Old Guard Democrats and Republicans are prematurely celebrating what they say is a Joe Biden presidential victory. Progressives are already lashing back at criticism that leftist extremism cost Democrats outright control of the Senate and seats in the House. And President Trump's America First movement is firmly standing behind him in his battle against election fraud and aiming to hold any Republicans who may waver accountable. This nation is indeed starkly divided on political lines. But it is a three-way split, not the blue-red phantom that belongs to another era.
Power With No People
The Swamp pretense that two distinct choices emanate from the same ossified entrenched incumbency tree is not the least bit convincing anymore. All Americans saw how quickly former president George W. Bush, his brother Jeb and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) scurried to congratulate Biden. The reason is obvious. These folks, along with the Clintons, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and so many others with large capital Ds and Rs next to their names in and around the Capitol make up one political bloc.
We’ve seen two recent events that bring home the stark separation between the America First cause and a Swamp establishment that contains numerous Republicans who have nothing whatsoever in common with the estimated 90% of grassroots GOP voters who stand squarely with Trump.
On Dec. 2, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) managed to get a bill passed through unanimous consent that vastly expands the visa program for foreign tech labor at the direct expense of American job seekers. Not one Republican senator opposed the measure, despite the fact that Trump won the White House in 2016 in large part by vowing to curb such programs.
On Dec. 5, Trump demanded to know the names of 25 congressional Republicans who reportedly have acknowledged Biden as the winner of the presidential election. “We have just begun to fight. Please send me a list of the 25 RINOS,” Trump belligerently tweeted out. At a spirited rally in Valdosta, GA, that evening, the audience greeted Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) with boisterous cries of “fight for Trump” when he took the mic to say a few words. Perdue had just been captured on video daydreaming about a GOP Senate happily negotiating with a Biden White House.
This is what a Swamp power base looks like. Call it by whatever name you wish. This faction’s defining trait is holding the levers of political machinery while having no popular support with the citizenry it claims to represent. Tens of thousands of faceless bureaucrats and others who make their living at the government trough are aligned with this grouping, which feels it is now about to return to the driver’s seat with Biden. Well-heeled K Street lobbyists and the enormous corporations they represent will feverishly work to buttress it. A complicit media will also play its part, but the American people are not a part of the equation.
And there is the rub. If this clique does indeed manage to install itself in the White House once again, it will be an artificially imposed outcome with no genuine grassroots base of support and a highly fragile alliance between it and the progressive bloc. None of this makes for a natural political phenomenon, and that in and of itself makes it brittle.
An Uneasy Alliance
While they have much in common and share a robust mutual interest in destroying the America First faction, the partnership between the progressive power grouping and the Swamp elites will always be a bumpy ride. Corporate insider cronyism is being tethered to a socialism that demands the government pour its financial resources into progressive social causes. As radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) herself said in January, “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”
These two camps can work together, however, on many vital issues. Immigration is perhaps the best example. The racial obsessions of the left compel it to work for massive demographic transformations that will “change the face of America” while the establishment pines for an ever-expanding pool of cheap labor. The Squad and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thus are able to pursue the same end goal with nary a murmur between them.
This is decidedly not the case with the America First faction. It simply cannot combine with either camp in pursuit of any of its core aims for both despise nationalism to such a degree that meaningful overlap is impossible. The built-in advantage America First has over the Swamp party is that it is an authentic political movement backed by genuine popular support. Even the progressive left, which has its share of true believers, does not prove a match on this score. The left’s base is particularist, centered on the northeast and west coast and in densely populated urban areas. The America First reach is continental, and a big takeaway from this 2020 election fiasco that the big-box media don’t want you to ruminate on is that this nascent coalition continues to grow.
For America First, then, working across the aisle is almost a hopeless task in the political climate of today. The most important thing for it is to coalesce as a tightly organized force that can apply intense pressure on those individual politicians with no base of their own who fear losing their cherished seats at the Swamp gravy train on election day.
But that only goes so far. Whether Donald Trump remains in control of the GOP or his cause breaks off into a new party of its own, the America First camp will likely seek to elect its own people at all levels of the political system, from city council all the way up to the U.S. Senate. In the four years since Trump first entered the White House in January 2017, this has not happened on the scale necessary to sustain what is otherwise a surging political power dynamic.
We have a three-way divide in America today. That two of the factions felt the need to unite for the 2020 presidential election to hack out a deeply controversial and still unverified “victory” over the third speaks volumes as to which movement is most on the rise.
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