As the patriotic pageantry of Inauguration
Day gave way to the demonstrations of defiance Saturday, our new America came
into view. We are two nations now, two peoples.
Though bracing, President Trump’s inaugural
address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism
of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of the president being
sworn in.
Trump’s inaugural was Jacksonian.
He was speaking to and for the forgotten
Americans whose hopes he embodies, pledging to be their champion against those
who abandon them in pursuit of higher, grander, nobler causes.
Declared Trump:
“For too long, a small group in our
nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have
borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its
wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed.”
Is this not true? American wages have
stagnated as scores of thousands of factories were shut down or shipped abroad.
Five of the six wealthiest counties in the U.S. today, measured by median
household income, are the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Inaugurals should lift us up, wailed the
media, this was “dark.”
And Trump did paint a grim picture — of
“mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out
factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an
education system flush with cash but which leaves our … students deprived of
all knowledge, and the crime and the gangs and the drugs…”
But is this not also a reality of America
2017?
Indeed, it carries echoes of FDR’s second
inaugural: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. …
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those
who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Some of the recoil to Trump’s speech is
surely traceable to an awareness by those covering and commenting on it — that
this was a searing indictment of them and their own ruling class.
With America’s political elite sitting
behind him, Trump accused them of enriching “foreign industry,” not ours, of
subsidizing other countries’ armies but neglecting our own, of defending other
nation’s borders while leaving America’s borders unprotected.
Then, in the line that will give his
address its name in history, he declared: “From this day forward it’s going to
be only America First.”
Prediction: Trump’s “America First”
inaugural will be recalled as the most controversial, but will be among the
most remembered.
What did Trump mean by “America First”?
“Every decision on trade, on taxes, on
immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and
American families.”
What does it mean for the world?
“We will seek friendship and goodwill with
the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the
right of other nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to
impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example. We
will shine for everyone to follow.”
Denounced as isolationism, this is in an
old and great tradition.
Ronald Reagan talked about America being a
“shining city on a hill” for other nations to emulate.
John Quincy Adams declared:
“Wherever the standard of freedom and
independence has been or shall be unfurled there will America’s hearts, her
benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters
to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She
is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
When the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth
came to America seeking aid for the revolution of 1848, Henry Clay told him:
“Far better is it for ourselves, for
Hungary, and for the cause of liberty, that … avoiding the distant wars of
Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on the western shore, as a
light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction among the ruins of
fallen or falling republics in Europe.”
The
charge of “isolationist” was thrown in the face of Clay. But he prevailed, and
America stayed out of Europe’s wars until 1917 when Woodrow Wilson, fatefully,
plunged us in.
In 1936, FDR said, “We shun political
commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars. … We are not isolationists
except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. … I hate
war.”
What Trump was saying in his inaugural is
that we will offer our free and independent republic as an example to other
nations, but it is not our providential mission to reshape the world in our own
image.
“We will reinforce old alliances” that are
in our interests, Trump declared. But we are approaching the end of an era
where we fought other nations’ wars and paid other nations’ bills.
We will no longer bleed and bankrupt our
country for the benefit of others. Henceforth, America will be of, by, and for
Americans.
Is that not what the nation voted for?
Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American
Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.
His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
See his website.
