisted Trump strenuously — from major media organizations to the professional classes who dominate the Beltway. After reveling in his political electricity in 2015, TV news channels portrayed much of the 2016 general election as a trial of his alleged shortcomings. Few national newspapers endorsed him; USA Today, which had never before endorsed a presidential candidate, outright anti-endorsed Trump. By and large, those who occupy the commanding heights of culture — in the media, the academy, and Silicon Valley — treated Trump as an existential foe. Even many marquee conservative names opposed him. And yet Trump still ended up with the most commanding Electoral College majority of any Republican in a generation. Although that majority hangs on a relatively slim number of individual votes, the fact that Trump achieved that result despite massive institutional opposition is a sign of how dissatisfied voters were with the status quo and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the alternative it offered. (That American politics offered only Hillary Clinton as a plausible, competitive alternative to Trump in the general election is itself a searing indictment of the current status quo.) If we are interested in defending republican governance, we should not cheer this crisis of institutional faith. Institutions diffuse power and cultivate the networks of trust and competence that are crucial for maintaining civil society. In order to address the current crisis, we should focus on the reform of institutions rather than the destruction of them. It might be troubling, then, that many of the institutional actors who flailed against Trump’s rise should then double down on some of their tactics that inadvertently fueled it in the first place. There maybe a touch of the apocryphal in the famous Vietnam-era declaration “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” but it provides a helpful image for the way some institutional stakeholders in the media and elsewhere have responded to Trump’s election: We have to destroy the public square in order to save it. If we are interested in defending republican governance, we should not cheer this crisis of institutional faith. In that narrative, President Trump is a threat to the republic and must be “resisted” at all costs. Paranoia should replace fact-checking. Accusations of treason or malice should supplant the presumption of patriotic good faith (even when we disagree). The monologues of those who fancy themselves the virtuous should replace a vigorous public debate. This is like plucking out your eye because you think that you have glaucoma; this procedure might remove glaucoma from your body, but you still won’t be able to see. If you think that Trump’s election is a republic-threatening crisis, blowing up the cultural norms necessary for republican life is a counterproductive strategy in the extreme. Believing that President Trump is himself destroying those norms is no excuse for torching them yourself. The Republic will be preserved by nurturing the soil of healthy political norms — not by a race to create a wasteland. Instead of projecting all the ills of America onto President Trump, we should confront them directly. Those who aspire to political power need to recognize their obligations to the electorate they serve. Leaders should look at the challenges of the moment with open eyes instead of simply exulting over past successes or wallowing in past failures. The snideness that has too often proven a handmaiden for complacency should be put aside. In facing these challenges, any effort to “get beyond politics” will likely be a distraction. Political contests arise because we disagree, and some of the problems of the present can be attributed to an effort to enforce a stifling conformity on many cultural and political issues. What we might need to recover instead is a way of doing politics: mediating disagreement, expanding political rhetoric beyond vituperation and preaching-to-the-choir bromides, rebuilding constitutional norms, and shaking off the debilitating comforts of nostalgia. In facing these challenges, any effort to “get beyond politics” will likely be a distraction. A significant component of these present challenges involves rhetoric that reflects, and reinforces, certain intellectual commitments that have calcified our politics. But there are more directly practical tasks, too: revising the federal bureaucracy, updating foreign-policy and national-security strategies, reinvigorating the economy, and working to rebuild a sense of civic belonging (so that Americans feel cooperatively responsible for rather than alienated from the institutions of governance). Some of these tasks will weigh more on congressional leaders, some more on the executive branch. Some are federal; others, local. Most of them, though, will involve efforts by both elected representatives and the citizenry at large. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson proposed that “the manners and spirit of a people . . . preserve a republic in vigor.” The Founders recognized that the health of a republic relies on the moral and intellectual constitution of its people. Civil government depends on civil society, which itself is made up of the efforts, habits, and beliefs of the citizens of a nation. Our current political crisis is in part a product of broader cultural trends. We can face these challenges by embracing a spirit of charity, by striving to listen, and by attending to our commitments to our fellow men and women. In the maelstrom of disruption, we should hope for the best and try to see it in each other. — Fred Bauer is a writer from New England. He blogs at A Certain Enthusiasm.

Rep. Steve King Files Federal Pro-Life Heartbeat Bill: 'If a Heartbeat Is Detected, the Baby Is Protected'

Whether the fetus is a person at any given moment of pregnancy is a non-issue, since it will eventually become a person. Therefore, to abort a fetus is to annihilate the person.

The Ninth Amendment doesn't spell out the rights it protects, because they are basic, natural human freedoms.

The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Last year was difficult for people who enjoy getting things on time. A global supply chain crisis led to delays in shipments and receipts of packages during the holiday season. Now, supermarket shelves are barren, and gas prices are creeping over $5 per gallon yet again. And if the IRS has any say,…

Detroit police are poring over Facebook videos that show people recording a brawl that ended in a double stabbing

CNN's claim that "Islam has always been part of the American fabric" is historical revisionism with a political agenda.

As Landon covered on Friday, thirteen states have signed onto a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in order to obtain records from FBI surveillance related to crackdowns on parents

A member of a black church in Mississippi has pleaded guilty to burning the church, which was also spray painted with the slogan “Vote Trump,” a week before the 2016 presidential election.

Palestinians celebrate another slaughter of innocents, “The Mooch” arrives at the White House, and single-payer is on the table!

MTV Decoded, with the help of their host Franchesca Ramsey also known as Youtuber "Chescaleigh" released yet another racially charged video, this time entitl...

A federal court dismissed Planned Parenthood's challenge to the city of Lubbock, Texas, which had passed an ordinance declaring the city a “Sanctuary for the Unborn,” and stated, “Abortion at all times and all stages of pregnancy is declared to be an act of murder.” The ordinance made it illegal to procure or perform an abortion or to aid or abet an abortion within the city limits.

Sen. Rand Paul, a GOP presidential candidate, said Thursday that it is time to “blow up” the current tax code and “start over” with a flat federal tax.

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz raised eyebrows with his idea of giving voters the power to oust Supreme Court justices from the bench. One federal judge says he's so offended by the Texas senator's proposal that he thinks it should disqualify him from the White House.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A woman says Al Franken pulled her in tightly and put his hand on her buttocks in 2010 while posing for a picture at the Minnesota State Fair, the second al

The Veterans Administration has been using unqualified medical personal to do examinations – and deny benefits - for traumatic brain injuries (TBI) at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, according to documents obtained during a KARE 11 News investigat

College students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education.

GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson was on fire in front a 12,000-strong crowd in Phoenix, Arizona.

The daily revelations over Hillary Clinton’s personal email system are raising a perplexing question for former government officials who dealt with sensitive information – who wonder how classified information made its way onto a non-classified State Department network in the first place, when the two systems are not connected.

Tuesday, Stephen Colbert, the former conservative-mocking Comedy Central host, launched his career as David Letterman's replacement with a blatantly "partisan" bias. Wednesday his numbers fell off dramatically. 

Sen.

When asked about the current House leadership vacuum, staffers for congressman Justin Amash pointed The Daily Caller to his Twitter salute to outgoing Speaker John Boehner. https://twitter.com/

A slow but steady climb.

Nailed it!