Over at Power
Line, Steven Hayward makes a striking, and funny, observation(boldface
mine):
I join
John in utter amazement (though not surprise) about the left’s freak
out over Donald Trump’s defense of the West in his terrific Warsaw speech. From
the reaction John and others have highlighted, you’d have thought Trump had
called Russia an “evil empire” or something. (Heh.) I hope Trump continues this
theme, and provides the left with more beclowning opportunities. If this keeps
up Trump is going to carry 45 states in 2020. Who could have
foreseen that Donald Trump would
become the rhetorical successor to Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard in 1978 or Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg in
2006?
That's right, the smug, sanctimonious left has gotten so unmoored
in its loathing for the West that it has ceded the title of defender of its
hated Western Civilization to ... are you ready? ... Donald Trump. That's
right, Donald Trump, real estate developer extraordinaire, man of gold-plated
fixtures and brassy towers with his name on them, celebrity tabloid culture
regular and reality TV star. Now - and there really is not arguing with it -
he's also the world's foremost defender of Western Civilization.
Trump has been the voice of moral leadership not just on whether
the West is worth defending, as he stated in Poland last week, but in taking
the leadership on forbidding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and in
standing up for the helpless British baby victim of socialism, tiny Charlie
Gard. Improbable as it sounds, such statements are the substance of moral
leadership no matter what one thinks of the vessel. The whole thing is
happening not because Trump is some particularly morally pure human messenger.
Solzhenitsyn with his multiple marriages and poetry
about raping German women made no pretenses to morality either even as
he spoke out morally with such powe. He was eventually just chosen, as the
biblical Jacob was chosen, flaws and all. So it seems is the role that Trump is
now in. Trump speaks out when something needs to be said. The pope won't do it.
Angela Merkel won't do it. Obama certainly won't do it. The cowardice on the
left is very clear on that front, none of those people are willing to say
anything that might make them unpopular within their social bubble. The Pope
sometimes moves in that direction cagily after an outcry, but this isn't
impressive. Trump will, however.
And that is not only the function of the office he holds, it's the
fact that he is willing to use its bully pulpit to say the right thing that
needs to be said. It's also a commentary on the widespread rot in the culture
spread by the left in that there are so few voices of diversity, the soggy
one-world-government attitude of the left is all over, taking Western
Civilization for granted, while its crazed component in the universities and in
the intelligentsia is still boiling with anti-Western lunacy. In that
atmosphere, how could there not be an opening to defend Western Civilization
for Trump? Who is smart enough to recognize it and run with it? Yes indeed, he
really is the defender of Western Civilization - even as he might be the last
guy we'd expect.
Could Tom Wolfe have imagined this one when he was writing about
the Studio 54 scene Trump was a part of around the same time he was writing
about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard speech, in Mauve
Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine? I don't think even Wolfe could
have foreseen that one. Oh for the talents of Tom Wolfe to do the honors on
this one.