President Barack Obama laughs with former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, prior to the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, April 25, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Pat Buchanan laces into the “democracy crusaders, globalists, open borders progressives and interventionists,” controlling government, and specifically those in the Republican Party. At The American Conservative he reminds readers that after the Nixon-Reagan coalition days (which includes the first election won by George H.W. Bush), “the Republican nominee has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.” That could be because Republicans have forgotten how to talk to voters not concerned with building global bureaucracies and instead putting food on their table and their kids through school. Pat writes (abridged):
George H.W. Bush was America’s closer.
Called in to pitch the final innings of the Cold War, Bush 41 presided masterfully over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the liberation of 100 million Eastern Europeans and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nations.
History’s assignment complete, Bush 41 was retired.
And what happened to the world he left behind?
The Russia that back then was led by Boris Yeltsin, a man desperate to be our friend and ally, is now ruled by an autocratic nationalist.
Was not Vladimir Putin an inevitable reaction to our treating Russia like an untrustworthy and dangerous recidivist, by our expansion of NATO into the Balkans, the eastern Baltic and the Black Sea — the entire front porch of Mother Russia?
Since George H.W. Bush left the White House, the U.S. has incurred $12 trillion in trade deficits, lost scores of thousands of manufacturing plants and 5 million manufacturing jobs. Our economic independence is ancient history.
After 41 left, the Republican Party supported an immigration policy that brought tens of millions, mostly unskilled and poor, half of them illegal, into the country.
Result: The Nixon-Reagan coalition that delivered two 49-state landslides in the ’70s and ’80s is history, and the Republican nominee has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.
From 1992 to 2016, the American establishment contemptuously dismissed as “isolationists” those who opposed their wars for democracy in the Middle East, and as “protectionists” those who warned that by running up these massive trade deficits we were exporting America’s future.
The establishment won the great political battles before 2016. But how did the democracy crusaders, globalists, open borders progressives and interventionists do by their country in these decades?
Read more here.
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