This Tuesday America takes an IQ test. Or perhaps we should say a common sense test. Or even more a test to see the degree to which it has been brainwashed.
This test has been going on for a week or two now in early voting in rather large numbers, but the results will be in, for the most part, late Tuesday night.
You would think that with all economic indicators at or near an all-time high, unemployment at an all-time low (notably for minorities and women), wages rising as they haven’t in years, the country at peace with the threat of evil doers from ISIS to North Korea on the wane, and an incredible, indeed unprecedented, number of presidential accomplishments in 20 months this election would be the proverbial no-brainer for voters.
But no, the president — forget the Republican candidates who have been decreed little more than “fifth business”– tweets too much, is a braggart, insults people, is a totalitarian, a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, etc., etc. Never mind what he actually does provides no evidence of that, indeed often proves the opposite. He has bad manners. The country must throw him and his party out. The media says so and it has to be.
This is “can’t stand prosperity” on steroids. It is a country shooting itself in the foot to please a group of “elites” whose sensibilities are offended and, even more, who are driven by envy and a lust for power.
What is on offer instead, for a surprising number, is none other than socialism, that hoary Nineteenth Century political theory that has led to the impoverishment of the masses and mass murder by the millions unparalleled in human history, the same ideology that is being fled in droves all over Europe. Good idea that. See what I mean about an IQ test?
No, this is an election motivated by anger and the aforementioned envy as none in recent memory, accompanied by mind-bendingly over-heated vitriol. Just the other day Jane Fonda joined her groupthink Hollywood colleagues in the moronic and unconsciously (let’s hope) anti-Semitic comparison of Trump to Hitler. (The man who moved the embassy to Jerusalem is analogous to the one who killed six million Jews. Given this kind of rhetoric, no wonder the Pittsburgh rabbi was “surprised” that the president was warm and cordial.)
On a more consequential level, we see this writ large in the highly partisan objectives of Democrats should they retake the House. We hear little of actual policy or ideas to make the country better — other than a tactical obsession with health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions (which everyone already favors and which seems ginned up in the last ten minutes) — but rather endless blather about hearings aimed at, at minimum, substantially weakening the president or, at maximum, impeaching him.
Adam Schiff — if he becomes chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — even expects to reactivate the hugely corrupt and partisan Russia probe, probably to avoid being exposed for being a serial liar on the subject himself for two years. Who knows what Maxine Waters — if she is elevated to chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee — will concoct, but it certainly won’t be a reopening of the ethics investigation of her husband’s bank. She is governed by vengeance, the same emotion that seems to control the hearts and minds of myriad public officials in our country, too many of whom are on the Democratic side.
The United States is in the strongest position it has been possibly since its inception but it is tearing itself apart like a nation on the brink of civil war. It is Freud’s narcissism of small differences played out on a national stage and gone berserk. Compared to virtually all of human history and to most of the rest of today’s world, most citizens, and even many non-citizens, in the USA have more white, brown, black and yellow privilege than could have been conceived of in any halfway rational utopian dream — and it’s only getting better. Yet vast numbers of people are at each other’s throats, not to mention families and friendships riven across the country.
Imagine if there really were a problem, how things would be. On second thought, maybe we need one.
Nevertheless, here were are in the land of “can’t stand prosperity.” Soon enough we’ll know how true that is. If you’re asking my prognostication for Tuesday, I don’t have one, although I was one of the few to predict Trump’s victory in 2016. Why spoil a perfect record? And I’m not by nature a gambling man.
But between us, the same elements apply.
Roger L. Simon – co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media -is an author and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.
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