Could It Happen Here?
This essay is based on a speech given at NPI’s 2016 winter conference, Identity Politics; first posted at Radix.
The Donald Trump phenomenon is amazing. I’ve never seen such enthusiasm for a politician—ever. His rallies are overflowing with emotion. This scares a lot of people because it conjures up images of populism, and even fascism. There’s something about crowds of cheering White people that terrifies America’s elites, especially when the speaker is criticizing their long-standing immigration policies.
We have become inured to an arrangement in which major party candidates are vetted by the media and the donor class before being put up for election. It’s a top-down system that more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Donald Trump has not been vetted.
Trump has said some incredible things—things I never thought I would hear from a politician with a real chance to win it all: birthright citizenship, Mexican criminality, a moratorium on admitting Muslims, an immigration policy that meets the needs of Americans, to name but a few. Without Trump in the GOP field, we’d be choosing between candidates’ methods of balancing the budget.
For years, the system has been stacked against our movement, to put it mildly. We have been doing our best to figure out how to get our issues before the public—issues like immigration and the demographic transformation of the United States. We ask: How could it happen? How could a political movement arise that would ignite the imaginations of White America, depose the corrupt donor class in the Republican Party and the corrupt politicians in Congress, and generate a populist uprising among those Peter Brimelow calls the “historic American nation”?

Broken Vows



