By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that
permeates the Left these days, especially when we’re talking about everyone’s
favorite topic: Donald Trump. But take this
cover, which features some of America’s most renowned presidents — George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and FDR — in various
states of dismay as they watch Trump pontificate on television.
They are all deeply concerned about the future. And
aren’t we all?
“In most historical portraits, Presidents are noble and dignified,”
Barry Blitt says of his cover for this week’s issue. “My biggest challenge was
to alter the Presidents’ expressions to make them reflect attitudes of
consternation.”
Well, agonizing about Trump’s political ascent is
understandable if you happen to be worried about extraconstitutional actions,
nativism, protectionism, and economic crackpottery. And The New Yorker cover is a helpful way to point out that
extraconstitutional actions, nativism, protectionism, and economic crackpottery
is not the domain of any particular party. Then. Or now.
The patron saint of the bureaucratic state, FDR, may have
more in common with Hillary Clinton than Ted Cruz, but I’m unsure why Blitt
believes he would be distraught by the way Trump intends to wield presidential
power. Few presidents, in fact, have ever taken advantage of crisis and fear
more effectively than FDR. Roosevelt brandished executive power in ways that
would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker. I’m not sure
even this casino magnate would try to pack the Supreme Court with judges to
neutralize anyone hostile to his agenda. That takes a special kind of disdain
for process.
Though all right-thinking people were appalled by Trump’s
promise to temporarily halt Muslim immigration, would the noble and dignified
Roosevelt — a man who forced thousands of American citizens into detention
camps for nothing more than their race — be similarly aghast? There’s no
evidence to believe he would.
Would the same president who agreed to terror bomb
Japanese and German civilian centers — and we can certainly debate the context
of that strategy — be disturbed by a candidate proposing to do the same to
terrorists’ families? Doubtful. The only difference is, FDR hid the extent of
his plans from the American people.
No one, I hope, is under the impression that Teddy
Roosevelt — who at one point embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific
aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism of the early 20th century — would
be especially concerned about the intimidation and bluster of Trumpism? He
lived for that sort of thing.
And should John F. Kennedy, who was not merely a moral disaster
but a middling president who owed his entire political career to the fortune of
his family, be distressed that Trump might class up the White House?
In a Politico
podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not
just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I
felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re
on the topic: What would George
Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated
class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?
For that matter, what would he make of Bernie Sanders?
What would the self-made Lincoln think of Hillary’s
malleable principles and corrupt political career, built on nepotism, favor
trading, and identity politics? Would he be more horrified by a loud-mouth
mercantilist or a politician who believes the state should be empowered to
confiscate private property to satisfy the mob’s call for “fairness”?
This canonized slate of liberal heroes gets away with a
lot. You’ll never see Coolidge or Reagan popping antacids as they watch Hillary
on the cover of magazine and neither of them had ever put anyone in a
concentration camp. But revisionism is one thing. Today there is broader,
left-wing effort to place progressivism at the center of American political
debate, and acting like Trump is the manifestation of genuine conservatism is a
nice way to try and do it. But this isn’t the first time pent-up anger among
Americans towards their institutions and political parties has led them to a
demagogue. We’ve got plenty of Democrat heroes lying around to help us make
this point.
None of this is to say that Republicans have a monopoly
on constitutional purity or American values. It’s simply to point out that they
don’t have a monopoly on podium-thumping, fire breathers, and dumb ideas.
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