Why Literacy Matters in a Leader
Donald Trump is inviting his drunken cultists to join him in partying like it’s 1934. FDR, the Uniparty progressives’ favorite president — Newt Gingrich thinks him the greatest of the twentieth century — was a nation-changing catastrophe of economic destruction, judicial corruption, and Constitution abandonment the likes of which America had never seen. FDR wrote the book on democratic tyranny. Unfortunately, Donnie can’t read.
FDR was the greatest gun control president in American history. Trump is vying to outdo Roosevelt’s unconstitutional overreach, demanding that the State assume the authority to confiscate legally-owned weapons from “dangerous” people without due process.
FDR was a socialist who used the Great Depression (which became much Greater thanks to him) as an excuse to institute massive government infrastructure projects to “create” tax-funded (i.e., artificial) jobs, and entrench government-dependency programs that have bankrupted America. Trump has made government-controlled health care an official plank of the Republican Party platform, personally favors fully socialized medicine, and boasts of his budget-shattering infrastructure proposals.
On the other hand, one significant difference between Trump and his great progressive predecessor is that FDR, admittedly with benefit of hindsight, saw the danger of excessive protectionist trade policies, and blamed the Hoover presidency’s Smoot-Hawley tariff as a major cause of the Great Depression. Trump, unwittingly determined — I believe Trump is the first world leader to make that oxymoron, “unwittingly determined,” meaningful — to incorporate the worst of Hoover into his revival of the worst of FDR, is aggressively promoting tariffs on products so essential to the economy that everyone in America — not to mention the rest of the world — will be severely affected by the inevitable higher prices, lower profits, and job cuts. (“Don’t worry,” Trump will tell his cultists — many of whom used to like the free market — “my Trumpfrastructure spending will make up for those private sector job losses! Who needs ’em!”)
What’s next? Well, when the combination of Hoover’s protectionism and FDR’s socialism had caused and deepened an economic depression of historic proportions, the only available solution — highly attractive to a president who believed government spending and micromanagement were the cure for all societal ills — was military spending, i.e., war.
Will Trump follow FDR’s path to “renewal” all the way to its natural conclusion? Who knows? What we do know, however, is that he will enter into each stage of the disaster he is causing blind, because he never read the book.
Literacy used to be considered a great boon and essential to the survival of a free republic, as it allows history and old wisdom to be passed through the generations. In other words, literacy allows a people to learn from their predecessors’ experiences. Today, the freest republic in history has been reduced to electing an illiterate as its president. There is a drunken cult that cannot see the danger in this. Everyone else is living at the mercy of their folly.
