A lot of conservative pundits are spittin' mad about Donald Trump's spectacular rise in the polls. Mad to the point of unreason. But the same folks claim to admire the founder of Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke, who placed his trust in the intuitive good sense of everyday people.
It was Burke who first identified the ideological insanity of the French Revolution, when fantasy-prone intellectuals grabbed absolute power to destroy a whole social class through the Terror, fully intending to keep killing until all the enemies of the Revolution were dead. The same kind of murderous ideologues have been pursuing total Revolution ever since, under the heading of Marxism and now Islamofascism, which also seeks to revolutionize the world by hook or by crook. Obama grew up in that part of the left.
Against the French Revolution Burke placed his faith in the moral intuitions of ordinary people. Well, you can't get more ordinary-sounding than Donald Trump. That's what seems to bug the intellectual right. It's a sort of class snobbery. But it's also a failure to see how cleverly Trump is playing the game.
Trump plays the part of a narcissistic blowhard, and his fans enjoy the joke. But when push comes to shove Trump is a very smart businessman who does know how to negotiate tough deals. He has faced business failure more than once, and managed to come back. Obama is a narcissist who has never experienced failure and who lives in his head; but it is failure that can turn narcissists into realists. The business world is all about reality. ...
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