Peggy Noonan Always Echoes "Respectable" Elite Opinion

Last Saturday, so I understand, Peggy Noonan wrote a piece writing off Donald Trump as "crazy, dishonest, and incompetent" according to Conrad Black.

I have always valued Peggy Noonan as a important meter telling us what "respectable" elite opinion is saying right now.

And yes, I get that right now "respectable" elite opinion wants to put Donald Trump (and the questionable election that you are not allowed to question) out of sight and out of mind. But in fact, as Black writes, Trump's achievements were considerable:

The near elimination of illegal immigration and of unemployment and the sharply rising incomes in low-income ethnic minority areas, reduced taxes, the identification in sober terms of the Chinese challenge, the elimination of oil imports, the extermination of ISIS, shaping up of NATO, the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and the pressure on Iran and de-escalation of the confrontation with North Korea[.]

Actually, says Black, Never-Trumpers like Noonan got it wrong all along:

they were useful idiots for the Democrats and must now wear their responsibility for the probably dishonest election of the most incompetent administration in American history.  

I think the question is rather whether we are seeing a basic realignment of American politics that puts the ordinary middle class at the center of politics, as various aborted movements suggest, from Nixon's Silent Majority to the Reagan Democrats to the Gingrich Contract with America to the Tea Party to the Trump Car Parades.

Or whether we are seeing a totalitarian educated elite slowing cinching down its domination until nothing moves, as suggested by the Zman. For, he says, good decent people that believe in compromise, the faith in due process, are always at the mercy of the true believers.

As long as people are willing to accept “well we have to respect the election results” as an excuse for not opposing evil, there is no escaping the gathering darkness. It is only when the opponents of radicalism commit to its utter destruction through any means necessary that the tides of war will change. 

Of course that is the lesson of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. The radicals won the revolution because they didn't believe in due process. They believed in the truth of their ideology. Of course, eventually almost every revolution returns to normalcy, as with Charles II after Cromwell, Napoleon after the Reign of Terror, and Khrushchev after Stalin.

But then there is the notion of God's Fifth Column, a book by William Gerhardie, discussed by William S. Lind.

His theory was that, just at the point where everyone who was anyone agreed events would go in a certain direction, they instead headed off on a wild, wholly unpredicted tangent.

Back in 1914 nobody thought that the nations of Europe would destroy themselves in a Great War. Right now nobody except crazy conspiracy theorists thinks that the current regime in the US is going anywhere but onward.

Why do we get surprised by history? Lind thinks it is because anyone in the prediction business has to predict a continuation of things as they are. Anything big departure is too crazy to consider in respectable circles.

Which gets back to Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

But the only question is: When? Peggy Noonan will tell us. After it happens.

Because it stands to reason that "most incompetent administration in American history" is not going to end well.