At my house we have a big slobbery happy dog who thinks he is 10 foot tall. He prowls the perimeter of our little homestead all night keeping the varmints (real and imagined) at bay. Though he doesn’t know it, that is his purpose. He is here, in large part, to keep the foxes, bobcats and raccoons out of the hen house. In his nature though, he too is a predator. If I don’t restrain him (either physically or by training) he too will suck eggs and kill chickens. In a simplified version of things, my big slobbery dog and government have a lot in common.
This election is not about Donald Trump. It isn’t about Hillary Clinton, either. This election is a contest of ideas. It is a battle to determine where we will set the needle on that grand idea of Liberty. On one side of the dial is mindless slavery created by a government that steadily takes more and more control of everything promising security in return. Opposite that is anarchy, a chaotic world without any government.
Somewhere between those two extremes is a big idea called “Liberty”.
Liberty exists only when government is strong enough to protect the vulnerable from the predators, but restrained from its tendency to become predatory itself. What we are seeing in the Donald Trump phenomenon, I think, is a reaction among the chickens who have finally seen the dog in the hen house.
A chicken in the dark is basically paralyzed. You can catch it, or kill it, or take its eggs without much of a fight. I suppose it is a combination of patience, laziness, fear and ignorance that causes people to endure political abuse the way they do. Staying in the dark is easy until, like a compressed spring, life gets tighter and tighter, waiting for the tension to be relieved. It can be relieved only by pushing-back or by breaking the spring, and being perpetually broke is a really crummy option.
To be sure, I would prefer a nominee with the manners of Rubio, the mind of Cruz or the deliberation of Carson. Then again, Donald Trump’s appeal isn’t really about Donald Trump at all. He comes off as a loud, crass braggart. He is a populist nominee not because he is a particularly likable, conservative or intelligent fellow but because he has the means and the disposition to push back against a genuine continuous encroachment on Liberty. To go back to the hen house analogy, Trump just happens to be the big redheaded, long spurred, ill mannered rooster with the guts to flog the dog.
I am under no illusion that Trump can save the Republic. That is too much burden to place on any man. If the Republic is to be preserved the citizens are going to have to retake their government from those who would manipulate it for their own self interests. Yes, Donald Trump is a deeply flawed candidate, but he is making the career political types in this country howl.
I’m not really offering political advice. Do whatever you want to do, but for me the only real choice is between a riled rooster and a rogue hound. I think I’ll choose the rooster.
