Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (photo credit: Lorie Shaull via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
In a previous column I considered how the coalition that is the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy began to fray after losing the common enemy against which it had united:
In 1988, as reported by the LA Times, one of President Gorbachev’s key advisors gave away the game. “Our major secret weapon,” said Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, “is to deprive you of an enemy.”
That column explored how the loss of its common enemy — the USSR — caused the right wing coalition to begin to fray and unravel and, thus, the GOP to lose its moorings. That column also pointed out how the election of Donald Trump could be one way to reunite the right.
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, though, her victory holds the distinct possibility of even more fundamentally uniting the right, bringing the GOP back to its core values of peace, equitable prosperity, and human dignity.
How might this be?
Clinton, a center-left Neoliberal, could well portend a Götterdämmerung for the classical republican order, galvanizing the right in ways that President Obama never quite did. Clinton lacks President Obama’s suaveness, and the opportunity that would be afforded to her to constitute a center-left Supreme Court would be catastrophic to major elements of the conservative coalition.
For these reasons, the right is more likely to recognize the fact that a mortal enemy, a worthy successor to the USSR, has definitively emerged. Clinton, by preponderance of evidence a nurturing and idealistic person, is not that mortal enemy. Yet she would be its loyal agent.
The true mortal enemy is what I have elsewhere called a “Cultural Revolution.” It is an ongoing effort to replace the classical liberal republican order with an egalitarian democratic cultural hegemony.
Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.
