By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Many have weighed in on whether Donald Trump’s agendas —
to the extent that they are different from what are now ratified Republican
policies — are crackpot, unworkable, or radical: e.g., building a wall to
enhance border enforcement (“And make Mexico pay for it!”), renegotiating trade
deals with China, promoting Jacksonian nationalism rather than ecumenical
internationalism, suspending immigration from Middle East war zones (after
Trump dropped his call for complete Muslim exclusion), and disparaging an
Eastern-corridor elite that derives privilege from the intersection of big
politics, money, and the media.
No doubt, some of Trump’s flamboyant invective is
isolationist, nativist, and protectionist. Certainly, we are in the strangest
campaign of the last half-century, in which members of Trump’s own party are
among his fiercest critics. In contrast, the ABC/NBC/CBS Sunday-morning liberal
pundits feel no need to adopt NeverHillary advocacy. They apparently share
little “Not in my name” compunction over “owning” her two decades of serial
lying, her violations of basic ethical and legal protocols as secretary of
state, her investment in what can be fairly termed a vast Clinton pay-to-play
influence-peddling syndicate, and the general corruption of the Democratic
primary process.
Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often
forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what
even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes
without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions
have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without
much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification
was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities
could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA
jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is
accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border
enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and
racist.
The president of the United States, on matters from
immigration to his own health-care act, often has declined to enforce federal
laws — sometimes because it was felt that to do so would have been injurious to
his 2012 reelection bid. The reputations of agencies such as the IRS and the VA
no longer really exist; we concede that they are politicized, corrupt, or
hopelessly inept. An attorney general being found in contempt of Congress
raises no more of an eyebrow than that same chief law-enforcement officer
referring to African Americans as “my people” or writing off Americans in
general as a “nation of cowards.”
On cultural matters, I too was disappointed at the
plagiarism of lines in Melania Trump’s convention speech and thought her speechwriter
should at least have been summarily fired. But I am afraid that ethical high
horse also long ago left the barn. The new normal regarding intellectual theft
was apparently established by the likes of Stephen Ambrose, Joe Biden, Fareed
Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Maureen Dowd, all of whom suffered few, if
any, lasting professional consequences for their outright larcenies of others’
work.
Quite a while ago, too, we entered the age of postmodern
fabulism, in which representatives of the president of the United States
casually admitted, in response to criticism, that large segments of Obama’s
best-selling autobiography were simply “composites,” a sort of euphemism for
making stuff up. From Brian Williams’s pseudo-combat reporting to Hillary Clinton’s
dodging bullets in the Balkans, we are now what we say we are — without much
consequence any more for flat-out lying. Does any public commentator worry much
that Senator Elizabeth Warren’s entire trajectory to Harvard was predicated on
her abject and comical lie that she was a rare and sought-after Native American
law professor?
I am worried about Trump’s flamboyance and about his
sloppy and dangerous references to NATO and U.S. foreign commitments. But from
the reaction to his ad hoc and sometimes incoherent musings, one would think
that the next president was inheriting a time of peace and stability — not one
in which the entire Middle East has imploded, reset with Putin has become a
nightmare of Russian expansionism not seen since the Soviet period, “jayvee”
and “on-the-run” terrorists are insidiously destroying the calm of the entire
international order, and China is creating artificial islands with commensurate
“sovereign” air and sea space. If there is one region in the world that is
safer and more stable than it was in 2008, would someone please identify it?
Iraq? Syria? Ukraine? Libya? North Korea? France? Baton Rouge? For now I am
worried about what was and is rather than what might be. Are there any
traditional U.S. allies that feel more secure in their partnership with us?
Israel? Japan? France?
It is a fair wager that a supposedly isolationist
President Trump would be more likely to attend an anniversary of the fall of
the Berlin Wall or the liberation of Auschwitz than would a supposedly internationalist
President Obama — or for that matter a European unity rally after horrific
terrorist bombings. If Trump were to find time for GloZell for an interview, no
doubt we would hear that it was confirmation of his shallowness.
We have already seen the shoot-from-the-hip Trump back
down on his idiotic idea of denying all Muslims entry into the U.S. (as opposed
to those seeking to emigrate from war zones and terrorist-rife nations of the
Middle East). So far, we’ve seen no impulse on the part of Barack Obama or
Hillary Clinton to simply employ the terms jihadist, radical Islamist, or
Islamic terrorist the next time dozens of Americans are blown up or mowed down
by someone shouting Allahu akbar!
Is Trump’s threatened “isolationism” worse than the present
“lead from behind” or the empty step-over lines, deadlines, and red lines of
the last seven years? Or than refusing to increase security at Benghazi and
creating fables to hide the dereliction? I often hear the question: “Who knows
what Trump might do?” I hear it much more often, in fact, than I hear anyone
recall “We came, we saw, he [Qaddafi] died” or “What difference does it make?”
The point is not to excuse Trump with “you too” moral equivalence, or to
cynically race to the bottom of low-bar politics, but again to remind our
ethicists that we live in an age characterized by Petronius’s Satyricon, not the elder Cato’s moral
republic — and if they object to that fact, there were plenty of occasions to
voice their outrage long before Donald J. Trump left The Apprentice. Trump may well be Trimalchio, but neither Clinton
nor Obama is a Scipio (more likely a Catiline, Clodius, or Milo).
I would prefer Trump to be more socially conservative,
but compared with what? We have gone from Democratic opposition to gay marriage
in 2008 to a new normal in 2016 of slandering those who oppose the idea of
transgender restrooms in primary schools. There is a degree of racial
polarization not seen since the 1960s, one in which activists invited to the
Oval Office include people, like Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter leaders,
who either have advocated the shooting of police officers or have been
affiliated with marches that have chanted such threats.
I agree that Trump is capable of reckless talk and
symbolism, but heedlessness is also the new normal when the president of the
United States praises the album To Pimp a
Butterfly, whose cover features the corpse of an eye-less white judge, his
apparently violent demise celebrated by hipsters on the White House lawn.
When the IRS is sicced on political opponents, AP
journalists’ communications are tapped by the administration, and an obscure
videomaker is jailed on trumped-up parole violations to cement a lying
narrative about Benghazi, and all this is greeted by relative somnolence, then
the currency of outrage has been drastically cheapened.
The difference between a reckless Trump, Clinton, and
Obama is not necessarily one of temperament, sobriety, or judgment, but often
one of delivery and assumed establishmentarianism: For some reason Ivy League
accents, government résumés, and liberal fides are supposed to repackage
outrageousness as a mere slip, an aberration, rather than a window into a dark
soul. A much-reviled Trump eliminated his primary opponents through invective
and character assassination in open debate; a much-praised sober and judicious
Clinton eliminated Bernie Sanders, in part, according to WikiLeaks, through her
control of a biased and corrupt Democratic National Committee.
Put “corpse-man” or a cruel joke about the Special
Olympics into the mouth of Trump, and we easily would find additional proof of
his ignorance and callousness; from the silver tongue of Obama they are either
minor gaffes or perhaps proof of the stress he endures on our behalf. There
really is a Clinton mirror-image of Trump University; but whereas Trump went
through the crude motions of offering real-estate training, it is hard to know
how exactly Laureate Universities’ “chancellor” Bill Clinton became the highest
annually paid academic official in the history of higher education. And what
exactly bothered Bill about Laureate in 2015 to cause him suddenly to surrender
his chancellor duties that had not bothered him from 2011 to 2014?
Despite the selective moral outrage, the election is
about just two things. First, is Trump’s agenda more conservative than
Clinton’s, or, inversely, is Clinton’s more liberal than Trump’s? And, second,
is either Clinton or Trump so morally flawed, so incompetent, or so
inexperienced as to render their policies and platforms irrelevant to their own
followers?
Reasonable people can disagree and do, but I think most
Americans of all persuasions will conclude that Trump’s positions on the whole are far more conservative
than Clinton’s. Tally up Trump’s likely Supreme Court appointments and
potential Cabinet choices and collate them with Clinton’s, and there will
likely appear an ideological divide that represents traditional
conservative/liberal antitheses. Obama raised income taxes and slashed defense
spending, and we still will likely have a deficit of $600 billion this year;
Hillary’s answer to that paradox is to raise taxes higher. NeverTrump advocates
are rightly worried about Trump’s excesses, and for the next four months they
will seek to cement the case — even as Hillary’s scandals mount — that Trump’s
agenda is no more conservative in toto than Hillary’s, and/or that Trump’s
incompetence, corruption, and potential dereliction as president are perhaps
far beyond what we have seen in the actual government tenures of Clinton and
Obama.
While Trump is loud, reckless, and without political
experience (he would be the first president of the republic who had not served
in the military or held an elected or appointed federal office), both Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama have done quite a lot of damage by speaking softly,
acting deliberately, and drawing on plenty of political experience. I seriously
doubt that many Democrats will swear not to sully themselves by voting for a
prevaricator and incompetent, and, likewise, I expect by November most
Republicans will be ready to “hold their nose” and vote for Trump.
If a “transformative” and “historic” president with an
Ivy League law degree, an enthralled media, and “lower the seas and cool the
planet” confidence has left us with a world on fire, the veritable destruction
of immigration law, $10 trillion in new debt, a wrecked health-care system, a
hollowed-out military, racial conflagration, an ossified economy, and near
permanent zero interest rates — to the general approval of half the country —
then it is hard to get riled up that a more conservative Trump represents
something uniquely dangerous.
Like it or not, this election is about degree, relative
political agendas, and comparative hazard, not about marrying ideological
purity and consistency with sobriety and character — a sad fact that did not
enter our politics with Donald J. Trump.
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