"From the beginning of the nineteenth century, American intellectuals, succumbing docilely to the European lead, turned increasingly against every one of America's founding ideas and ideals. While the people, taking the American system for granted, were working to build a magnificient industrial structure, the intellectuals were working to undermine the system, to discredit its root premises, to sap its self-confidence, to erode its institutions, to remake the United States in the image of the succesive waves of European irrationalism.
The result is America today: a nation with the remnants of its distinctive meaning and institutions buried under more than a century and a half of intellectual wreckage; a nation which has kept some imperishable part of its original soul, but surrendered its mind to the alien ideas of the anti-Enlightment; a country intellectually prostrate, haunted by a pervasive, undefined sense of uneasiness, of ominous forebodding, of national self-betrayal; a country torn by a profound conflict, without guidance or coherent direction, unable to follow its Founding Fathers or to renounce them."
(L. Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels)
Let us not forget that I was able to pick out the finalists of the Republican primaries from the very start, strictly based on the hand signs they made in public; then something happened along the way, which constituted a change of plans: the unexpected death of A. Scalia, the fact that Cruz did not receive any kind of help in the NE primaries as he was supposed to... we will see what is going to happen at the convention.
There is plenty of space here available for everyone to express their opinions, isn't there?
http://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=3243.msg82666#msg82666