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Trump’s View of the World

This is the most deceptive, vicious world. It is vicious; it’s full of lies, deceit, and deception. You make a deal with somebody and it’s like making a deal with—that table.

—PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

Trumpism versus Globalism

When you take the 30,000-foot view, you can see the larger context and the significant stakes in the contest between Trump and the globalists.

Globalism was Clinton’s core belief, and it remains that of the entire Democrat elite and the party of Davos: open borders, diminished sovereignty, multilateralism, multiculturalism, and everything defined as “worldwide” or “global” in scope. World government is the ultimate long-term end.

Nationalism is its polar opposite. For Trump, the nation-state is supreme and sovereign, borders matter, bilateralism is preferable, national and ethnic identities are rooted in tradition, cultures count, and the intermediating institutions of society—family, church, civic association, and place—come first. Issues are settled by sovereign nation-states, which are not going away any time soon. This is patriotic in Trump’s view of the world.

The battle lines are set as never before. One ideology is pitted against the other, one set of institutions against the other, one cultural outcome against the other. It is a war.

Truth is, globalization has been ebbing while economic and political populism has been surging. Globalists no longer provide the accepted set of rules for the political and economic order. Transnational, multilateral, and supranational organizations and their networks, experts, and regulators are everywhere on the defense. Cosmopolitan and globalist values are not ascendant as they were in the 1990s.

This is what made Trump’s candidacy viable. It is the defining mark of his presidency.

As a matter of fact, national sovereignty has soared back and is growing stronger week by week and month by month. We see it most clearly in President Trump’s principled realism that he calls “America first.” Like the nineteenth-century version of populism that rallied against the gold standard, today’s economic populism is antiestablishment, antielitist, and opposed to all forms of globalization and globalist governance. Economic history and economic theory both provide strong reasons to suggest that the advanced stages of globalization are proof statements for the populist backlash in both its right- and its left-wing variants and everywhere from Brexit and the Trump effect, to current European politics (Italy), to Brazil and throughout Latin America.

Whether along ethnocultural cleavages or along income-class lines, these forms of populism are a predictable and logical result. It should surprise no one, including globalists, that the pendulum has swung so far away from them.

There are two sides to populism: demand and supply.

Economic anxiety generates a base for populism but does not determine its particular political narrative; that story line is left to various populist politicians and movements, which are on the rise worldwide.

National greatness in one place does not diminish it in another place. There is no reason why all nations cannot articulate their individual greatness and in their self-interest (national interest) interact in the world in a peaceful and benign fashion.

It is the economics of trade and financial integration that provide the politically contentious backdrop to all globalization.

Trade theory, such as the well-known Stolper-Samuelson theorem, shows that there are sharp distributional implications in open trade. In other words, free trade is not a win-win for everybody.

Losers are inevitable. Those who lose are generally low-skilled and unskilled workers.

Trade liberalization raises the domestic price of exportables relative to importables. Go to any Walmart if you want to check out this phenomenon firsthand. Where is everything made? There is an inherent form of redistribution at work here: the flip side of the benefits of trade. The surplus from lowering wage costs and the tax bill is unevenly divided between corporate executives and badly paid foreign laborers who work in appalling conditions—in violation of International Labour Organization (ILO) and World Trade Organization (WTO) standards, it must be said. Globalists never met a rule they didn’t want a special exception for.

Overall, as globalization advances, trade agreements become more about redistributing and less about expanding the economic pie. The political fallout is clear: Globalization, the opposite of national interest, has become more and more contentious, if not unsustainable. The empirical evidence bears this out. From NAFTA, which has cost the United States some $3.5 trillion over the last decade, to the widening United States–China trade deficit, the American economy has enjoyed few overriding efficiency gains from globalization.

What we have instead are large trade imbalances, income stagnation among middle earners, and other nasty social side effects. Talk to any middle-class family or visit any town or factory in the affected areas and you can gain firsthand knowledge, up close and personal. The overall benefits of globalization are zero to negative. Trade was supposed to be based on reciprocity and growth, but that turned out to be a sham. The benefits of international trade as originally argued by Adam Smith and its subsequent canonization ignore important historical differences.

A displaced worker in our modern technological age (unlike a day laborer or farmer in the eighteenth century) already has a home mortgage, car payments, tuition costs for his or her children, and lots of other overhead. Merely switching careers or retraining is not so simple for many people. Truthfully, it is more than difficult, especially for middle-aged workers who have worked one job in one place.

The share of U.S. imports in gross domestic product (GDP) went from less than 7 percent in 1975 to more than 18 percent in recent years, but the imbalance hasn’t been corrected by what’s called trade adjustment assistance. Why? Because it is very costly and because politicians on all sides of the spectrum make a lot of promises they do not keep. All economists know that trade causes job and income losses for some groups. The same economists deride the notion of “fair trade” as a kind of fiction, but that’s clearly not the case, as we see with antidumping rules and countervailing duties.

These fixes are dubbed “trade remedies” for a reason. And don’t forget what might be called “social dumping,” in which one country literally dumps its unemployment potential elsewhere or subsidizes inefficient production forever, regardless of the cost.

What about operational mobility and the so-called benefits of financial globalization? The distinction between short-term “hot money” and financial crises and long-term capital flows such as foreign direct investment is significant. One is disruptive, and the other is enhancing. One is patient, and the other is imprudent. So why is it that the timing of financial globalization and the occurrence of banking crises coincide almost perfectly?

Recurrent boom-and-bust cycles are familiar to less developed countries but appear to have spread to the European Union and the United States. Financial globalization has, like trade, exerted a downward pressure on labor’s share of income.

Has anyone ever heard this line? “Accept lower wages or we will move abroad!”

A gentleman in Ohio was interviewed who ran a large battery-manufacturing unit and had recently moved, as the boss, to Mexico. He was asked about the thousands of workers in Ohio. “They are gone,” he said. “We hired far cheaper Mexican ones in Juarez at just a fraction of their hourly wage.”

Those with lower skills or qualifications are the least able to shift or move across borders and are most damaged by this sort of risk shifting. But soon, so too will accountants, architects, engineers, software developers, and every other type of white-collar worker.

It also has become harder to tax global mobile capital. That is the case because capital moves to the lowest-rate tax haven and uses transfer pricing to disguise profits. Taxes on labor and consumption are much easier to collect, and they have gone up and up.

Globalization, we were told, had a big upside. This is the bill of goods the public has been sold for decades. In fact, globalization has helped only the few: exporters, multinationals, and the large international banks as well as certain professionals and the very top management.

It is a question of foreign policy, not just economics. It surely helped some countries, such as China, which rapidly transformed peasant farmers into low-cost manufacturing workers, thereby reducing poverty. But all those jobs were at the cost of “old jobs” in America’s Rust Belt. In effect, globalization was a definite and planned wealth transfer from one place to another that has gone largely unreported.

Any national security professional will tell you the economy is a major part of the national arsenal. POTUS has shown the world how to weaponize our GDP for the national interest.

There is another side of the not-so-glossy globalization coin: increased domestic inequality and exacerbated social division. Both are threats to the stability of our country.

The benefits and monetary flows sold to the unknowing public turned out to be all one-sided and went exclusively to the very highly skilled, to employers, to cities, to cosmopolitans and elites—not to ordinary working people. The United States and Europe have been ravaged by financial crises and decades without a raise in pay or the standard of living for the masses and by the effects of austerity while the few got richer. Globalization gutted the existing social contract and ushered in a stigma of unfairness in what Trump calls “a rigged system.”

The playing field is hardly level. The winners took all, and Goldman Sachs bankers always seemed to come out on top whether they were selling distressed mortgage debt or shorting it (sometimes simultaneously). In the end, the political economy of globalization and globalist agency is, we have discovered, not politically sustainable.

Economic integration (in the European Union or globally) has definite and unacceptable real costs that people cannot and will not bear. This explains the rise of economic and political populism. Economic populism and its cousin political populism are an antidote to and a reality check on excessive globalization and globalist values and institutions. This represents the nation reasserting its interest and place at the table as a factor to take into account.

You spell that Trump: Geo Deus.

Looking back, 2016 was a watershed historic year. The Clinton globalists did not want to lose to the Trump nationalists. They did not want their world or their ambitions for globalism disrupted. They have been by one Donald J. Trump.

Who Is Trump’s Speechwriter?

A true patriot will defend his country from its government.

Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depositories of the ultimate powers of government.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need, is big enough to take everything you have. . . . The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

All these quotations come directly from the pen of our third president (1801–1809), an author of the Declaration of Independence and a Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson.

Does anyone, Democrat or Republican, question his patriotism?

Each quote sounds identical to things Donald Trump has said on crony capitalism, military security, guns, overregulation, government oversight, democracy, elites, bureaucracy, media misinformation, fake news, and limiting government in our lives during his presidency.

As patriotic an American as Jefferson, Trump speaks as the real populist American voice, not for the elite globalist views of his immediate predecessors. His views are embodiments of the sentiments of American citizens and a sovereign nation.

Listen to Thomas Jefferson even if you can’t stand Trump. Then realize that they are one and the same. Trump is a new voice but one that resounds with American history from its founding to Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.

Anti-Americanism: Why Europe Hates Trump

Let me take you back to the year 2012, when President Obama was running against the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, Governor Mitt Romney.

During the second debate, which focused on foreign policy, the sitting president delivered (twice) a line that would live in infamy: He mocked Romney’s aggressive stance on Russia, which the Republican candidate described as being America’s “greatest geopolitical foe.”

As it turned out (unlike the Russia-mad Dems today), the Democratic National Committee (DNC) knew that Romney would bash Moscow and had crafted a Twitter-ready retort. It read: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

Democrats all over America all laughed, and the rest of the world, especially in Europe, chuckled right along with them.

Why did they laugh? It wasn’t a particularly funny joke. The delivery wasn’t exceptionally well executed either. Were they laughing at Putin? Perhaps at a stiff Governor Romney? Or at America itself? Were they all disciples of Francis Fukuyama, laughing at Romney for thinking that history is still plugging along, that it had not in some Hegelian fashion ended?

Of course, it wouldn’t be long before Romney was proved absolutely right. As the Georgians already knew from their brief war in 2008, President Putin was indeed a geopolitical threat to the West. The Ukrainians have found out the hard way again and again. The Eastern and Central European parties, to their credit, weren’t as shortsighted as most of their Western European counterparts, which triumphantly celebrated America’s leftward lurch under President Obama.

The European Union in particular showed its true anti-American stance and embraced Obama with a zeal rarely seen in modern politics. They nearly anointed him. But why?

Yes, the Cold War had ended some decades earlier, but the Cold War wasn’t solely about Russia versus the United States. It was about capitalism versus communism.

Indeed, the Western, capitalist countries spent much of the Cold War fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The so-called mixed economies of postwar Europe and the United States hadn’t (and still haven’t, really) given way to consistently capitalist social organizational and market structures.

Europe in particular is permanently tilted toward socialism, and the left still holds sway over most of the Continent. There is energy on the European left.

America’s Reagan revolution and Britain’s Thatcherite ascendancy completely upended postwar politics in both of those countries. Not so for Europe. Britain, in which wartime rationing was largely still in place (a particularly wasteful kind of centrally planned command economics), was suffering intermittent power shortages—brownouts—like some sort of developing economy. London was often paralyzed by unionized labor going on strike and had received an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout for a balance of payments crisis in government finances. America was suffering from Jimmy Carter’s malaise—stagnant growth, price inflation, and an oil shortage—which was dealt with by (you guessed it) government rationing of gasoline.

Within the space of Margaret Thatcher’s three splendid terms (1979–1990), the United Kingdom again became an economic powerhouse and has remained so ever since. Post-Brexit “Global Britain” has plans to throw off the shackles of EU regulation and become the free trading global powerhouse it once was, if allowed.

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election would see Republican control of the White House for twelve years, free market policies, and a reformed Democratic Party that would have felt at home in Presidents Nixon’s and Ford’s White Houses, though Democrats would never say it.

The transformation of the domestic economy produced such a boom that the great question of the last 200 years had its answer: Capitalism produced such immense riches that minor forms of socialism became a small price to pay for the advancement of humanity. Democratic capitalism not only in America but also around the world raised living standards as never before, cured diseases, led to greater longevity, and allowed people to prosper.

Countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, that remained mired in pre-1980s social organization could never hope to give their people such standards of living.

This story is familiar to most people on the right of the political spectrum.

What often escapes notice, however, is that most other countries in the developed West did not experience similar revolutions in their politics. In 2018 France and Germany both largely fell into this category.

Indeed, whereas America and the United Kindgom experienced paradigm shifts to the economic right of the political spectrum, France experienced the exact opposite in 1968.

Whereas unionized labor was never again a major political force in America and Britain, French unions are still capable of paralyzing the country at will, and German unions remain some of the most powerful political entities in the world. France has a majority of its workforce employed by the government and has tax rates you wouldn’t believe. In truth, socialism is what’s wrong with today’s Europe and its EU project. It also underscores why Europe is anti-American to the core.

Present at the creation of all major European institutions were politicians who bore allegiance to political stripes that have since been proved to be subpar, inferior alternatives as social models and ideals. Conservatives and Christian Democrats have outperformed European liberal and socialist parties in Western European countries every time, especially the founding signatories of the Treaty of Rome.

France, a political universe unto itself, left an exceptionally deep mark on European superstructures as the most powerful and influential European country until it was supplanted by the unified (and more capitalist) Germany. France’s dirigiste centralized power structure is the lay of the land to this day in the European Commission. To make matters worse, the trend in America was, until Trump’s election, going in the same wrong direction.

Forty percent of the American public, it was found, preferred socialism to capitalism. A poll of millennials revealed that a third of them think George W. Bush killed more people than did Joseph Stalin. So much for facts and a solid civics education.

At the same time, the trend on the left has turned: Multiculturalism has become a more powerful force than labor solidarity. Whereas unions across the West opposed liberalizing immigration rules in the 1970s—migrants were seen as competition to unionized labor—the broader left has now decided that fully “open borders” is the only just state for immigration laws and illegal sanctuary cities are to be blessed, not cursed.

Tellingly, the unions never budged on their protectionist position, and many of their members, it appears, ended up backing Donald Trump for president in 2016. This, as is the case with many other positions of the Trump administration, has been horrendously misinterpreted.

The Trumpian insight is that globalization can be free market and fair only if devoid of government intervention everywhere, not just in America. Europe hates hearing that message.

Currency manipulation, insuperable nontariff barriers, and outright national preferences will always be facts of life in countries that still have communist parties in power. Europe insists on acting as if this position were unacceptable. Yet the European Commission has imposed steep antidumping tariffs on Chinese steel at various times.

Similarly, the media made it sound like a flip-flop when President Trump said he supports NATO, which is not entirely obsolete. Seemingly, they must have forgotten that the “NATO is obsolete” rhetoric was replaced with “they’re now dealing with terrorism because of my criticisms” months before the election.

Trump mentioned that during nearly every campaign rally after NATO began implementing an antiterrorism agenda, and it was one of his major talking points.

But Trump never gets the credit.

Nor does his insistence on Europeans sharing the burdensome cost of their own defense and security. Socialists like “free” things. The culprit here is not only shortsighted European politicians with anti-American sentiments; it is the press, which refuses to come out of its bearish inclination to bash and hate the U.S. president. The media lead the Trump resistance forces.

Must he continuously pay lip service to NATO after it significantly changed its position to reflect his views of current security priorities? After more countries are finally paying up?

The double standard is in plain view: Lest we forget, Obama’s State Department was literally recorded saying “F*ck the EU” and didn’t suffer the pile-on that the Trump administration has received from the press and so many European politicians. This is despite Europe’s agreement with his new actions, whether in Syria or on NATO or on economic policy (not climate change).

Press alarmism is still in a bear mode when it should be bullish, and the politicians (Democrats in the United States included) who are naturally inclined toward anti-Americanism are champing at the bit to keep criticizing this “failed” presidency.

The American press must realize that they are playing into the hands of a latent anti-American strain in the European Union and that the old rule that politics stops at the water’s edge should count for Republicans as well as Democrats.

Most important, we cannot normalize this behavior among European politicians. Loathing the American president is unacceptable. Looking down on Americans as fascist is ahistorical and without evidence or merit. It should never be accepted as the legitimate norm.

Right now, it seems it is acceptable to be anti-American in Europe as long as a Republican is in the White House. We hear it all the time in European capitals: “When can we get Obama back?”

This administration’s priority in Europe should from this day be twofold: Make better friends and let everyone know that alliances aren’t dependent on political parties. You’re either a friend of the United States and pay your fair share of the burden or you are anti-American no matter which party holds the presidency.

One other person understood this well.

Thatcher and Trump: Twins in Politics

Margaret Thatcher was a most divisive prime minister. She transformed British history and saved her country. She put the “Great” back into Great Britain.

Everywhere she went, she sowed division: in her party, in UK politics, and in world affairs. To this day, her legacy is bitterly debated. But she was unique as the first woman to be prime minister and as a true conservative.

She was extremely successful in carrying out her agenda. If she had not succeeded, her country would have gone from crippled to doomed.

Today we call it Thatcherism. Her ultimate successor (Tony Blair) had to redefine a (new) Labour Party to look more like Thatcher’s Tories to get elected. Divisiveness is the result of bringing into the open an underlying, festering, fundamental disagreement that few wish to acknowledge but that needs to be resolved.

Trump is the perfect analogue. He is divisive in his party, in U.S. politics, and especially in foreign affairs. But in the end, we will all be Trumpians.

He is unique as a nonpolitician and a total outsider. His ambition is to disrupt politics as we know it, and he is doing just that, and rather masterfully.

He seems, against all odds, to be succeeding in his “America first” agenda.

Hence, there will be policy and career winners and losers and therefore much resentment about his achievements. The underlying disagreement is between those who seek to preserve the United States as a specific historical entity, a democratic republic, and a constitutional nation-state and those who seek to redefine the nation as an elitist and globalist abstraction.

This tension already existed in both parties and was shown in the inability of the United States to deal with a host of domestic issues (terrorism, immigration, outsourcing, stagnation in the middle class) and in world affairs (with the European Union, on migrants, on radical Islam, etc.). It is predictable that Trump will be reelected in 2020 and the Democrats eventually will win a national election by redefining themselves, as the British Labour Party did after the reign of Margaret Thatcher ended.

Hollywood could eventually make a film about Trump in his declining years starring Alec Baldwin as Trump. It will be a favorable treatment this time.

But like Lady Margaret Thatcher, who eventually was elevated, Trump may never be fully loved by the powers that be. Yet without him, America would still be crippled, locked into no growth, and moving toward creeping socialism.

Thank God for Thatcher and her twin, Donald Trump.

Forget Left and Right: The New Fault Line for Trump Is Patriots versus Globalists

The European Union said there was nothing else available, and so this is the deal that is right for the United Kingdom in the Brexit withdrawal negotiations. That was the gist of Theresa May’s argument for the deal she negotiated. Does this sound like the leader of a proud and productive nation, the fifth biggest economy in the world, and the very founder of modern democracy? A country trusted to wield nuclear weapons and bearing a veto on world affairs?

Peddling the withdrawal agreement on a flight to the G20 meeting, she displayed the supplicant attitude that her government took throughout the protracted Brexit negotiations. Where was the bulldog spirit? Where was the “Great” in Great Britain?

Sadly, May’s stance is typical of political establishments across the Western world. Since World War II, most liberal politicians, including those in the United States, have been hoodwinking their citizens and herding them toward postnational globalism. The patriotism of common people is derided, if not excoriated.

We see this all the time in attacks on President Trump by the media, by Never Trumpers, by globalists, and by academics.

Mass immigration has dramatically changed the demography of the UK and other European countries as well as the United States, shifting the electoral balance in major cities. But the culprits for the demise of national identity in society are not the incomers but a middle class so ashamed of its country that any expression of national sentiment is perceived as far right, xenophobic, or racist. This pejorative use of the label “right” is a convenient means of vilifying opposition to the prevailing set of liberal opinions, now literally policed as “hate crime.”

Students are more likely to see themselves on the left of the political spectrum, but scratch below the surface and you will find that the fault line is not really socialism versus capitalism. They won’t get their smartphones or skinny lattes from nationalized industry. Unlike the radical campus activists of the late 1960s, today’s students are in fact very proestablishment.

David Goodhart perhaps best conceptualized the social divide, which in the United States is openly discussed as a culture war, in his book The Road to Somewhere.

On one side are Anywheres, the graduate class who populate the upper echelons of our political and cultural institutions and dominate professions such as teaching. Upwardly mobile, they have little sense of belonging to their hometown or country. These rootless citizens of the world contrast starkly with Somewheres, who value their families, community bonds, and nationhood and see the impact of globalization as a threat to their culture. You are more likely to find Somewheres in the pub and Anywheres in an expensive, trendy ethnic urban restaurant.

The Somewheres are more numerous; they are the ordinary people. Are they left or right? Ask them about public services and unscrupulous business practices and they will espouse state provision and regulation. But ask them about queen and country or the extremes of identity politics (such as transgenderism) and they will appear more conservative than progressive. Indeed, Somewheres are a mixture of working-class Labour voters and “Middle England” Tories.

Brexit has exposed the redundancy of the old left-versus-right dichotomy, as has Trump.

The same transcending of the spectrum is happening across Europe, as illustrated by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and by the marriage of the Five Star and Lega political groups in Italy (previously positioned as left and right, respectively).

Steve Bannon’s “The Movement” is building links between such parties, following the success of Donald Trump in luring blue-collar workers from their habitual attachment to the Democratic Party.

The established social democratic and center-right parties are in serious decline throughout Europe. Belatedly, the people have realized that their representatives take votes for granted while pursuing policies that are gradually destroying Western civilization: using identity politics to divide and rule; practicing moral relativism to subvert the Enlightenment triad of democracy, freedom of speech, and equality before the law; creating by stealth an Orwellian surveillance system; making unholy alliances with global corporations; and sending hard-earned taxpayers’ money to dastardly regimes.

The terms “left” and “right” originally appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left.

That is all very outdated. As the gilets jaunes riots in France indicate, the New World Order is stoking the ire of the masses. “Extremists” are setting fire to cars and pelting the police with road furniture. The Guardian suggests that they are right-wing; the Telegraph suspects leftists. The protesters don’t care how they are labeled. They have lost faith in politicians and their media lackeys.

Each country will have its own flavor of antiestablishment agitation, but the phenomenon is basically the same. A people’s revolt is brewing, and right against left is not the frame.

Patriots versus globalists is a more apt description of the new ideological divide, which will shape the politics, economics, and culture of the next decades.

Trump has redefined the ideological spectrum and realigned U.S. and now global politics.

What’s at Stake?

America has created institutions of government, economy, and law that provide unprecedented freedom for its people and a body of natural scientific knowledge and technological achievement that makes possible a level of health and material prosperity undreamed of in earlier times and unknown outside the West and the areas it has influenced.

Do we fully appreciate this?

This is what is at stake right now. Elections matter! Forces on the left seek to destroy the very roots of our culture and the foundation of the rule of law and market economies. We should not let them.

The late novelist V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad of Indian parents, is right to speak of the modern world as “our universal civilization” shaped chiefly by the West and its exemplar, America.

Most people around the world who know of them want to benefit from the achievements of our science, medicine, and technology. Increasingly, they also want to participate in our political freedom and enjoy our economic prosperity.

The evidence suggests, moreover, that a society cannot achieve the full benefits of this technology or freedom without a commitment to reason and objectivity as essential to knowledge and to the political freedom that sustains it and helps it move forward.

The primacy of reason and the pursuit of objectivity, therefore, both characteristic of the American experience, seem to be essential for the achievement of the desired political and economic goals anywhere in the world but best exemplified in American exceptionalism.

The civilization of the West as embodied by America, however, was not the result of some inevitable process through which other cultures will automatically pass. It emerged from a unique history in which chance and providence often played a vital part.

The institutions and ideas that provide for our freedom and improvement in the material conditions of life cannot take root and flourish without an understanding of how they came about (our founding) and what challenges they have had to surmount. Non-Western people who wish to share in the things that characterize modernity need to study the ideas and history of Western civilization to achieve what they want, and Westerners, particularly Americans, who wish to preserve them must do the same thing.

The many civilizations developed by the human race shared basic characteristics. Most tended toward cultural uniformity and stability. Reason, though employed for all sorts of practical purposes in some cultures, lacked independence from religion and the high social status to challenge the most basic received ideas. The standard form of government was monarchy; outside the West, republics were unknown. Rulers were thought to be divine or the appointed spokesmen for divinity, and religious and political institutions and beliefs were thoroughly intertwined in a mutually supportive unified structure. Government was not subject to secular, reasoned analysis; it rested on religious authority and power, and the concept of individual freedom had little or no importance.

The first and sharpest break with this common human experience came in ancient Greece. The Greek city-states were republics, not democracies. Differences in wealth among their citizens were relatively small. There were no kings with the wealth to hire mercenary soldiers, and so the citizens did their own fighting.

As independent defenders of the common safety and interest, they demanded a role in the most important political decisions. In this way, for the first time, political life came to be shared by a large proportion of the people, and participation in political life was highly valued.

Such states needed no bureaucracy, for there were no vast royal or state holdings that needed management and not much economic surplus to support a bureaucratic-political class.

There was no separate caste of priests and little concern with existence after death. In this varied, dynamic, secular, and remarkably free context there arose for the first time a speculative natural philosophy that was based on observation and reason, the root of modern natural science and of philosophy, free to investigate or ignore other authority.

What most sets the Greeks apart is their view of the world. Where other peoples have seen sameness and continuity, the Greeks and the heirs of their way of thinking (us) have tended to notice disjunctions and to make distinctions.

The Greek way of looking at things requires a change from the use of blind faith, poetry, and intuition to a reliance on reason. It permits a continuing rational inquiry into the nature of reality. Unlike mystical insights, scientific theories cannot be arrived at by meditation alone but require accurate observations of the world and reasoning of a kind that other human beings can criticize, analyze, modify, and correct.

That was the beginning of the liberation and enthronement of reason, to whose searching examination the Greeks thereafter exposed everything they perceived: natural, human, and divine.

From the time they formed their republics until they were conquered by alien empires, the Greeks also rejected monarchy of any kind. They thought that a human being functioning in his full capacity must live as a free person in an autonomous polis ruled by laws that were the product of the political community, not of an arbitrary fiat from a man or god.

These are ideas about law and justice that have not flourished outside the Western tradition. The Greeks, however, combined a unique sense of humankind’s high place in the natural order and the possibilities it provided with a painful understanding of its limitations. Those views were merged with Christianity in the centuries that followed.

This is the tragic vision of the human condition that characterized classical civilization. To cope with it, they urged human beings to restrain their overarching ambitions. Inscribed at Apollo’s temple at Delphi were the slogans “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess,” meaning “Know your own limitations as a fallible mortal and exercise moderation.”

Beyond these exhortations, they relied on a good but limited political regime to enable human beings to fulfill the capacities that were part of their nature, to train them in virtue and restrain them from vice. Aristotle made the point neatly:

As man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst when separated from law and justice. For injustice is most dangerous when it is armed, and man, armed by nature with good sense and virtue, may use them for entirely opposite ends. Therefore, when he is without virtue man is the most unscrupulous and savage of the animals.

The justice needed to control this dark side of human nature can be found only in a well-ordered society of free people who govern themselves.

This brings us to the urgent need today: commonsense principles that are critical to limited government, support for a free market, and the building of great enterprising companies in a prosperous and growing economy.

All this is at stake as America, indeed most of the West, bends to the siren song of creeping socialism and cultural Marxism and closes off its cherished patrimony: the Greco-Roman–Judeo-Christian inheritance.

We cannot let this pass. We need to defend our heritage, uphold it. This is the role of conservatism: tradition, custom, and faith—the very things the left despises.

Their hatred for America is clear to see. Do not let them steal power. The consequences loom large.

Indeed, much is at stake, and Trump realizes this.

Déjà Vu All Over Again!

Yes, the present is starting to look a lot like the recent past. Yogi Berra was right.

In 2018, the Republicans did not hold their majority and keep control of the House, but the loss was less than many expected. All the pollsters and TV talking heads said this was impossible. They said that Trump would be put in his place. They said Beto and Antifa and all those loonies would come to power.

How could they get it so wrong? Again.

When you control the media, you control the news. And when you control the news—the flow of history, both past and present—you have the power to control the way the world thinks.

The American ideal is, after all, equality. Like sheep being led to the slaughterhouse, too naive to see the knife hidden behind the shepherd’s back, there is great danger in this race toward conformity in thinking. It seems as though equality is the gravest threat to our civil liberties and free will.

Americans aren’t buying it. The media get it all wrong.

Behind America’s mainstream media is a fluid collective of top intelligence agencies—including the CIA, FBI, and NSA—which we’ve come to know as the deep state.

These agencies work in tandem to promote an agenda that they disguise as democracy and equality. The public thinks they were part of this decision, as though they exercised their own free will and judgment, when really, they’ve been told not just what to think but how to think through calculated manipulation. In this new prescriptive age of democracy, determinism is disguised as free will.

In today’s world of rapidly advancing technology and instant-gratification news—where by the time the newspaper hits your front porch, it’s old news—an unverified bit of information can be established as truth and then plastered across social media platforms. Just like that, the opinions and agendas of the few become the ethos for the masses.

The most glaring example of manipulation in recent history was the 2016 election, in which the deep state crafted a myth, a one-size-fits-all narrative for immediate American consumption.

Yet the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Left behind was a trail of crumbs riddled with inconsistencies. Using advanced technologies, dissident intelligence practitioners from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) were able to sift through the troves of electronic data, accessing e-mails and text messages, and reveal a deeply buried truth: It wasn’t the Russians who attempted to hack the election; it was done from within (look it up).

As we know now, the deep state, working covertly and closely with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton, orchestrated a plot to subvert the 2016 presidential run of Donald Trump.

Yet the unthinkable happened: Clinton lost. After Trump’s victory, these intelligence agencies and Clinton herself (and much of America) were shocked. In a volatile mix of embarrassment and revenge, they continued to perpetuate the myth of collusion to delegitimize Trump’s presidency, slander his name, and weaken his reputation.

A majority of Americans—the ones sucking at the teat of the mainstream media, the carnal consumers of CNN—wanted answers: How could this happen? Clinton and the deep state concocted a prescription to remedy their devastating loss, a fabricated panacea for all those wounded Americans. Clinton herself wrote a 512-page book to address the simple question “What happened?”

Instead of playing by the rules, she tried to buy votes and rig the election, calling in favors from her deep state cohorts, and she was still bested by Trump.

That’s what happened. End of story. But no one wants to read that book. Instead, what they got was a never-ending story of all the ways in which the world conspired against her, most notably those pesky Russians. But it’s pulp fiction, as phony as the dossier at the center of this ornate lie that begins with Christopher Steele, the master fabricator himself.

Using the mainstream media as its voice, the deep state is waging a slow relentless war on reality. Democrats, like sheep too distracted to notice the knife in the deep state’s hand, were force-fed a narrative that confirmed what they wanted to hear.

Every headline, Tweet, and blog post acted as another turn of the screw, tightening their foregone conclusion: The Russians did it.

What the mainstream media wants us so desperately to believe is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump because of the Russians. That a select group of Internet hackers were able to influence the results so heavily in Trump’s favor that we need to exact revenge through endless circular investigations that drain the taxpayer’s wallet and undoubtedly will lead nowhere, since after all, there was no collusion between Trump and Russia, as the Mueller report admitted.

Yet the media and the deep state didn’t stop there: They want us to believe that Trump and his campaign have had long connections to the Kremlin and that Vladimir Putin, channeling Nostradamus, had the overarching foresight to plant a seed back in 2013 and set up Trump as a Manchurian candidate, so to speak, and sowed that seed and relationship to undermine America, using Trump like a puppet, his very own Moscow stooge.

Their aim is clear: Control humanity by convincing the world that what they say is true. Democracies do not have permanent ruling classes, but Clinton and the deep state don’t want to relinquish their hold on the most powerful country in the world. With the wool pulled over our eyes, we could rapidly descend into the most oppressive tyranny ever seen.

Through oppression rises revolt. As in any successful revolution, we must band together, arming ourselves with voices that oppose the sheeplike mentality, in search of the truth.

Alone, our voices are lost like echoes down a water well. But together, our voice will be louder than the sum of its parts, breaking through these political echo chambers. In time, we will have the power to forge a new path forward, exposing the truth about the deep state’s manipulation.

In doing so, we must look beyond the prescribed notions so deeply ingrained in the water supply, such as who is our natural sworn enemy. Yet these are the notions we need to challenge most. These are the ones that deserve the most critical thinking. Oddly, these are the ones the majority of America think require no further examination because we accept them as truths when they are in fact fabrications and manipulations by the deep state.

The recent elections rebuked the deep state and the Democrats (now increasingly socialists) and reenergized our commander in chief: Geo Deus.

They wanted a referendum on Trump. They got it. In 2020 we have another chance to prove it. The world awaits the outcome.

The Collapse of Free Societies

Starting in the 1960s, intellectuals, including most journalists, began accepting the view that all perception is interpretation and that everything is a matter of interpretation (postmodernism, deconstruction).

It was pointless or obtuse to ask if that view was true. There is no way to avoid some framework. We were told that there is always bias, that even the idea of being balanced reflects an interpretive bias.

In itself, this is a profound but relatively harmless insight. All it requires is that we be aware of our presuppositions. We can challenge our framework, amend our framework, even surrender our framework, but what we cannot do is pretend that we do not have a framework.

We can envisage a society in which there is a plurality of substantive frameworks but in which each and every one of those extant frameworks has within it the resources to agree to the procedural norm of being tolerant of other frameworks.

This shared procedural norm is reflected in the way religious toleration was possible (articulated by John Milton and John Locke and later by John Stuart Mill).

That is the society we thought we had in the Anglo-American world (civil association). There was a host of other supplementary procedural norms for conversing in such a society.

All this changed with the cultural triumph of scientism. In the scientistic framework, there is only one correct or objective framework. There is also, therefore, a scientific explanation for other prescientific frameworks and why people cling to them.

At first glance, this might not appear threatening. Once we all agree on the scientific facts, there will be intellectual and social harmony. It is the responsibility of universities to discover and teach those facts and the responsibility of journalists to bring them to the attention of the larger public.

Unfortunately, it did not work out that way. Some of the professors and even some of the journalists (otherwise bright and articulate) did not go along. Clearly, some people resisted “education.”

Social scientists then explained why even some intellectuals and journalists could not be educated: They had a deformed previous framework (racist, homophobic, etc.). Education and debate did not work with those recalcitrant individuals. They were not only wrong, they were spreading mischief, specifically the wrong public policy positions.

Changing a framework was akin to a religious experience or revelation. Debating with them is counterproductive because it gives the false impression that there might be something legitimate about their thinking.

Education had to be indoctrination; anyone who disagreed had to be silenced for the public good. Imagine the self-righteousness needed to believe this.

What should such university-trained journalists do? First, they should all speak with one voice (the one they heard from the professors). Second, it is their duty to warn the public that advocates of certain policies are both wrong and dangerous. They could not do this by debating and refuting the arguments. Refutation works only when we share the same framework, and debate gives the appearance of legitimacy to the wholly misguided.

What happens when the deplorable part of the public (the part that does not take the New Yorker magazine as gospel) elects people who advocate the wrong policies? What if they are named Trump?

Again, there cannot be debate or refutation. First, they attack the policies by showing the underlying motives of those who advocate those policies (French intellectuals and journalists think reading Marx and Freud is good practice for this). They do not debate the merits or reasons; rather, they identify and attack the motives.

What if even this does not work? Then one must fabricate a Platonic-type myth about why the deplorably elected advocates are part of a vast conspiracy. The public lives in the “cave.” It is the responsibility of the elite to fabricate a myth for the supposed public good.

All this, believe it or not, is based intellectually on the framework of scientism. It showed up first in sociological positivism, then in legal positivism, then in legislative positivism, and finally in educational positivism.

What we are witnessing today, particularly in the current Paris disorders, is the collapse of free societies. Free societies depend on a long cultural and intellectual history but are subject to both external and internal threats. In the United Kingdom and in France (and to some degree in the United States) what we are witnessing is (1) the loss of institutional memory, (2) the substitution of theory and technocracy for knowledge of historical practice, and (3) the indifference and blindness of financial/political/cultural elites to economic malfunction.

This all can be traced back to the prevailing educational predicament outlined above, which now infests teaching, journalism, the professions, and the culture.

Free societies need to exercise a judicious policy toward the great disparities of wealth and the question of truth. If they do not, they eventually will fail.

The New Dark Age of European Progressivism

I readily admit to being a Europhile. My family roots in Scotland and Holland and my education, faith, and upbringing, though quintessentially American, are deeply rooted in the European experience. My faith was founded in the Protestant Reformation that shook Europe 500 years ago.

I spent my formative summers teaching and touring throughout Europe while I was in graduate school and as a young professor. I still recall with enthusiasm my first trip to Europe in 1972 at age nineteen.

I studied and took degrees and have lectured at European universities. I was a Deutsches Austauschdienst at Kiel University and was made an honorary member of the Christian Democratic Party of the Netherlands in 1979. More recently I was a visiting professor at Tübingen University in Germany. I was president of one of the four ancient Scottish university trusts in the United States. I wrote a doctoral dissertation largely about European ideas in politics, philosophy, and economics.

I spent four years in Geneva, Switzerland, in an ambassadorial post in the United Nations from the late 1980s until 1992, when European history shifted and the Cold War ended. I had a front row seat as a deputy executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe.

I was an executive board member of the World Economic Forum, which started as the European Management Forum.

I was present at the Berlin Wall just days after it came down. My friends in Eastern Europe, the radical economists, all became leading figures—ministers, central bankers, and prime ministers—in their respective countries after the fall of the Soviet Union.

I was an adviser to the Polish government during its shock therapy and privatization. I speak several European languages; regularly read European books, magazines, and newspapers; and have been a firm supporter of the so-called Atlantic alliance my entire life.

More recently I have lived in the United Kingdom and taught at Oxford University and visited and spoken on the Continent regularly. To steal a line from President Kennedy, Ich bin ein Europaisch.

Thus, it is with a deep sense of disappointment and true sadness that I have to say what I am about to say: Europe is dying.

A new Dark Age is coming. Europe’s churches are empty. A recent mass in one of the largest cathedrals was virtually unattended. The cathedral was not just sparsely filled; it was, except for a handful of tourists, vacant. Mass was being conducted in a side chapel large enough for the couple of dozen worshippers, all older women, who showed up for it.

Europe is adrift without a soul and is moving rapidly away from its moorings. Most of Europe’s churches are unused these days, reduced to monuments for tourists and artists to admire.

There is a reason for this neglect.

In his brilliant book The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel describes a progressive European culture that has become not only increasingly secular but in many cases downright hostile to Christianity.

The cathedral in his title is Notre Dame, now overshadowed in cultural importance by the Arche de la Defense, the ultramodernist “cube” that dominates an office complex outside Paris. “European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular,” Weigel writes. “That conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe’s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale.”

You will remind me that throngs of believers descended on Rome to bid farewell to Pope John Paul II. Yet even as Catholics mourned that pope’s passing, socialists and greens in France decried the French government’s decision to fly the flag at half-mast in his honor. Officials were reduced to claiming in response that the honor was afforded to John Paul in his capacity as a head of state, not as a religious leader.

The incident that forms the centerpiece of my critique is the debate over whether Christianity should be explicitly acknowledged in the European Union’s constitutional treaty. By the time the constitution was completed, a grudging reference to “the cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance of Europe” had been shoehorned into the preamble’s first clause. That’s all. This was about as much religion as Europe could stomach in a constitution of some 70,000 words.

Practicing Christianity in Europe today enjoys a status not dissimilar to that of smoking marijuana or engaging in unorthodox sexual activities: Few people mind if you do it in private, but you are expected not to talk about it much or ask others whether they do it too.

Christianity is considered at best retrograde and atavistic in a self-described “progressive” society devoted to obtaining lifelong holidays, short work hours, and generous government benefits.

What is the deeper source of European antipathy to religion? For Weigel, the problem goes all the way back to the fourteenth century, when scholastics such as William of Ockham argued for “nominalism.” According to their philosophy, universals—concepts such as “justice” and “freedom” and qualities such as “good”—do not exist in the abstract but are merely words that denote instances of what they describe. A current of thought was set into motion, Weigel among others believes that that pulled Europeans away from transcendent truths.

One casualty was any fixed idea of human nature. If there is no such thing as human nature, there are no universal moral principles that can be read from human nature. If there is no universal moral truth, a religion positing them is merely a form of oppression or myth, one from which Europe’s elites see themselves as liberated.

These people look down on their American and third world cousins who continue to believe in such irrational flights of fancy.

As Richard Weaver said a half century ago in Ideas Have Consequences, “The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a course of truth higher than, and independent of, man, and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind.”

I think the critics are on firm ground when they analyze the current condition of Europe, with its low birthrates, heavy government debts, worries about Muslim immigration, and tendency to carp from the sidelines when the fate of nations is at stake.

This is European progressivism, and it is coming to America.

In what is certainly the most attention-grabbing passage in an engagingly written book, Weigel sketches the worst-case scenario—the “bitter end”—for a Europe that is religiously bereft, demographically moribund, and morally without a compass: “The muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St. Peter’s in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine—a great Christian church become an Islamic museum.”

One need not find this scenario altogether plausible to feel persuaded by measured arguments about Europe’s atheistic progressive humanism and European Union–generated globalism, a cosmopolitanism severed from Europe’s past.

Without a religious dimension, a commitment to human freedom is likely to be attenuated, too weak for people to make sacrifices in its name.

Europe’s political elites especially, but its citizens as well, believe in freedom and democracy, of course, but they are reluctant to put the “good life” on hold and put their lives on the line when freedom is in need of a champion in the Balkans, Darfur, or the Middle East.

The good of human freedom, by European lights, must be weighed against the risk and cost of actually fighting for it. It is no longer transcendent, absolute. In such a world, governed by a narrow utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is rare, churches go unattended, and over time the spiritual capital that brought forth all that we know as the West is at risk of being lost.

Here are five things that might turn the tables and perhaps even begin to revive Europe:

1. Coming to grips with its unique place in world history and acknowledging the importance and source of those original ideals.

2. Realizing that culture matters and that Europe’s culture has been the most formative for Western Christian civilization, or what used to be termed Christendom.

3. Accepting the social, political, economic, and especially military responsibility of a great continent, now more and more united.

4. Realizing the evident demographic realities and Islamization and stepping up to reverse them to avoid an eventual Eurabia.

5. Most critically, sparking the second great Reformation such that there is a wider recognition of transcendence and a moving of the spirit of God across the whole Continent from the westernmost shores of Portugal, Ireland, and Britain to the easternmost steppes of Russia.

I pray every day for such transformation and reawakening.

Weigel suggests that Europe is a society adrift, untied from the source of its greatness. The very cultural foundation that provided the values that made Europe great is disintegrating, leaving Europe (and soon the entire West, including America) on sinking sand.

More specifically, as the past is erased, rewritten, or ignored, the rich Judeo-Christian history of Europe is being left behind. At what cost? Why is European productivity dwindling to an all-time low? Why is European politics rife with senselessness? Why does Sweden have a increasingly higher level of its population living below the poverty line? Why is Europe undergoing what Niall Ferguson has called the “greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the fourteenth century”? Why are “open borders” changing the very definition of Europe?

Could the recent woes of Europe be tied to the ever-decreasing Christian minority on this now decidedly post-Christian “progressive” continent?

I am reminded of Orwell’s quote, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” We should restate the obvious: “Culture determines civilization.”

Without its distinctly Christian history, Europe would not be what it is. Or perhaps Europe would not have been what it was. However, from the perspective of our American pilgrim tradition there is more to lament than the secondary effects of a decline in European productivity, living standards, and art.

That is, merely reviving spirituality as an end in itself is not what Europe needs.

It demands rather a call back to its first love, to the God who blesses and rewards those who diligently seek and serve Him. Trump knows and embodies this.