What
is Donald Trump doing in his campaign? What is he doing that has melted the
brains of the conservative commentariat (which will never recover from its
cluelessness about the times in which we are living)?
Donald Trump is a practical man of
action. We haven’t seen one of those in high office for a very long time.
Trump is not Reagan. Reagan was from a much more cerebral tradition. He had
actually read Hayek and Friedman and had given talks based on them which he had
written himself. Writers know how impressive this is. Writing requires a depth
of understanding of your subject; the ability to concentrate for a long period
of time; and withstanding the loneliness of doing so.
A man of action reacts to external
impulses, to external conditions and makes decisions quickly. If they are not
perfect, he refines them as he works the problem.
Where is America? We are trapped within the
liberal worldview. We are at the completion of Gramsci’s leftist “march through
the institutions.” It took two generations and it has happened.
We
see it in the universities falling apart because they are now run by liberals
who have no philosophy to deal with the real world except to give things away.
Liberalism rules the courts. Cases are decided on how the people judging feel,
not on the basis of law. Justice Sotomayor advanced one of her credentials for
the Supreme Court that she was a “wise latina” which should have had nothing to
do with being a judge, much less a justice.
The
ascendancy of liberalism in America is the cause of the silence of Republicans
in Congress since they won the House in 2010. One would think that a solid
majority in the electoral body closest to the people would provide a platform
for advancing the Republican case. But no.
A lot of people think this is because the
Republicans have been bought off by the contributariat. If so, that is only one
tile in the mosaic. The larger picture is due to being unwilling to challenge
the liberal world view. Conservatism is at all points hostile to liberalism,
but liberalism controls the debate in the public space. The Democrats have been
skillful at making non-liberal ideas not just wrong, but evil. Republicans have
had neither the skill nor the intestinal fortitude – the courage – to operate
outside the culturally dominant liberal paradigm.
This
is why their voice is so weak. This is why their compromises amount to giving
the Democrats what they want. They have preemptively surrendered in the public
space because as it was amusingly put time back “In their hearts they know
they’re wrong” – wrong in liberalland, which is the institutional culture of
America.
Comes
Donald Trump. He has walked into the cultural mess liberalism has created. He
sees its disastrous outcomes all around him. Whatever his liberal impulses were
in the past, and they are impossible to separate from the baksheesh the
Democrats demanded, they were motivated by generosity of spirit. Not having
much time, or interest, to devote to these issues, he accepted the liberal
argle bargle and went along.
Now he
sees what liberals have wrought. He sees they won’t defend the country. He sees
that problems he has seen in business, such as our foolish trade practices, are
not interim things, but the outcome of policy which is intended to last
indefinitely. Trump thinks it is a bad idea to strip-mine the country of high
wage jobs. Nobody else sees a problem and it is certainly not on the
conservative agenda even though it is upending our society.
Trump is not attacking liberalism, as
the conservative commentariat wishes him to do; he is attacking the results of
liberalism. To do that, you have to do things in the real world – build walls,
deport illegals, negotiate trade deals – all things that liberals have no intention
of getting their hands dirty with.
This is why Trump seems so uncouth. He
actually wants to do things rather than write about doing things. The
difference between those two temperaments is immense – it is the difference,
for instance, between Trump and Cruz. Cruz has accomplished something when he
walks out of a courtroom; Trump has accomplished something when he has built a
wall.
To build a wall you have to deal with
labor, with suppliers who might want to trim on you, with politicians who
expect their needs to be dealt with. Crude. Inelegant. Unnuanced: either the
wall is there or it is not.
If it is going to be there, then that project
has a beginning, a middle and an end. And it involves a lot of men moving a lot
of material, and all those men must be provided for. This is not what has made
suburban Washington the richest district in the country. Washington and the
commentariat are appalled by the personality traits that deal with such
crudeness.
But the public isn’t. This is how it lives.
It has not had the chance to say so until now.
