Did you notice that common sense was almost entirely missing from the two nights of the Democrats’ radicalism pageant last week?
In terms of common sense and nonsense, the clear winner of the pageant was Julian Castro. The former Obama housing secretary’s bold advocacy of government-funded abortions for transgender women—that is, for biological males incapable of bearing children—was the standout in two evenings of real doozies.
But even if Castro is not awarded the prize, the Democratic presidential nominee will be a person who has taken a bold public stand against common sense—and done so on national television.
Even Barack Obama did not do that. By the time he finally got around to funding the mullahs of Iran, it had become perfectly clear that he was making the American government the world’s most powerful sponsor of Islamic terrorism. By supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere, by using military force to throw Libya open to the Islamists, by returning jihadis quarantined in Guantanamo to the fight, and in countless other ways, he made his sympathies clear—but even he did not make them clear while he was campaigning for the nomination. He waited until he was re-elected when, as he told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, he would have “more flexibility,” to go all in for the mullahs, among other things.
Do you believe that if Obama been open about what he was going to do for the Islamists, the media would have been able to disguise his anti-Americanism sufficiently for him to have secured the nomination? It seems to me not. If he had been boldly and brazenly outspoken about his sympathies, I reckon there would have been sufficient common sense among those who voted for Obama to have thrown the nomination to Hillary.
But how much have things changed in America? Obama successfully transformed the Democrats. Did he also succeed in fundamentally transforming America? Is America ready for the kind of policies and politics the Democrats put on display last week? In his brilliant article on common sense here at American Greatness, Mark Bauerlein wrote:
The culture sphere gives progressive politicians and commentators the vocabulary for doing so [taking down common sense]. Go into a modern art exhibition and check the wall text. “Subvert,” “transgress,” “challenge,” and “question” are everywhere, and common sense is the target.
The taking down of common sense that was once restricted to the cultural sphere has taken over the party Obama transformed—and the Democrats evidently believe America is ready to elect one of these new, post-common sense Democrats to the Oval Office. The only question that remains for them is to decide which one to choose.
There are, however, stirrings in another direction. America did elect Donald Trump, and Trump did run as a “common sense conservative.” So, did America by electing Trump take a step in the direction of becoming once again the common sense nation it once was?
That raises the question of the meaning of the 2016 election. Was the election decided by the vote for common sense conservatism or by the vote against the brazen corruption of the Clintons? If the election was decided by voters recoiling from the nauseating corruption of the Clintons, then the true test of common sense may await us in 2020.
For a replay of common sense versus political corruption, the Democrats would probably need to nominate former Vice President Joe Biden. At this point, it seems that only Biden’s political corruption approaches the corruption of the Clintons, though, as with the Clintons, the media could be counted on to conduct a cover-up and distraction campaign to protect him.
Of course, Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are phonies. Should Trump prevail over one of them or over another candidate he manages to expose as a phony, the foes of common sense in politics and the media will perhaps insist that it was not their candidate’s defiance of common sense that decided the election. They can be expected to explain the loss by rallying around the narrative that their candidate was just not a good candidate, as they did with Hillary.
But two wins in a row for the foe of political correctness and the champion of common sense in the presidential sweepstakes certainly would be interesting. Perhaps common sense, brought to the edge of extinction in politics and the cultural sphere in America can make and is making a comeback.
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