The Dragon’s Wrath

Come not between the dragon and his wrath – Shakespeare (King Lear)

There was a political earthquake last Thursday in the United Kingdom. A big question was answered in a single day without any lingering doubt or speculation about its meaning. After three years of debate over Brexit, and a Parliament acting in their own self-interest and ignoring the will of the people, the people had had enough. It was time for their version of “drain-the-swamp”. They voted to decimate the Labor Party (Labor=Democrats in the US) to its lowest strength in more than 80 years. They also voted to remove and replace “wobbly” Tories (Tories=Republicans in the US) who weren’t fully committed to the cause. The net effect was to reshape Parliament into an overwhelming conservative majority that should be immune to rebellious actions from party defectors. If all this wasn’t enough, they also re-empowered a street-fighting, no-nonsense, laser-focused ruffian as Prime Minister to make sure the will of the voters is enforced.

Nearly all the news media outlets in the US and UK reported this as a refutation or defeat of socialism and far left policies. In the US, the conservative news media issued dire warnings to the Democrat Party that if their platform continues its lurch leftward (as led by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), they will suffer a similar slaughter at the ballot box in 2020. We do agree there is a good chance of a conservative backlash against socialism in the next election. However, if a UK-like landslide were to occur here in 2020, we think it will be for a different reason. By the same token, we don’t believe it was purely an anti-socialist vote that determined the outcome in the UK election last Thursday.

In 2016, voters in the UK got to express their will to their government by answering one very simple question on a ballot – should the UK leave the European Union, YES or NO? By a clear majority (52% – 48%) they voted YES, they wanted to leave. Ever since then, Parliament has thwarted the peoples choice. Worse, Parliament has accused the electorate of having made an uninformed decision, wrongly influenced by sinister forces. Parliament has styled itself as a well-educated and finely cultured elite body striving to “save” the people from themselves. The vote to leave the EU was considered foolish and the result of an uneducated populace. This opinion became painfully obvious to the electorate throughout the summer and fall months of the Brexit debate. The UK voters may not want socialism and leftist policies, but we believe they rebelled primarily against their votes not being taken seriously and their will being considered invalid.

In this regard, a parallel between the US and UK is striking. At exactly the same time in 2016 as the Brits were voting YES/NO on Brexit, US voters were deciding between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. At the time, each group of voters were disenchanted with the status quo in their respective country. In the US, many voters were especially put off by Hillary Clinton’s obvious disdain for them (she called conservative voters a “basket of deplorables”). In both the UK and the US, a sleeping giant awoke. Via the ballot box, voters in each country sent what they thought was a clear message that the time had come for a big change. Leaving the EU would be a colossal alteration of political and economic affairs in the UK (and the EU). Of no lesser import, the election of Donald Trump, a bombastic, anti-establishment outsider and the antithesis of political correctness, would shift the tectonic plates of Washington. In both cases, the pre-existing government leaders in each country recoiled at the choice of the voters. In the UK, a cabal formed in Parliament with enough members from both major parties to delay any implementation of Brexit for the succeeding three years. In the US, an elaborate tale was spun by former Obama officials, Democrats, and the media to convince voters that the result of the 2016 election was illegitimate. They proclaimed it was not the will of the people, but rather the result of mind-altering Russian propaganda combined with a complex conspiracy orchestrated by the new President.¹ This “tale”, along with the constant refrain that an impostor was in the White House, persisted for the next three years.

Last Thursday, the time came around again for voters in the UK to express their will. This time it wasn’t a sleeping giant that awoke, but a fire-breathing dragon. In the space of 14 hours, the voters incinerated the Brexit opposition and sent an unmistakable reminder that in a democracy, the people will not be ignored. In the US, voters must wait another 10 months to speak their mind. Much like in the UK, the elitist message for the last three years in this country has been that the 2016 result shouldn’t have happened and if voters weren’t tricked, they were just plain wrong.

Increasingly, evidence is coming to the surface exposing how the sordid attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump was orchestrated. The recently released report from the Justice Department Inspector General (Horowitz) is just the tip of the iceberg. As with the UK electorate, we believe a dragon has awoken here in the US. However, numerous signs indicate that our dragon is a ferocious, tail-swinging, mucous-dripping, wart-covered, flame-throwing monstrosity even uglier than the one that wreaked havoc in the UK last week. Also, our dragon is getting more vicious by the day as the Democrats press on with impeachment. At least half of the US electorate, the winning half no less, is still being ignored and marginalized by most establishment elites in our government. The Trump voters’ only consistent supporter, listener, and defender is Donald Trump himself. His rock-star like charisma and the attendance and passion at his rallies, regardless of where they are held in the country, should be assessed by the Dems as foreshadowing. It isn’t. The precipitous decline in both ratings and subscriptions for the major liberal news media outlets (CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.) should be another clue a dragon is stirring. It’s been ignored. And what about a logical explanation for how the economy, unemployment, and stock market are all the best they’ve ever been under the leadership of the “wrong” person in the White House? Are we really to believe all those things happened purely by chance and would be even better if Hillary Clinton were President instead?

This isn’t that complicated. A government “by the people” means the people select their government. If the leaders they select and the policies they support aren’t respected as a legitimate choice, the people will justifiably respond with a fiery vengeance. That’s what just happened in the UK. Next November, no one should be surprised if the same exact thing happens here in the US, for the exact same reason.

¹ We have to appreciate the cleverness of this premise. Blaming the “incorrect” result of the 2016 election on a mysterious and faceless 3^rd party (Russians) and not on the voters is cagey. It allows the Trump opposition to openly disrespect the election result without directly implicating the voters as the cause of that result. For the scheme to be fully successful, those supposedly unwitting voters would need to be convinced that the trickery visited upon them was real. Thus, the accusation of a Trump-Russia conspiracy to “fix” the election and a lengthy Mueller investigation to legitimize the charge. Trump’s apparent ability to cheat in an election has now become the Dem’s justification for wanting to remove him from office. Their impeachment case rests on the notion that his statements to the Ukrainian President “prove” he is trying to repeat his 2016 swindle again in 2020.