Mount Rushmore, The Avalanche Version
As has been the case for years, the progressive authoritarians are loving every minute of this deterioration of any plausible resistance to their schemes. Trump, as I and others predicted publicly at the beginning of this charade, has effectively sullied the cause of liberty for a generation with his demagogic fakery and personality cult appeal, just as the progressive establishment of both parties knew he would.
Establishment dupes of one tribe liked to say that Obama’s presidency made Bush’s look better. Likewise, their counterparts in the other tribe said Trump’s presidency made Obama’s look better. Now many are saying Biden’s is making Trump’s look better. That is all nonsense. An incompetent tool of the establishment without any real ideas of his own does not suddenly become more admirable because the peculiar follies of the next establishment tool become more prominent in one’s perceptions.
Bush’s presidency established the premises of unlimited police state monitoring of all human beings in an alleged free society, direct government payoffs to global billionaires on the “too big to fail” mantra, and abandoning the free market whenever it feels more convenient to the ruling class to assert command economy principles instead.
Obama was a Marxist publicity stunt with well-creased pants who did more to foster renewed racial division, normalize socialist attitudes, and entrench the idea of government by celebrity than any other president could ever do.
Trump was the most ignorant, least qualified, and most obviously low-minded self-promoter ever to gain high office in any semi-civilized country.
Biden is a mentally decrepit old mouthpiece for leftist populism.
Admittedly, Bush at least seems like a relatively decent human being in a non-political sense, compared with the other three, which perhaps makes him less personally disagreeable for political life, though certainly no more intellectually competent for it. But from a political action point of view, not one second should be wasted on judging relative merits among these men. All were and are instruments of totalitarian advance. All governed without a care for an irredeemable national debt, without a qualm about federal micromanagement of the economy, and in general without an iota of consideration for — or in the two most recent cases, without an iota of factual awareness of — the concepts of limited government, constitutional republicanism, or individual rights that were once the foundation of every American political debate.
In truth, these four presidents (with a great assist from Bush the elder and Clinton the TV star before them) have effectively put an end to anything worthy of the name “political debate” in America. They are all prop presidents, optics presidents, persona presidents, soundbite presidents, cipher presidents. They represent no ideas, only slogans; no policies, only pragmatic “winning”; no character, only crowd-pleasing hero lines; no love of country, only lust for approval, power, or some kind of personal bragging rights. Bush, an unwitting tool of authoritarian advance. Obama, a witting tool. Trump, the establishment long-range planner’s dream come true, an irreverent and sociopathic destroyer of decent men’s best instincts. Biden, a mindless pen prepared to scrawl a signature on anything America’s true rulers place on his desk.
If someone had predicted, a hundred years ago, or even fifty, that the United States of America would have four consecutive presidents this unworthy and incompetent, this destructive and self-serving, this unqualified and ignorant, few would have believed it. Today, by contrast, it seems that few are capable of remembering, let alone understanding, that this shocking avalanche of decline in leadership was not always the norm in America.
