In the feudal era there were the “three estates” – the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”

Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill – of the Press … of the fourth estate. … There she is – the great engine – she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world – her courtiers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets.”

The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

With the rise of network television and its vast audience, the fourth estate reached apogee in the 1960s and 1970s, playing lead roles in elevating JFK and breaking Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Yet before he went down, Nixon inflicted deep and enduring wounds upon the fourth estate.

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Enter The Donald.

His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of political correctness is daily on display. And that large slice of America that detests a media whose public approval now rivals that of Congress relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press. And the media have played right into Trump’s hand.

They constantly denounce him as grossly insensitive for what he has said about women, Mexicans, Muslims, McCain and a reporter with a disability. Such crimes against decency, says the press, disqualify Trump as a candidate for president.

Yet, when they demand he apologize, Trump doubles down. And when they demand that Republicans repudiate him, the GOP base replies:

“Who are you to tell us whom we may nominate? You are not friends. You are not going to vote for us. And the names you call Trump – bigot, racist, xenophobe, sexist – are the names you call us, nothing but cuss words that a corrupt establishment uses on those it most detests.”

What the Trump campaign reveals is that, to populists and Republicans, the political establishment and its media arm are looked upon the way the commons and peasantry of 1789 looked upon the ancien regime and the king’s courtiers at Versailles.

Yet, now that the fourth estate is as discredited as the clergy in 1789, the larger problem is that there is no arbiter of truth, morality and decency left whom we all respect. Like fourth-century Romans, we barely agree on what those terms mean anymore.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/why-liberal-m...17q5eCyVthbX.99