Trump is hated because the American people elected him to bury the Establishment. Last weekend the Establishment obliged by conducting burial services for itself.

Spengler writes in Asia Times,

Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave.

Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

…America had no military competitors of importance when George W. Bush took office in 2001, and an edge in high technology that made the American economy seem insuperable. Since then:

China has taken America’s place as the leading exporter of high-tech equipment;

America faces credible military competition from China;

Real median household income hasn’t grown since 2000;

The civilian labor force participation rate has fallen from 67% in 2000 to 63% today;

Productivity growth has languished at 1% a year since the global financial crisis;

US federal debt has between 2000 and 2018 has doubled as a share of GDP;

The American economy became “cartelized, corrupt and anti-competitive,” dominated by a handful of tech monopolies who combined to crush competition.

Bush, supported by Senator McCain and the Republican mainstream, spent $5.6 trillion chasing the phantom of democracy in the Middle East, not to mention more than 6,700 American dead, more than 50,000 wounded and millions of lives disrupted.

…The ideological commitment of the Establishment to a new global order made facts irrelevant. If things weren’t that way, they should have been that way.

Being an Establishment means never having to say you’re sorry. The first task of an Establishment is to insulate its inmates from the consequences of their errors. Never mind that America’s adventures in Iraq threw the Middle East into a new Thirty Years War, as I warned 10 years ago it would.

The only senior US official to warn of the consequences of the Establishment’s blunders was General Michael Flynn, whose career has been ruined by Establishment holdouts in the intelligence community. The opportunists, careerists, ideologues and fools who ruined America’s strategic position in the world should be the continuing object of public ridicule, but they have safety in numbers.

Because the whole of the Establishment signed on to a failed policy, the whole of it will band together to protect its right to rule.

…McCain never thought that he had made a mistake. He clung to a failed policy out of conviction. During his last years he erupted with anger at old friends who questioned his judgment on matters such as the Muslim Brotherhood. His unswerving belief in the inherent virtue of the Establishment agenda has made him the saint and martyr of the moment.

The bright line in American policy divides the utopians who believe that America’s mission is to bring free markets and liberal democracies to the benighted, backward nations of the world, and realists like Trump.

Senator McCain threw his support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the expectation that it would become a vehicle for Muslim democracy; Donald Trump proposed to insulate America from the problems of the Muslim world.

Trump rose to the top in the Republican primaries when he proposed to freeze immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, a stark declaration that America’s safety is what matters, not the fate of nations on the other side of the world.

More than anything else that Trump did, the travel ban horrified the Establishment, but it won the support of 60% of American voters. Trump declared in effect that the United States would rather insulate itself from problems in Muslim-majority nations than fix them. American interests would come first.

…Trump is hated because the American people elected him to bury the Establishment. Last weekend the Establishment obliged by conducting burial services for itself.

Read more here.