In 2016, Donald Trump shocked the world. With no political experience whatsoever he ran for president and defeated two political dynasties, the Bushes and Clintons, in the Republican primary and general election, respectively.

Trump came out of nowhere and took the bipartisan ruling establishment completely by surprise. At first, they ridiculed him, Huffpo going so far as to relegate any articles about his campaign to the Entertainment section.

However, it didn’t take long before they recognized Trump was a credible threat not only to the Republican Party side of the establishment, but the whole, corrupt, globalist cabal. That’s when they began demonizing him. And once he won the presidency, the establishment committed itself to two objectives:

1. Neuter his presidency to the best of its ability with investigations, impeachments, and resistance to his directives by the executive branch bureaucracy and,
2. Make sure electing him or anyone like him could never, ever, happen again.

And so, the public was regaled with anti-Trumpism nonstop, during and after his presidency, for eight straight years. Trump and his supporters weren’t the only victims of this psychological waterboarding. Tens of millions of American liberals became consumed with irrational fear planted in their psyches by the media that Trump would “end democracy” and replace it with 1930s-style fascism a la Hitler or Mussolini.

Even after Trump’s first term, during which none of this happened, liberals as high profile as actor Robert De Niro truly believed they would be in physical danger were Trump to be elected again. Certainly, Trump made the media’s job easier with some of the undisciplined things he said, but no one can point to any overt act of his as president that remotely justifies this animal terror.

What would motivate the political establishment to go this far, to demonize one half of the electorate along with their candidate, and to inflict psychological terror on the other half? To go so far as to prosecute Trump in multiple jurisdictions on spurious charges even after he secured the Republican nomination?

Consider what the establishment stands to lose. Over the course of the 20^th century, the so-called “progressives” had systematically undone a political system which, although its lifespan was relatively brief, had improved the human condition more in a few decades than it had improved in the thousands of years of recorded human history that preceded it.

That system was called “liberalism,” although it bore no resemblance to the system supported by the people who call themselves liberal today. It was a system based upon John Locke’s concept of “property,” which included individual liberty, the security of justly acquired possessions, and the right to participate in what we would now call a laissez faire free market.

Under this system individuals have the opportunity to acquire wealth through what Franz Oppenheimer referred to as the “economic means.” This is the means of production and voluntary exchange in a free market.

The other means of acquiring wealth, which has dominated human civilization for most of its history, is what Oppenheimer called the “political means.” As Murray Rothbard put it, “The "political means" siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer's incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence.”

As I’ve said before, progressivism isn’t really progressive; it’s regressive. It is an attempt to return society to the system that existed before liberalism, before the original “shot heard ‘round the world.” It was a system in which wealth was acquired by a ruling elite through the political means. Its basic structure should sound familiar:

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

 Tom