The message Trump should communicate to women

Donald Trump’s recent foibles in discussing abortion create a media opportunity for him that he ought not miss: the opportunity to burst the liberal myth that political issues may be divided based on race, gender, and wealth. In the case of gender, liberals presume that women have issues unique to them and uniquely understandable by them when in point of fact women’s concerns are men’s as well. There is no issue which would beget public policy or a political viewpoint that is not fair for both genders. The need to emphasize that point is accentuated by virtue of the fact that Hillary Clinton plans to run a sexist campaign where she presumes her gender gives her a uniquely valid perspective, superior to any man. So much for equality between the sexes, Hillary, at least when it comes to her own point of view, wherein she asserts a gender based superiority that is no less repulsive than Adolf Hitler’s race based superiority. That sexism is indeed identical to racism, and Donald Trump should call it out. He can deflate Hillary’s sexist balloon in short order by calling it for what it is, sexism, and revealing it to be the product of simple mindedness because in fact issues that beget public policy are not the unique province of any one gender.

Men and women are concerned about protecting the lives of the innocent, including the unborn; protecting the nation against foreign aggressors, including ISIS; and ensuring that the economic opportunity is restored to America for men and women. There is no room in America for gender based or racial based preferences in education, government, the military, or the private sector. Ours should be a meritocracy and that, indeed, appears to be Trump’s view. Hillary, on the other hand, believes in dividing the nation along racial and gender lines and saddling those who are not racial minorities or women with economic and regulatory burdens designed to advance the wealth or status of a preferred race or gender ahead of those not of that preferred race or gender.

That race based and gender based system of government preferences is akin to the racism of Nazi Germany. It is repulsive precisely because it offends fundamentally the notion well-articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. that all Americans are to be judged by the content of our characters not by the color of our skin or, for that matter, our gender.

The opportunity society Trump wishes to resurrect in America is predicated not on government selection of winners and losers but on the action of free markets where excellence is celebrated and complimented with riches, regardless of race, creed, color, or gender, whether the titan of industry is Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey, Robert Johnson or Doris Fisher. We should prize and protect an opportunity society driven by free markets not by government mandates.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, wants to continue the heavy overlay of government that characterizes the failed Obama Administration, where government issues grants to, coerces, and cajoles companies into advancing the kinds of product offerings it thinks best, and urges the kind of racial and gender characteristics it prefers. That has proven a total disaster because merit as determined by market demand which is the ultimate source of free market success has been supplanted by political preference as determined by who has the governmental authority to decide. Planned markets have always failed. It is impossible for government bureaucrats to predict the preferences of individuals in the market, and it is equally impossible for them to decide for each of us what we should buy or sell, when each of us has a different idea.

While in America there can be no legal protection for racism or sexism, there must also be no legal protection for select corporations or industries; rather there must be equal legal protection for all private property against the incursions of government. No matter how great a design some bureaucrat in Washington may envision (e.g., the disastrous Obamacare), it is not government, President Obama, who “built that;” rather, it is private initiative, unbounded by the constraints of those in power, that built all things great in America.

If we are ever to reclaim upward mobility as a people and a nation, we must reject the failed notion that central government planners know better than private citizens how best to satisfy private interests.

Trump grasps that fundamentally. He must now articulate the message against all-comers. When asked what he will do for women, he must turn that around and say he will do for women as he will do for all people, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity; he will get government out of our way, eliminate barriers to competition, and free the market to allow women, men, and all Americans to invent, compete, and succeed, as is the great American tradition.

He must assure us that the wayward course (that of government protectionism and socialism) always brings down what is above, replaces exceptionalism with mediocrity, and deprives individual Americans of that freedom which is essential to economic achievement and progress.