By David French
Friday, July 07, 2017
Before I address the text of Donald Trump’s speech
yesterday in Poland, it’s worth pulling up two quotes from our two previous
presidents. These quotes, I think, encapsulate the difference between the ideas
Trump articulated yesterday and the core ideas of many of his liberal critics.
First, let’s go with Barack Obama, in a speech to the British Parliament on May
25, 2011:
For both of our nations, living up
to the ideals enshrined in [our] founding documents has always been a work in
progress. The path has never been perfect. But through the struggles of slaves
and immigrants, women and ethnic minorities, former colonies and persecuted religions,
we have learned better than most that the longing for freedom and human dignity
is not English or American or Western — it is universal, and it beats in every
heart.
Next, let’s step into the wayback machine to George W.
Bush’s first State of the Union address following the start of Operation Iraqi
Freedom:
We also hear doubts that democracy
is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it
is mistaken and condescending to assume that whole cultures and great religions
are incompatible with liberty and self-government.
I believe that God has planted in
every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is
crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.
These statements are remarkably similar, perfectly
encapsulate a universalist view of human nature and human freedom, and are
totally and completely wrong. Our previous presidents — and, indeed, much of
the intellectual establishment left and right — have sold the American people a
false bill of goods about human nature, their own history, and the role of
culture in the inculcation of our civilizational values.
Trump, by contrast, located the values that other
presidents have deemed universal squarely within a Western context, and he specifically
rejected a universalism and moral equivalence, declaring that “there is nothing
like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our
community of nations.” He continued with a series of key questions:
We have to remember that our
defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because
as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests
not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be
successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time
is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our
values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens
to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our
civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?
The response from thinkers on the left was swift and
outraged. Sarah Wildman at Vox
compared it to an “alt-right manifesto.” Slate’s
Jamelle Bouie was blunt. The speech was dog-whistle racism:
Imagine being a political writer in
this moment and being utterly unable to identify clear white nationalist
dogwhistles.
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) July 7,
2017
Peter Beinart wrote a widely read piece at The Atlantic accusing Trump of voicing
“racial and religious paranoia.” To Beinart, “the West is a racial and
religious term,” and he called back — as I just did — to the universalism of
presidents past:
Every president from George H.W.
Bush to Barack Obama emphasized the portability of America’s political and
economic principles. The whole point was that democracy and capitalism were not
uniquely “Western.” They were not the property of any particular religion or
race but the universal aspiration of humankind.
But declaring that previous presidents disagreed does not
make previous presidents right. They’ve been wrong. Dangerously wrong. And
Trump’s “sin” here isn’t racism but rather calling out the false god of
post–Cold War establishment utopianism. Ross Douthat is right. Trump’s speech
wasn’t white nationalism, it was a rejection of universalism:
But it’s not white nationalism.
It’s just … not. It’s a shift responsive to Bush and Obama-era dashings of
universal-civilization hopes.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) July
7, 2017
The ideas that define and govern our nation come from a
specific culture, and that culture comes from (and has defined) a specific
place. The Founders were heirs to a specific intellectual and religious tradition
— one that is both alien and superior to many competing cultures and faiths.
The fiction of the universalist Left and the universalist Right is the notion that the best human
values, including that alleged “longing for freedom,” are somehow transcendent
and universal. It’s one reason why so many otherwise- mart people fell head
over heels for the Arab Spring. They thought the “longing for freedom” was
emerging, as opposed to a will to power and a thirst for vengeance. Instead,
the Arab Spring brought forth the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, ISIS in Syria,
and a vicious war in Libya.
This universalism is a reason why both previous
presidents made serious mistakes abroad. As I’ve written before, President Bush
was idealistic about our alleged friends — believing they wanted liberty more
than they wanted to settle old scores — and failed to adequately plan and
prepare for the Iraq that would emerge after the American invasion. President
Obama was idealistic about our enemies, believing that if you addressed their
“legitimate grievances” against the U.S. and Israel, then the alleged universal
values would have a chance to prevail against the forces of hate.
Yes the experience of immigrants (and a select few allied
democracies across the globe) shows that men and women from every tongue,
tribe, and nation can embrace and build societies dedicated to constitutional
governance and that also protect individual liberty. At the same time,
millennia of human experience shows that entire societies and cultures have rejected
those values and actively work to suppress human freedom. How do we deal with
these twin realities?
The realistic response is that while the “longing for
freedom” is the product of particular ideas from a particular place, it is of
course not inherently limited to that place or the residents of that place. If,
however, you want that culture and those ideas to persevere and even to spread,
you have to protect those ideas and the place from whence they came. You
cannot, for example, import en masse people from other cultures and simply
assume that the fictional universal “longing for freedom” will take hold. You
cannot, for example, denigrate the source of these ideas — the “dead white
male” Founders, Judeo-Christian civilization more broadly — and assume that
these ideas will endure.
The best Western values, in other words, aren’t the
result of universal virtue bursting forth but rather a centuries-long and
uneven process of acculturation and education — one that’s often at odds with
human nature and specifically designed to suppress our worst impulses. In this
context, Judeo-Christian ideas have a specific value. The family as a core
building block of the culture has a specific value. Constitutional governance
has a specific value. They are not necessarily interchangeable with Islam, with
alternative family arrangements, or with statism. Thus, a call to protect
faith, family, and limited government is a call to protect the culture that has
birthed freedom at home and abroad.
No reasonable person pretends that the West is perfect or
that its history isn’t shot through with its own legacy of wars, racism,
genocide, and injustice. But its spiritual and intellectual architects did
ultimately build something of immense worth. Part of the proof is the clamor of
masses around the globe to live in the society they made. We’re heirs to a
grand tradition; should we not work diligently to preserve it? Should we not
recognize the threats from within and without? Should we not recognize the
truth that not all men share our values or ideals?
Universalism is a false ideology. It’s a burden and a
cancer on our body politic. It defies reality. Not all people have the same
desires, and not all faiths teach the same things. Some cultures are superior
to others. Trump yesterday reminded America and its allies that the culture
they’ve built, imperfect as it is, is both valuable and vulnerable. That’s not
racism. That’s just truth.
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