The 39th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Lost in the adulation of departed Intel chief Andy Grove—but noticed by the non-Trumpists at the New York Times—was his entirely reasonable concern about Silicon Valley’s failure to create jobs for American workers.

“Lost in the lore,” the New York Times specified, “is Mr. Grove’s critique of Silicon Valley in an essay he wrote in 2010 in Bloomberg Businessweek. According to Mr. Grove, Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by failing to propel strong job growth in the United States.

“Mr. Grove acknowledged that it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But in his view, those lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a ‘misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.'”

We must duly note the (temporary) magnanimity of the NYT in remarking Grove’s essay, since Grove explicitly placed the Tom Friedman vision of the world in his sights. Happy as the moment of innovation might be, conjuring up the images that are lovingly whispered to children reared on the hallowed words of Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, startups “cannot by themselves increase tech employment,” wrote Grove. Even tech startups!

The problem, as Grove noted in Bloomberg, is that “[t]he scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S.” but abroad, where labor is more plentiful.

Naturally, the NYT omitted not only Grove’s criticism of its editorial page’s Chief Shaman, but also the fact that Grove’s concerns are precisely those propelling the candidacy of Donald Trump. Acknowledging that fact, though, would jeopardize Friedman’s (nonexistent) prophetic powers.

As Grove notes in his Bloomberg essay, the excitement about offshoring—typified for him by the aptly named Princeton economist Alan S. Blinder—overlooks the long-term importance that real knowledge in manufacturing can have in an economy, precisely because one doesn’t know what’s coming next. “Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs” through offshoring, Grove argues, but “we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”

Perhaps coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal today drew attention to the wide expansion of the “gig economy” even well outside the obvious hotspots such as Uber. “The rise,” the WSJ notes, “has happened even across industries including health care and education, manufacturing and public administration, with professions that have traditionally offered stable employment.”

The expansion of the gig economy has also disproportionately harmed female workers. “Alternative work,” as the WSJ innocuously calls the modern forms of temping, used to be more common among men. “A decade ago, the phenomenon was more common for male workers, about 12% of whom were in alternative arrangements compared to 8% of women. That gender pattern has reversed. . . . Today, about 17% of women and 15% of men hold such jobs.”

The reasons for this shift will doubtless go unexplored by the very politically correct, impeccably liberal young tech workers who are making the Bay Area uninhabitable for anyone else. As their great innovations lead to more redundancy among precisely the communities their “political correctness” is supposed to guard (its function is in fact strictly academic), the political tide they hope to stem will continue to gain force.

The arc of Capital is long, but it bends toward unemployment.

—MANLIUS CAPITOLINUS

The 37th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

We realize that, for most, other momentous events are deservedly taking precedence in public conversation today.  We understand and sympathize.  We’re not avoiding the subject, and it’s not that we don’t care; but we don’t know what we could add that would advance broader understanding or convince the West to find the will to live.

The 35th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Tim Cook v. the FBI is a sort of Eastern Front in miniature: whoever wins, we all lose.

Time has weighed in with the most persuasively pro-Cook account so far. (Tim, your PR people deserve some extra options for engineering that one.)  The mag then follows up with two other pro-Cook pieces (including one from Jesse Jackson!) and, in the other corner, a blunt-force op-ed from the much-prayed-for conservative heir to the Reagan legacy Tom Cotton. Leaving aside the 3-1 imbalance, rhetorically, the score is even more lopsided.  Cook wins in a rout.  But of course: this is Time.

A more interesting question is revealed when you compare Cook’s interview to Cotton’s op-ed.  Each says something wholly different about the central fact of the case and Time declines to elaborate—or even notice.  Is it true, as Cook alleges, that the only way for Apple unlock the phone is to design a deliberately compromised operating system?  Or is Cotton right that Apple could crack that phone well short of such a measure?  Since the FBI has asked the courts to force Apple to do exactly what Cook says he doesn’t want to do, it would seem that Cook is right and Cotton is … misinformed.

Cook and his defenders score some other good points.  The suspect in question had a personal phone, which he went out of his way to destroy; this Apple phone, issued by his employer, he didn’t bother with, which suggests he didn’t care, which suggests there’s nothing incriminating or exploitable on it.  Also, with the whole universe of exploitable data out there, why obsess over this one phone? Because there might be something valuable on it, sure—but the overwhelming likelihood is that there isn’t.  So is it worth compromising the security of the whole iPhone network, and setting a dangerous precedent, for this longshot that will likely yield nothing?

Which brings us to the larger point.  This whole spat is just a proxy fight, a diversionary feint, over vastly bigger issues that no one wants to face.  “Conservatives” who bleat on about “limited government” (and its contentless little cousin, “small government”) don’t really understand what’s at stake.  The issue is not the government’s size or spending or even, in the final analysis, scope.  While far from irrelevant, these are but epiphenomena of the real problem.  The permanent question in all political theory and practice throughout history is: Who rules?  (There is a deeper issue; viz., a difference between ancient republicanism, which admits no “private sphere” and therefore no a priori limits on government power over the individual, and modern republicanism which—owing primarily to the emergence of Christianity—carves out a space for the conscience into which the government is not supposed to intrude.  We may come back to that later.)

America would eventually be doomed anyway because of the cycle of regimes.  Unfortunately for us, this great civilizational Maytag turns more quickly in modern times because of the pernicious influence of modern philosophy.  The original American answer to the fundamental question—based on a judicious combination of ancient and modern philosophy, scripture, the lessons of history, and practical experience—was: the people, mediated through representatives and well-designed institutions.  But as modernity ground on, the other sources were deliberately jettisoned until only modern philosophy itself—and a later version than the one our Founders relied on—was left.  Its answer is: experts.

“Limited government” is fine and dandy—in the modern context, we prefer it, too—but unlimited government is, in modernity, just a consequence of the administrative state, which is the root of conservatives’ complaints, or would be if they understood it.  When a conservative says “big government,” the administrative state is usually what he means.  There is nothing terrible about “big government” per se.  We realize how blasphemous that sounds.  But would it really be possible to govern 320 million people, nearly 4 million square miles and more than 12,000 miles of coastline with a “small government”?  In some cases only big government will do. For instance, one of the reasons New York City—even under the clown de Blasio—remains so much safer than any other large city is that it can afford to deploy a non-small 35,000-man police force (and which in the recent past has topped 40,000).  Libertarians are no doubt reaching for the defibrillator; we can only remind them that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Broadly speaking, conservatives have a built-in instinct to distrust the administrative state when it comes to domestic policy but to favor giving it carte blanche for national security.  To some extent the rationale is sound.  According to Aristotle and Jefferson alike, the alpha and omega of politics are to further the safety and happiness of the people.  By its nature, government can be quite effective at the former, though it often needs to be larger rather than smaller relative to those tasks in order to be so.  Also by its nature, government best achieves the latter not by trying itself to produce happiness but by instituting and preserving the conditions in which happiness can emerge and thrive.  A properly limited government, then, is large and powerful enough to accomplish security and to secure the conditions of happiness; but not so large or intrusive that it uses either as a pretext for doing things it shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

The classic, perennial, ever-presently-dangerous reason why governments transgress these limits is tyranny: i.e., the person or persons who control the government do whatever it is they want, typically to further their own narrow, selfish interests.  Later modernity adds a new twist: the tyranny of “science” or “knowledge,” which in practice really means the tyranny of ideology. That is the heart of the administrative state.

Conservatives concerned about limitless government—that is to say, the usurpations and abuses of the administrative state—in the domestic sphere shouldn’t be too sanguine about the effects of same in the external or foreign sphere.  The national security apparatus is far from infallible.  9/11 and the subsequent decade-and-half should have made that abundantly clear.  Conservatives ought also to know that powers ceded to government tend never to be given back; indeed, they only grow, with often unforeseen and disastrous consequences.

We hold no brief for Tim Cook.  In almost nothing that matters do we believe he is on our side, or on the side of the American nation. Were he ever able to buy his way into political power, we’re confident he would be one hundred times the hectoring, intrusive, micromanaging busybody scold that his current perch allows him to be.  Which is to say, a near ur-perfect embodiment of the administrative state.  We’re also well aware that a victory for Cook and Apple will only increase the oligarchic power and cultural dominance of our hubristic tech-overlords.

Such a win may even make it harder for legitimately patriotic and judicious officials to fight genuinely dangerous enemies.  Which brings us to the other ducked issue.  Somehow America got along fine without a surveillance state for more than 150 years.  We’re not absolutists on this issue: we understand that the new circumstances of the Cold War imposed new necessities.  We also believe that the safeguards put in place to prevent domestic spying were reasonable and effective.  The operative word, of course, being “were.”

That assertion now appears to be highly questionable.  We’re not—yet—too worked up.  If the sky is falling, it’s doing so slowly and remains well above our heads.  If the situation were as bad as all the chicken-littles insist, wouldn’t there be some evidence of the government using illicitly collected data to abuse its power, a la the Gestapo, against politically irritating but otherwise innocent citizens?  Still, there’s appears to be little question that government is collecting data that the law says it can’t, that most Americans think it shouldn’t, and that will give it the power to change its mind and start being abusive whenever and to whomever it wants.  All in the name of “national security.”  They can already read all your emails and listen to your calls.  Do you want them to be able to crack your phones, pads and pods as well?

The reason—the only reason—we are told we “need” this surveillance state is to keep track of terrorists.  Which—as much as the government tries to muddy the waters with scare-warnings about rightwing militias—is just code for radicalized Muslims.  Who are here—in the thousands if not more—because we’ve admitted millions of their co-religionists in contravention of the explicit wishes of the American people, and with no benefit to the interests of the country or its people.  Your every move and word must be tracked (at least potentially), my fellow Americans, because the idea of not continuing to invite by the millions all these potential terrorists is just absolutely unthinkable.  There must be immigration—millions of Muslims included—and so there must be mass domestic surveillance.

On that, Tim Cook and the FBI—hell, everyone in the tech industry and the federal government sans ICE—entirely agree.  The techistocracy likes mass immigration because it pounds down wages and further corrodes the cohesion of the American nation and historic American norms that would otherwise be  obstacles, and threats, to their power.  The administrative state likes it because bureaucrats prefer subjects they can control to citizens with the assertiveness, and awareness of their potential power, to control what by rights is their government.

Cook and the FBI don’t fundamentally disagree about any of this.  The only real difference between them is that Cook prefers not to get his own hands dirty.

—Decius

The 34th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

No one—at least no pundit—can stop talking about Friday night’s “protest” that shut down a Trump rally in Chicago, the Saturday attack on Trump in Dayton, and the credible threats of endlessly-more-of-the-same from radical thugs backed by enemy alien George Soros’ money.

The interesting angle to us is the overwhelming hand-wringing—wait, that’s much too kind—the overwhelming condemnation from the right of Trump as the formal, final and efficient causes of the riots.  At least they had the broad-mindedness to allow that the rioters themselves were the material cause.

Their point seems to be that since Trump has said intemperate things, he had—and has—it coming. More of the same will surely follow and he has that coming, too.  It’s not all his fault, of course; free speech should be sacrosanct and liberals more than anyone should cherish that “value.”  But by saying bad things, Trump coarsens our public discourse and creates a hostile environment in which bad things happen.  Etc.  Cruz, Rubio and all the pundits have done Maxine Waters’ famous interpretation of the L.A. riots one better: they don’t condone what happened, but they’re sure that Trump and his supports deserved it.

Now, as stated many times, our brief is less for Trump personally than for what he represents: secure borders, economic nationalism and America-first foreign policy.  Trump has said many things we wish he hadn’t.  Tops among these would be the various “walk-backs” of his official policies—though he’s so far been reassuringly quick to walk back his walk-backs.  And, yes, we do think that some of the playground bully rhetoric he occasionally uses from the podium harms his (our) cause.

But if any of Trump’s “conservative” critics thinks these disruptions wouldn’t be happening if only Trump’s every utterance were Churchillian, we reply, first, that even Churchill was not averse to wielding the rhetorical hammer against domestic threats.  Second—and here we’re afraid that only highly specialized technical language appropriate to the subject-matter will do—get real, you superjive muthafuckas.

Allow me to play a personal anecdote card—a whole deck of them.  Have any of these critics spent any time around the New Left?  Because I have.  I grew up in one of their citadels and went to college in the mothership.  I spent about a quarter of my life on various university campuses.  I’ve served in the executive branch of the government in Republican administrations at the city, state and national levels.  I’ve been observing and later dealing directly with leftwing protesters almost since I could walk.

They live for this.  Period.  They need no provocation.  Intemperate language from their enemies can perhaps add a bit of fuel to their fire.  But only in the way that—if the Air Force had an instrument capable of measuring temperature to the trillionth of a degree—one extra twig might have increased the joules rising from the bombing of Dresden.

The leftist rage against Trump has almost zero to do with the quotes that are giving “conservatives” the vapors.  Their rage has two fundamental sources.  First, the left hasn’t had a serviceable boogeyman since George W. Bush left office and was never seen or heard from again.  All that pent-up energy had to go somewhere.  In Obama’s direction?  Are you high?  Second, and much more important, Trump is the first nationally popular figure to address America’s immigration disaster head-on.  To the low-information indoctrinated leftist man-child, there is zero difference between this stance and reconvening the Wannsee Conference to make sure nothing gets in the way the second time.  Yes, that’s how stupid they are.  If you were impressed by the quality of the brainwashing depicted in the originalManchurian Candidate, you ain’t seen nuthin’ until you’ve looked at our educational system up close.

Trump’s bravado in no way caused this.  Once he took on open borders—even had he mimicked the language and cadences of Fred Rogers—the left was coming for him like a freight train.

To those who lament how deplorable it is that our political discourse has come to this—what can we say?  Do you honestly believe that Trump’s outbursts are the cause?  Even a symptom?  Or are they not, rather, a reaction?  Does anyone else remember the root of the word “reactionary”?  The New Left learned more than 50 years ago that spot-welding guilt-trip-victimization crocodile tears to brickbat bullying will cow the decent, honest, and apolitical into silence and submission.  But back then, the right had more … spine and fought back.

Not anymore.  “Conservatives” still seem to think they will get credit for “doing the right thing,” which they define as supine acceptance of whatever fresh indignity the left has in store for them.

The smarter ones might reply: more important than winning is to deserve victory.  The best men would rather lose nobly in a noble cause then revel in a squalid triumph.

We sympathize.  But let’s be clear on what that means in this context.  Alinsky has become a cliché precisely because the left knows that they follow his script more rotely than Obama reads from a teleprompter.  So they insist that he’s old news, nothing to see here.  But his dictates remain operational.  Disrupt.  Provoke.  Shout.  Smear.  Swear.  Insult.  Shut down.  Push.  Prod.  Punch. And if you are so much as tapped back, immediately fall to the floor, wail like a banshee and wait for the sympathetic cameras to record it all and portray you as the gentle, lamblike innocent victim.  Which they will.

The script remains the same.  The only difference is that Trump refuses to play his assigned part. Conservative pundits, on the other hand, are excelling in the role of MSNBC outrage-mongers. Additional information about the Chicago mayhem dribbles out every day, just as it took days for the full truth of New Year’s Eve in Germany to circumvent the media blackout.  And what do the conservative pundits focus on?  Allegations—which turned out to be at the very least ridiculously exaggerated, if not completely phony—that a Trump aide roughed up a reporter, and a 76-year-old Trump-supporting Korean War vet who more than a week ago shoved a protester and has subsequently apologized.  Needless to say, not a single member of the Chicago mob has apologized.  On the contrary; its leaders bragged about their success.

Could Trump be more “statesmanlike”?  Actually, we think he could be, and still brook none of this agitprop.  But which is more important right now?  To be statesmanlike?  Or to stand up to the lefto-fascists?  To repeat, both is best, but if we had to choose one …

These are degenerate times.  Trump did not make them so.  He may in some sense be a product of them and have been a contributor to them, but right now he is fighting the predominate degeneracy.  The implicit calculation that Trump’s high-minded conservative critics have made (though we doubt any have really thought this through) is that Trump’s occasional exhortations to repay thuggishness in kind are worse—far worse—than what will follow if we assent meekly to the thuggishness of Trump’s enemies.  Who are also our enemies—the enemies of the historic American nation and all who pledge allegiance to it.

This same high-minded refusal to fight back is what surrendered every academic, intellectual and cultural institution—one after the other, like a ribbon of dominoes—to the left over the last half-century.  And now there is scarcely a single opinion-shaping force remaining in the West that doesn’t aim at the oblivion of our 3,000-year heritage.  For starters.  Now the right is prepared to surrender the government itself to the mob, because fighting back is just too unseemly to contemplate.

Aristotle says that natural right is changeable, by which (we think) he means that in extreme circumstances, extreme measures may be justified.  Maybe this is such a situation and maybe it isn’t.  Trump’s “conservative” critics haven’t even tried to make a case that it isn’t; they’ve merely clutched their pearls and assumed that whatever they believe is so obvious, words are superfluous.

But their inaction, combined with objection to Trump’s action, must arise from one or the other of the following conclusions.  Either they think the situation is not really that bad, or they think that fighting back will bring worse than accepting whatever may come.  If the former, we can only call them delusional.  If the latter … what do they think is coming and what role do they expect to play? Martyrs?  For what cause?

—Decius

The 32nd post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

If not RFK, how about John C. Frémont?

To those on the right who insist that Trump is destroying the Republican party, we respond: we sure hope so!  But we also ask: what then?

Some people we respect (and a great many for whom we have no respect) oppose Trump for reasonable reasons.  They make a case, not easily refuted or lightly dismissed, that Trump would make a bad president.  Yet given the alternatives, we’ve asked—and continue to ask—what would they have us do?  Supporting Rubio is a non-starter.  Cruz is better, especially in his pointedly non-neocon approach to foreign policy.  But is he trustworthy on immigration?  And on economics and trade, he’s stuck in November 1980 like all the rest of them.

That combination is still better than Hillary (or Bernie).  But is it good enough to transform the party, and shape the country, for the long term?  Especially now that the establishment is rallying around Cruz as a way to stop Trump?  What’s more likely: that Cruz will change them or they’ll change him?  Depressingly easy to answer.

And what if Cruz is nominated?  We don’t claim to be expert political prognosticators.  And we readily admit that polls contradict what we’re about to assert.  But it seems to us that Trump—who has helped to more than double primary turnout, brought new voters into (what’s left of) the party, reenergized the disaffected, shows national appeal that could scramble the red-blue gridlock in place since 2000, and is actually speaking to the issues that matter most right now—has a much better chance in November than the doctrinaire and antediluvian Cruz.

Even we’re wrong, what would be better?  A Trump loss or a Cruz loss?  We suppose that depends on how in the tank one is for the Davoisie agenda.  We’re assuming that, if you’re reading this blog, the answer is: not much.  Let us therefore rephrase the question: what would be better for Trumpism (secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy): a Trump primary loss to Cruz or a Trump general election loss?

This one doesn’t seem particularly difficult to answer either.

A Trump primary win—whether or not he goes on to win the general—will either transform the Republican Party in a Trumpian direction or destroy it and open the way to a new party à la 1854, when the Republicans rose from the wreckage of the Whigs.  And unlike Ross Perot’s amorphous Reform Party, this one would have a real core: the three pillars mentioned above.  There’s no guarantee of success, of course, but remaining on the present course is a guarantee of failure—electoral and otherwise.

In 1856, in its first presidential outing, the brand-new Republican Party nominated John C. Frémont, erstwhile conqueror of California.  Like Trump, Frémont was talented, ambitious, flamboyant, sometimes careless with facts, rarely played by the rules, and could be unscrupulous.  He lost, but his loss paved the way to Republican success in 1860 and national dominance beyond.

Trump, as noted, is appealing to a new constituency that the Republican Party (perhaps because it is too open about how much it hates ordinary Americans) hasn’t lately been able to reach.  He also, as noted, has the potential to scramble the red-blue electoral map in much the same way that Frémont and the Republicans scrambled the map back in 1856.

Most of the respectable (we mean that in the nice way—this time) anti-Trumpites are convinced Trump can’t win a general.  They also acknowledge—ruefully—that the window in which it’s possible to block his nomination is almost closed.  No widely acceptable and electorally superior successor has stepped forward and Cruz can’t seem to catch up.

If Trump is so bad and can’t be stopped, why not—as we’ve suggested before—use him like Cesare Borgia used Remirro de Orco?  Or the gentler and more apt metaphor: like the Republicans used Frémont in 1856?  To do the necessary dirty work and pave the way for something better.

This would require writing about something other than what an awful person Trump is, or how sad it is to see the Grand Old Party and the Reagan legacy in such straits.  It would require turning our energies instead to fleshing out a practical program and electoral strategy for a transformed Republican Party, or for a new party.  We’re confident that at least some of the better conservative pundits are capable of making a contribution.  So why don’t they?

It’s not like they have a better plan.  The only plan we’ve noticed on the “right” so far is: Let’s find some way to get back to BAU ASAP. Aside from being idiotic and undesirable, we don’t think that’s practical.  The way forward is through.

So let’s get started.  At least that’s a plan—and a positive project.

—Decius

The 29th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Far-left Soros-backed MoveOn.org riots at Trump rally site, causing cancellation of event.  Cruz and Rubio blame Trump.

—Decius

The 28th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

In what we assume will be but the first of many incidents, a planned Trump rally was shut down tonight by protesters brownshirts.

This wasn’t a “protest.”  It was a fascist intimidation.  The goal, said one, was “for Donald to take the stage and to completely interrupt him. The plan is to shut Donald Trump all the way down.”  The mission once accomplished, another exulted: “We came in here and we wanted to shut this down. Because this is a great city and we don’t want to let that person in here.”

The “free speech” left is of course completely silent.  The Trump-is-a-Nazi crowd—also completely silent.  Only Trump can be the target and victim of Nazi-like tactics and still be Hitler.

Like the campus “protests” of last fall, to which in each case the relevant administration folded like a cheap tent, the success of this thuggery will breed more of it.  All the wise and good will either stay publicly silent (while gloating in private) or else—when cornered—leak out the most desultory “I don’t condone it but I understand it.”  Law enforcement—especially in the blue cities; which is to say, all of them—will likely not act to keep order nor take action against the “protesters,” but  maximally enforce jaywalking statutes against Trump supporters.  Some out of conviction, most because they know that’s what their political and media overlords demand of them.

What Sam Francis termed “anarcho-tyranny” now defines our national politics.  I fear that we may be later into the late republic than even I had feared.

—Decius

The 27th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Much is being made of Trump’s “inconsistency.”  Unlike many of Trump’s defenders, we’ll admit to being troubled by this, though in a different way that most of Trump’s conservative enemies mean.

But first, the areas of agreement.  It’s troubling that Trump has not merely said and done inconsistent things over the course of his life, but some diametrically opposed to what we consider (or hope) to be the core of Trumpism: secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.  Trump’s supporters, and Trump himself, have tried to explain these inconsistencies in various ways, none altogether satisfying.  Perhaps he really has rethought these issues as he claims.  We’re more convinced by his (cynical) explanation of certain business practices: he had to play by the corrupt rules the government has set, lest he self-penalize.

Trump’s inconsistent statements during this campaign cycle are also troubling—and even more troubling are his (all too frequent) deviations from and even contradictions to his own policy papers.  This could be mere laziness, or a tendency to find policy boring, or overconfidence born of having gotten this far by winging it, or some combination of the above.  Still, we pin our—perhaps vain; who knows?—hopes on Trump’s (so far) quick and consistent reassertions of Trumpism after every heresy.  To those who find this irrational on our part, we repeat: what else would you have us do?

Where we disagree is with the “conservative” fetishization of “consistency” as rigid adherence to yesterday’s doctrines.  Cruz and Rubio may be more “consistent” than Trump in the sense of having held the same positions over the course of their political careers (though even that is debatable).  But what good is that if those positions don’t meet current necessities?  Trump admittedly could be better at sticking to his published program.  But at last that program actually speaks not only to voter concerns but to the actual challenges facing the country.

This points to a larger issue that the “conservatives” don’t seem to understand.  Policy positions are all second-order phenomena in the hierarchy of being.  That’s a fancy way of saying that they don’t exist for their own sake but for the sake of something else, and that something else—the country and its people—are what is really important.  George Washington’s policy prescriptions addressed the necessities of his time, just as Lincoln’s addressed those of his, Coolidge’s of his, and Reagan’s of his—all with the same ultimate end in view: the safety and happiness of the American nation.  Our intellectuals don’t seem to begrudge these statesmen for having calibrated their “positions” to their times.  But they insist there will be hell to pay if any fresh face deviates from Reagan’s recipe for a time that has been gone for nearly 40 years.

Nor is this to deny, but rather to affirm, that there are permanent principles, goods, and truths that wise statesmanship always seeks to favor and further.  Would any conservative writer today (apart from the Lincoln-hating paleos) deny that Washington and Lincoln (and Coolidge and Reagan) believed in essentially the same first principles and political fundamentals?  Yet they are allowed to be different—allowed the freedom to address differently the challenges of their differing times—without being read out of the pantheon.  So why must every candidate since Reagan recite the 1980 platform like the Nicene Creed?

A distinction should be drawn between two kinds of inconsistency.  First, a statesman in contact with the moving current of events and anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a steady course may lean all his weight now on one side and now on the other.  His arguments in each case when contrasted can be shown to be not only very different in character, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction; yet his object will throughout have remained the same.  His resolves, his wishes, his outlook may have been unchanged; his methods may be verbally irreconcilable.  We cannot call this inconsistency. In fact it may be claimed to be the truest consistency.

That’s Churchill, Charlie—heard of him?  He understood what politics is for.  Do you?

There are infinite reasons why Cruz and Rubio and all the others are failing and have failed.  Failure to distinguish true consistency from rote recitation is near the top of the list.

—Decius

The 25th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Maybe if he had announced this before Iowa, he would be in the lead now.  But, uh, maybe not.

One does wonder: what on earth does he think he has to gain by doing it now?

—Decius