Trump has this Important Thing Right

I haven’t been a big fan of Donald J. Trump’s White House run. At one point I had been negative enough that I wrote “Ten Nice Things” about the man, since few people deserve unremitting condemnation.  Let me leave aside the many things to which I have objected in the solutions Trump proposes to get to what I think he sees that is true.

I have a good many friends (and I hope they remain friends) who are supporting the businessman and entertainer and these are sensible people. My social media feed is full of white nationalists and for those ideas I have no sympathy. But there is one thing about which we should all agree with Trump fans: the system is deeply corrupt.

As a conservative, this is not shocking to me. As a Christian, I even expect it. Nothing is so awesome that humans cannot mess it up. What begins in promise will in a few generations (if blessed) end in a rip off. The ministry becomes a money making machine. The business degenerates into doing what it did to increase profits. All human creations end badly.

The other side of this truth is that nothing is so bad that redemption is not possible. I have found goodness in people who were pretty bad and watched people climb from the pit to decent lives. Grace happens.

Donald J Trump is tapping into the sense we have been cheated.

Watch the outstanding movie The Big Short (business language and some brief nudity). The film describes the collapse of the mortgage market and the near destruction of the global economy.

We know that the “big fish” got away.

We know that the banks enriched themselves at our expense.

I believe that both Republicans (Bush) and Democrats (Obama) meant well at the very top (the President), but that the system itself produced corruption. People did deals, made “small moral compromises,” and the accumulated load of stealing, lies, and scandal nearly cost us all. People we know lost jobs, houses, and even their way of life. Most of the plutocrats escaped.

Obama presided over most of it. Romney never seemed upset about it.

We feel like we are being conned. Education is one good example. School keeps getting more expensive, but the quality of education does not increase. What does increase are administrators’ salaries while the real teachers are given no health care and part-time work. College is a con, but nobody does anything because each individual in the con is not doing that much wrong. Nobody is calling “b.s.”

Donald J. Trump has the courage to say: B.S. He is willing to say that politicians in both parties are on the take. They are. He knows most “conservative” celebrities are cheap and can be bought . . . and he is buying them on the cheap. Trump understands that we are sick of Clinton and Bush and the entire self-sustaining system. He delights in blowing it up and breaking the rules.

As far as it goes: God bless him.

So why not Trump?

I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him any more than the guy who sold me a mortgage in the early 2000’s by telling me what crooks everyone else was. I bought it then only to discover that he had given me a mortgage and then switched products on me at the last minute. It was a con, but one I bought (my bad), because he was so “honest.”

Bernie Sanders is like Trump in one way: he too tells us that the system is a mess. We know it is a mess. He has personal integrity, but also dubious solutions. I don’t trust democratic socialism any more than I trust Trump. Go to Greece and take a look. I have seen democratic socialism and it does not work and too few Greeks have work as a result.

Both Sanders and Trump want radical change in the system. Sanders blames capitalism. Trump wants to build a wall. Both solutions are “big” and that’s why I strongly oppose both. We know what happens in political revolutions: the first few to the block are people who deserve it. We cut off the head (hopefully metaphorically) of the corrupt favorite, but the revolution continues and soon we are shooting kids because they are “aristocrats.”

In the end, many of yesterday’s fat cats make their peace with the new regime. The old Czarist generals become the new Soviet generals. The old managers become the new commissar and millions of us starve to death. Revolution always begins well and ends badly.

Let’s not be stupid. Is there a global group of odious fat cats that are sucking the life out of free markets? Yes. They do so by combining big business with big government and enriching themselves. Does this stink? It stinks to high heaven.

We must bring justice, but not with some kind of messiah. We shake the system too much and those of us in the middle or on the bottom will be crushed by the weight of the fall. That is what always happens. Instead of putting our trust in a messianic Sanders or Trump, let’s find someone who will clean up some of it. Clinton cannot. I will not vote for her as a result, but maybe a Cruz, with his constitutionalism, or Kasich, with his Ohio rectitude, would clean up some of it.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

This much I know. Buying into blaming immigrants (illegals!) or “white trash” or the Jews or the Illuminati or the Establishment always ends with millions of dead regular people and something terrible.

My least favorite picture . . . ever. . . shows Russian revolutionaries going down a street while people sit at their desks looking out at what is happening. Revolution came and most people went to work. Their doom was sealed and most people thought: “Well, things have been bad. We need some change. How bad could it be?”

The answer was: pretty bad.

I know the system is rotten, but we are not dead. We can go to church. We can work. We can pay our taxes and they mostly leave us alone. Let’s be cautious lest we pull down the temple and it falls on our heads.