Should small donors take a hike?

Last week, Jonah Goldberg, former National Review editor and one of the intellectual authors of the MAGA Resistance Movement, entered the friendly confines of CNN to expose how small political donors pose a mortal threat to democracy — the New York Times reported that more than 110 Iowa voters gave Trump at least $200 compared to only 17 voters who presented to the DeSantis campaign. 

“Small donors in Iowa are more important,” Goldberg told CNN political stenographer Dana Bash, “as an indicator of grassroots support than anything else.  But I also think we’re dealing with a time where there’s a lot of cheering and self-congratulation about the rise of small donors a decade ago.  And now small donors are actually one of the biggest problems for democracy, for the GOP.  Large donors actually have a strategic view about moderation, who can win, and who can’t.  Small donors are really just venting their spleen with their credit card and they lock candidates into positions that can hurt them in the general election.”

Goldberg also discussed a recent article he wrote for The Dispatch in which he accused Trump’s grassroots support of “suffer[ing] from the delusion that they are victims of the ruling classes and that the woke left is running everything.”  He concluded, “For those desperate for a Republican nominee other than Trump, hoping voters will change their minds seems scary. But that’s democracy for you.”

Along the marble-lined vacuous and elitist coastal corridors, Goldberg struts like a paragon of conservatism.  He believes that once he finds the meanest motive for an action or a person, he identifies the real one.  Small donations to a political candidate he despises result from a delusional, deranged, paranoid voter.  “Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner” (Hitchens, 2006, p. 71).

He fails to understand that the structural relationship between conservative voters and the GOP is no longer fraternal, but fratricidal. 

The GOP aristocracy can no longer contain the revolt of the “swinish multitude,” as described by Edmund Burke.  This aristocracy directs voters to ends other than the truth.  Its goals are perpetuating a dysfunctional political system and total control of the individual.

Timid attacks by GOP political candidates against the effects rather than causes of a failed system are pointless.  No change is possible. 

“If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government” (Pirsig, 1975, p. 94). 

President Trump is the only political candidate willing to destroy “the factory and the rationality which produced it.”

Like Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Goldberg is a supporter of “political” heredity, elitism, and entrenched power while seeking the destruction of those who distrust and abhor them. 

He complains about the rise of a populist political movement (MAGA) like how Burke lamented the execution of Marie Antoinette.

The proposition that wealthy donors are the only ones who possess the right or power to control our posterity is contemptible.  Our generation are free to act for ourselves, as did those who preceded us, without the influence of an oppressive aristocracy.

Poor Jonah: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird” (Hitchens, 2006, p. 84).

References:

Hitchens, C. (2006). Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.  New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Pirsig, R. M. (1975). Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  New York: Bantam Books.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.