The 24th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

This is getting a lot of attention.

I don’t know enough about trade (or economics ) to say whether or not the arguments are correct.  But it seems evident that what we’re doing right now isn’t working.  It’s certainly not working for anyone outside the financial and tech sectors.

The American economy feels like a ship on one of those pre-Columbian maps, sailing straight for the edge of the world.  Change course?  Unthinkable!  All the wise and good know that the earth is flat.  Trust us!

What if, in this case, it isn’t?

—Decius

The 22nd post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Since we’re piling on NR, it would be remiss not to single out the worst of the worst: the sneering, arrogant, obnoxious know-it-all-who-actually-knows-nothing Kevin Williamson.  Williamson is a one-man case study in everything wrong with “conservative journalism.”  Doctrinaire.  Hubristically overconfident yet embarrassingly error-prone.  Snide in his every syllable.  To paraphrase Mary McCarthy, Williamson manages to imbue a toxic level of bile even into “and” and “the.”  Hair-trigger.  And always, always, always on the attack, but like a Gatling gun with no one aiming it—just spraying bullets everywhere.

Like the natural aristoi Williamson is so certain he is, he despises any among the hoi polloi who don’t toe the line he draws.  “Donald Trump is a man of low character,” he writes.  Fair enough; there’s material on which to base that claim.  But Williamson can’t stop there:

Trump is running a con on Republican primary voters. Some of them are so full of spite that they are willing to be conned by a lowlife if that means annoying people they resent. That is a mark of low character, too.

There you have it.  Trump’s voters are people “of low character.”  Says the perpetually red-faced and purple-prosed Kevin Williamson.

As we noted recently, this is emerging as the standard establishment explanation for Trump: the American people—or at least Trump voters—are ipso facto corrupt.  Have any of these despondent elitists thought through where this conclusion inevitably leads?

In any case, we would hesitate to say the same of those who vote for Hillary—someone we are reasonably confident actually is corrupt, both in the civilizational sense implied by Williamson and in the more prosaic sense people usually think of when they hear the word.

This is the kind of thing the left never misses an opportunity to say about the right.  And in fact routinely say every time they lose an election.  Bad people!  Bad!  You sleep outside tonight!  A lot of “Republicans” and “conservatives” have been switching sides lately.  By temperament at least, Williamson would probably be more at home not just on the left but with the New Left.  Maybe he can stow away in Max Boot’s suitcase?

—Decius

The 20th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

“Since the republic necessarily had to perish, it was only a question of how, and by whom, it was to be overthrown”

~Montesquieu, Considerations XI 1 ¶9.

There is much “conservative” loose talk these days of Trump as some sort of Caesar, or “fascist” or “authoritarian”—any way of conjuring Hitler’s ghost without the embarrassment of being called out for offering yet another dreary example of Godwin’s Law.  Ross Douthat’s recent, rather weak, entry in the genre is garnering him extravagant praise.  Some of that can be attributed to the typical conservative back-scratching.  The rest is owing to the #NeverTrump mania currently gripping the American “right.”  Once again, the “conservatives” demonstrate a weak grasp of history and theory.  And once again, JAG is here to help.

Douthat prefers “authoritarian” over the various alternatives presumably because it sounds to him the least charged and the most “scientific.”  He ought to know, but apparently does not, that by using this term against Trump he is playing into the hands of those whom he should like even less.  But maybe he prefers the anti-American, anti-Western left to Trump after all?

I speak of course of the Frankfurt School.  For it was Theodore Adorno (along with colleagues from that School) who popularized the term with their mendacious 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality.  In those just-post-Hitler years, the right was terrified of being associated with anything that might—even for a nanosecond, from the tinted window of a fast-passing car—look vaguely like Nazism. The left naturally intuited that here was the perfect moment to forever tar the right with exactly that smear.

Hence this term and this book.  The ostensible purpose was to “prove,” using “scientific methodology,”* that conservatism is merely a point on the “F-scale” (for “fascist,” of course).  The traits which identify one as being somewhere on that scale includeconventionalism, aggression, submission (hard to see how these go together, but bear with me), superstition, predilection for stereotypes, worship of power and “toughness,” destructiveness, cynicism, a propensity for projection and (channeling Freud while anticipating the ’60s) sexual hang-ups.  And, finally, these are all mental disorders.  Therefore conservatives are not only all proto-fascists, but also insane.

Despite being roundly attacked at the time and thoroughly debunked since, this “study” has had an amazing success in the world.  It is after all exactly what the left wants to believe about its enemies.  “Simplistic thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and racial prejudice” clucks one liberal wag about Trump, summarizing (so he claims) Adorno et al.  He would no doubt say exactly the same about Douthat.

Who would no doubt object that he is not merely not authoritarian, but more important, Nothing Like Trump!  Such are the perils of resorting to the language and categories of the left.

Presumably what Douthat means is that Trump is a proto- or would-be tyrant.  Here at least is an intellectual concept not made up in the last century to score partisan points.  We may say with tolerable certainty what a tyrant, as opposed to an “authoritarian,” actuallyis.  The strict, and original, definition is one who usurps a legitimate regime.  Since such usurpation is always unjust, tyranny as such is always unjust.  Plus, tyrants—lacking the historic affection that peoples have for legitimate kings or republics—typically must govern harshly in order to maintain power (this is especially true of the usurpers of republics).  This is how “tyranny” acquired its harsh connotation: there is a built-in, though not in all cases inevitable, tendency for the tyrant to rule solely through fear.

But sticking for the moment with the strict definition: are there any signs at all that Trump intends to overthrow the U.S. government and seize absolute power?  I doubt even Douthat would say so.

What he must mean, then, is that Trump intends to govern, or rule, like a tyrant after coming to power legitimately.  Certainly there isprecedent for this—some even recent.  But what evidence is there that Trump so intends?  Douthat himself supplies none.  The best that Douthat’s admirers can do is point to Trump’s 26-year-old comments on China, which we’ve already addressed, and campaign rhetoric in which Trump sometimes taunts his opponents with language along the lines of “you’ll be sorry” and the like, which they take to be threats to use government power for revenge.  We may grant that Trump’s off-the-cuff utterances don’t always rise to the level long considered “presidential.”  But we would also point out, as contrary to Douthat’s thesis, Trump’s many pledges to work with others, make nice with his opponents, cut deals, act presidential and even “politically correct” and so on.  Isn’t singling out one set of comments and ignoring the other unfair, or at least tendentiously selective?  Especially when the point is to establish Trump’s alleged tyrannical ambitions?

We might also ask which of the two likely nominees has shown more of a taste for tyranny?  The one who illegally and knowinglymishandled classified information in order to circumvent government record-keeping requirements and covered up her incompetence and malfeasance, all while working for a lawless administration that has routinely flouted the Constitution and unlawfully expanded executive power, maintains an enemies list, uses the IRS to persecute political opponents, abused prosecutorial discretion, andselectively prosecuted some while exonerating its friends guilty of much more serious offenses?  Or the one who sometimes says “You’ll be sorry” in the heat of a debate?

And that’s just Mrs. Clinton’s affiliation with the present administration; this hardly exhausts her tyrannical tendencies, which have a long history stretching back to intimidating her husband’s sexual assault victims into silence.  And that, too, is to say nothing of her preferred policies which—in keeping with the whole tenor of the left today—are far more “authoritarian” than anything Trump has proposed.

But, we know well that tu quoque is not an argument.  We stake our case not on Trump the man but on Trumpism: secure borders, economic nationalism, and interests-based foreign policy.  We once again ask: if Trump-the-man is bad as Douthat and everyone else on the right (and left) insists, what does that say about his army of supporters and fans?  Conservatives—at least since the twilight of right-wing elitists such as Mencken and Albert Jay Nock—have tended to rhapsodize about the superior wisdom of the common man; Buckley and the Boston phone book, etc.  That pose becomes difficult to maintain when your beloved common man—or at the very least a third of the Republican primary electorate—is enthralled with an unacceptable demagogue.

Not that we’re convinced that’s what Trump is; only that the logic of conservative anti-Trumpism admits no other explanation.  The proto-tyrant has but two paths to power: crime and violence or the support of the demos.  Since Trump does not appear to be pursuing the former, his intended path must be the latter.  And this route is possible only when the people are corrupt.  Therefore—unmistakably if only implicitly—according to Douthat and all his conservative endorsers, the American people, or a sizable portion of them, are corrupt.  At a minimum, they cannot tell good men from bad and perhaps not even right from wrong.

If this is true, then do we not in some sense deserve Trump?  Or someone like Trump?  Have we not degenerated to the point that we are ready for Caesar?

Caesarism is not tyranny.  It is rather a sub-species of absolute monarchy, in which the monarch is not an unjust usurper but the savior of a country with a decayed republican order that can no longer function, and of a corrupt people no longer capable of self-government.  Caesarism is therefore just, if “in the way in which deserved punishment is just.”  So why blame Trump?

Douthat and his admirers would no doubt rebel at this conclusion, with no less vehemence than Polus and Callicles fumed at Socrates’ “proof” that the unhappiest man is the one who gets away with his every injustice.  Therefore, there must be a logical flaw somewhere in the above.  Perhaps it was imported, like a bit of buggy code, inside one of Douthat’s premises?

—Decius

* We will have more to say about the so-called “scientific” study of political phenomena.

The 14th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

NO GREATER FUN CAN BE HAD in the present political situation than to watch the sputtering attempts of media analysts to describe the phenomenon of Trumpism or, alternately, to conceal however poorly their contempt for it. “Georgia has fallen to Trump” was Bret Baier’s bon mot (or rather lapsus de langue), presumably referring to the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 and confusing Trump with his pre-Trumpist forerunner.

The 13th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

We can’t repeat often enough that we hold no brief for Trump personally.  Our interest is in Trumpism: secure borders, economic nationalism, interests-based foreign policy.

In any event, the conservative anti-Trump case would be stronger if they got basic facts right.  Andrew Bacevich has done yeoman’s work over the last decade as a scourge of neocon imprudence and adventurism.  One might think he’d support Trump’s anti-neocon approach to foreign affairs, but Bacevich finds Trump’s character too gravely wanting.  Fair enough.  But this:

with absolute unanimity, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio ascribe to Barack Obama any and all problems besetting the nation. To take their critique at face value, the country was doing swimmingly well back in 2009 when Obama took office. Today, it’s FUBAR, due entirely to Obama’s malign actions.

a Republican president can, they claim, dismantle Obama’s poisonous legacy and restore all that he has destroyed. From “day one,” on issues ranging from health care to immigration to the environment, the Republican candidates vow to do exactly this.

Here, too, the Republican candidates see eye-to-eye and have solutions readily at hand. In one way or another, all of those solutions relate to military power. Trump, Cruz, and Rubio are unabashed militarists … A Republican commander-in-chief, be it Trump, Cruz, or Rubio, won’t take any guff from Moscow or Pyongyang or Beijing or Tehran. He will eradicate “radical Islamic terrorism,” put the mullahs back in their box, torture a bunch of terrorists in the bargain, and give Bibi whatever he wants.

The 12th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in March, 2016.

Conservative intellectuals have a shaky—at best—grasp of history and political theory, something that becomes more evident with every word they write.  We couldn’t possibly keep track of every example.  That would be more than a full-time job, and no doubt boring to our readers.  But we think it’s useful to point out the faults of representative examples.

Rich Lowry repeats the conservative refrain for “limited government,” plus all the usual business about entitlements, the welfare state and so on.  Trump, he insists, will finally give the liberals and Democrats what they’ve always wanted: bipartisan acceptance of the permanence of the New Deal.

As “history,” it’s hard to call this anything other than surprisingly ignorant.  Eisenhower already “ratified” the New Deal.  The debate between the Taftites and the moderates definitively ended more than 60 years ago and the anti-New Dealers lost in a rout.  Lowry wasn’t around for that, but hasn’t he read about it?  He has, at any rate, helmed NR for nearly 20 years.  Hasn’t he noticed that there is virtually no Republican appetite for repealing or rolling back the welfare state?  The most radical plans yet proffered—George W. Bush’s 2005 Social Security reform and Paul Ryan’s entitlement reforms—all claim to aim at “saving” these plans “for the middle class.”

Trump’s refusal to attack entitlements is just a re-ratification of what the Party itself (to say nothing of its voters) has already decided. Lowry, with the rest of the pundit class, is right that eventually these programs will have to be reformed if they are to survive.  But he is quite out-of-touch in his insistence that such reform ought to be centerpiece of the 2016 campaign.  The country has more pressing problems just now.  Entitlements can wait.  Plus, the more the Davoisie agenda undermines Americans’ economic security, the more voters tend to see entitlements as essential lifelines.  Coupling that agenda with strident calls for slashing the safety net may as well become the new textbook definition of “tone deaf.”

Lowry’s comments on theory make even less sense.  We went into some detail below on the limitations of conservative paeans to “limited government.”  But certain points bear repeating.  “Limited government” is a species of the genus republic, one that requires a certain type or character of people to establish and maintain.  Right now the most urgent threat to limited government is not Trump or entitlements but the mass immigration of non-republican peoples.  To the extent that Trump opposes and will take action against that corrosive trend, he is a far greater defender of “limited government” than all the conservative pundits who rotely sing its praises put together.

(It’s also worth noting that the mass importation of net tax-eaters and welfare consumers makes the entitlement problem worse, not better.  Trump is, in that sense at least, also “better on entitlements!” than “conservative” hero Paul Ryan, whose open borders mania would bankrupt the nation is short order if given the chance.)

Finally, some unsolicited advice.  Stop throwing down “American exceptionalism” as the intellectual ace of spades.  For one thing, when people who aren’t already on your side—and who are inclined to support Trump—hear it, their instinctive response is to shield their wallets with one hand and reach for their guns with the other.  “American exceptionalism” has become not merely trite but a blunt instrument for imposing the donor-class agenda.  You must accept mass immigration and pointless foreign wars because “American exceptionalism”!

More fundamentally, Lowry and the rest of the pundit class apparently don’t know what it means.  Here is Lowry:

Of course, mainstream European political parties tend not to be nationalist or anti-immigration. Here, Trump bears a closer resemblance to Europe’s outsider parties on the right. He is less the candidate of American exceptionalism—which has a keen appreciation of our national creed as enunciated in the Declaration and the limits on government power set down by the Constitution—than a robust nationalism of a blood-and-soil variety found nearly everywhere else in the world.

“American exceptionalism” in no way denies or laments that America is a nation with a people (blood) and a country (soil).  It refers instead to America’s status as the first nation whose government was founded on the basis of a full understanding of the true principles of political legitimacy in the modern era.  Second, and related, America is exceptional in having been blessed with circumstances that allowed a people, for the first time in history, to “establish … good government from reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force” (Federalist 1).  Only (distantly) third does American exceptionalism mean that, because of the partially creedal nature of American citizenship and our protections and respect for religious liberty, America is better able than other nations to absorb and assimilate newcomers—but even then only those demonstrating a willingness to embrace our political system and accept our religious liberty.

The latter caveat is decisive, and precisely the one Lowry and his ilk are prone not merely to deny, but not even to entertain.

—Decius

The 9th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

EDITORS’ NOTE: We are honored to present, in nearly unedited form, the musings of one of our great teachers.  This was prepared in haste to calm the nerves of a genuinely conservative mutual friend who finds much to admire in Trumpism but has reservations about Trump.  Not drafted for publication, the essay perhaps falls short of the focus and precision of which its author is more than capable given sufficient leisure (in the sense of σχολή, not “pool time”).  However, it is so rich with necessary insight that we present it here for the edification of those with sufficient λόγος to understand it.

During the pre-South Carolina debate, Donald Trump notoriously said that Bush (43) should have been impeached.  This naturally caused all sorts of outrage among “conservatives.”

But what did Trump mean?  That Bush should have been impeached for abuse of power?  That would have required a Congress jealous of its own powers.  Not such a bad thing.  Perhaps it also means if Trump wins but then abuses his own powers, Congress should impeach him as well.  I see no reason not to welcome that sentiment, either.

Yet if conservatives think they can conserve anything meaningful from the past (including Constitutionalism) after the wholesale destruction of a regime of civil and religious liberty that was built upon a moral tradition established by a two-thousand-year old civilization, they are deluding themselves.  The traditional moral and political defense of civil and religious liberty has been undermined.  American citizens, who want to live by the virtues established by that old moral tradition, have no real public means of defending their way of life, because the Washington elites have succeeded in transforming the moral foundations of contemporary political and social life behind the backs of the American people, and without their consent.  The old regime of civil and religious liberty has been cut from under the people who long for it.  “Morality” today is established, confirmed, and legitimized by contemporary intellectual elites.  It seems that the best conservatives can hope for is to defend policies that appear to protect ”conservative” opinions on abortion, health care, limited government, and constitutionalism, seemingly unaware of the fact that those opinions are tolerated among contemporary elites because they have nothing to do with political reality in terms of reversing those policies, or re-establishing the limitations required by a constitutional government.

Frankly, I don’t think any of this matters.  The real question is whether Trump is trying to re-establish the ground of politics as central to re-establishing the authority of the people.  Policies can be changed, but now they are changed—or kept the same—without the consent of the governed.  In fact, policy today is changed only by an administrative elite that is responsive to the interests of the various economic, social, cultural, religious, scientific, media, and entertainment elites. It remains a fact that, in the administrative state, the only thing NOT needed to change policies—or even the entire way of life of a people—is the authority of the people themselves.  Does Trump understand that the first political necessity is to take the power out of the hands of the elites?  He must, because all of the interested elites, including “conservatives,” fear that he threatens to take precisely that power out of their hands.

In truth, leftist policies cannot be reversed without a political revolution, one that would undermine the established authority of both contemporary liberalism and conservativism.  It would also require re-animating the role of the people as a political force in Washington, which has become the heart of the administrative state and the source of the authority of the national intellectual and social elites, or the cognoscenti.

Conservatives such as Victor Hanson and Charles Murray, who are now taking Trump seriously, do so by separating Trump from Trumpism.  They want to understand the importance of the political movement created by Trump; and they attempt to do so by separating Trump from the people, from the political constituency he created.   But like any political movement, this one is unintelligible without Trump.  He mobilized that political movement on behalf of a political reality that was in opposition to the socially constructed public world that had been created by the political, social, and media elites.  That elite had dictated what constituted the morally defensible in the political and social world.  It had determined what constituted allowable outrage against public decency.

Yet, since the end of the cold War, a whole way of life established by a venerable tradition was under attack by social, economic, intellectual, and religious elites, with little possibility of outrage against those who brought it about, precisely because conservative and liberals alike had accepted the inevitability of what they knew was only a “narrative.”  In fact, despite the abuses of authority, and various scandals generated in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, no moral outrage could be directed against the Washington establishment, from without or within.  Watergate had established the ground of permissible moral outrage against the political, but it was not on behalf of the people, it was on behalf of the Washington establishment.

Reagan’s questioning of the legitimacy of centralized administrative government, and his defense of civil society, resonated with the electorate.  It put the Washington establishment on the defensive for a decade.  But by the end of the 1990s, the line between government and civil society had almost vanished, as the administrative state came to be centered on the presidency, with its vast ability to influence public opinion.  Public opinion was both vulgarized and politicized during that decade.  The coarsening of the culture was accelerated and the politicization of the private sphere had encompassed nearly everything including the movies, television, sports, music, and popular entertainment.  Indeed, much of civil society was transformed in such a way as to become merely a reflection of the moral and political opinions established by elite intellectual opinion.

Consequently, it had become increasingly difficult to defend the autonomy of those private institutions in civil society that had depended upon a public, and political, defense of traditional morality.  Government itself participated in undermining public support for those civil society institutions, such as the family and the churches, which had been dependent upon the authority of the old morality.  This transformation occurred without organized political debate, and without the participation of the people in terms of legitimizing such a radical transformation of public opinion and public authority.

On the contrary, the political and enlightened elite—alone—had determined what constituted acceptable moral standards in the public sphere.  As for the people themselves, no outrage at sexual scandal in the highest places, political corruption, or political correctness could resonate politically without the blessing of the Washington establishment.  Rather, any kind of moral or political misbehavior on the part of the political establishment was defended on the ground that it was merely private behavior, unrelated to public performance.

But during the Clinton administration, the line between public and private behavior had nearly vanished because of the politicization of the culture and the coarsening of society as a whole.  The public moral character of the regime would, subsequently, come to be shaped almost exclusively by the private interests and personal predilections of the cognoscenti.  As a result, nearly any kind of private behavior that had an influential intellectual constituency (not necessarily large ones) could demand and receive public recognition in the form of government protection of private behavior as a public right.

It was not long before the only justifiable moral outrage was in opposition to those who still attempted to defend traditional morality.  That morality came to be viewed as nothing more than the private, or personal, values of the ignorant and the vulgar, or the bigoted; and therefore unworthy of a public defense.  In other words, the only public, or political, outrage that was socially and intellectual acceptable was moral outrage against the old morality. In short, the political and social elites had created an intellectual and political environment that made it nearly impossible to mobilize any public, or political support, for those traditional virtues that had made the defense of civil and religious liberty possible and necessary.

Trump has re-animated the political meaning of moral outrage, by being outrageous on behalf of what had come to be understood as the vulgar and unsophisticated, the hoi polloi.  In doing so, he showed that it was the people, themselves, who could and should be outraged—by exposing the agenda and the hypocrisy of the Washington elites.

But that required using outrage on behalf of the political sphere once again.  It also required an appeal to the people, against the establishment.  Although in the past quarter century, nearly every aspect of the culture had become vulgarized, manners had been coarsened in both public and private life without complaint, it had become nearly impossible to mount a political opposition to the transformation of the culture.  On the other hand, the establishment had erected a wall around public political behavior, in which coarseness or vulgarity, which so permeated the rest of society, was off limits in terms of political competition and debate.  It appeared that only in politics are there rules of civility that still had to be observed.  But the arbiters of good taste depended upon an agreement among themselves that required control of the public conversation, or the narrative.  As a result, the people must only be able to understand their government through the lens provided by the national political, social, and media elites.

Trump’s unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of elite opinion concerning what is allowable in terms of the conversation, shattered political correctness and threatened the social and political control that was dependent upon the agreement of all of the intellectual elites.  He could not do this in any civil, or politically acceptable, manner.  Perhaps he thought that the political world ought to be treated in the same way as the rest of society.  He coarsened and vulgarized politics in the same manner that the elites had coarsened and vulgarized the popular culture and the whole of civil society.  That was too much for all of those who had come to understand themselves as the arbiters of manners: the sophisticated or the cognoscenti.

Not surprisingly, a liberal and conservative establishment—which had not been able to summon up any moral indignation against the outrageous behavior of the elites in the past quarter century—are outraged by the outrageous behavior of Trump.  By making outrage political again, and placing that outrage in the hands of the people rather than the elites, even the behavior of the Clintons in the 1990s—which had not resonated at the time because none of the elites would or could make an issue of it—has re-emerged in a political manner that was almost inconceivable before Trump.

And this is not because Trump has said anything new or radical.  It is because he did what no educated intellectual, or academic, would do: he took the side of what had come to be seen as the simple, if not ignorant, common man, against the enlightened and sophisticated elites of the social and intellectual world.  He seems to understand that the coming political battle is a battle for control of public opinion, as Lincoln understood that term.  Public opinion is, and has been for decades, treated as the private preserve of specialists, post-modern intellectuals, social scientists, lawyers, bureaucrats.  Or, to put it in Hegelian terms, public opinion has been formulated, authorized, and legitimized by what has come to be understood as ‘the rule of organized intelligence.”  There is no respectable opinion that has been able to emerge without the authority and the consent of the intellectual elites.  In fact, there seems to be nothing quite like the political challenge to the authority of the cognoscenti, such as that posed by Trump in his appeal to the political authority of the people.

Again, what Trump seems to have understood is the necessity of revitalizing the political by reestablishing the authority of the people, rather than upholding the intellectual authority of the cognoscenti.  Given his flamboyance and his unorthodox methods, many question whether he seeks power on behalf of the people, or on his own behalf.  That will depend upon whether he is ambitious enough to understand that his self-interest, and his glory, will be assured by his success in pursuing the public good.  Whether he will know how to harness and mobilize that political movement on behalf of restoring a constitutional order remains an open question.

Nonetheless, in the case of those who might learn from Trump, they need to understand that the fundamental problem of our time is to determine how to re-animate political rule in a way that allows public opinion, understood to arise in the creation of constitutional majorities, to establish the legitimacy of politics and policies, so that the resulting policies are compatible with the rule of law and the common good.  If the people are to understand themselves as a sovereign people, they must reestablish the authority of the Constitution in a manner that makes it possible to restore the theoretical and moral ground of civil and religious liberty.  That requires revitalizing the meaning of citizenship and reaffirming the sovereignty of the people and the nation.

Since the end of the Cold War, our leaders have understood their offices in terms of global and administrative rule, rather than political rule on behalf of the people and the nation.  We have become so accustomed to administrative rule that we have forgotten that political rule requires the consent of the governed (not the consent of self-interested minorities of whatever kind) to establish its legitimacy.  But such consent is possible only when a people understand themselves as a people, in a country where the regime supports the people by recognizing the political rule of its citizens.  That requires distinguishing our citizens from all others.

It seems that Trump, at least, recognizes the necessity of re-establishing the sovereignty of the people as the first step in reaffirming political rule.  In a certain way, this is an American form of the problem at the center of the Strauss-Kojeve debate: on the one hand a universal bureaucracy and a global elite that caters to human pleasure (sports, entertainment, erotica), which Strauss considered a tyranny; on the other, the question of whether there is sufficient pride in human beings for them to fight to retain their freedom and dignity, and hence reestablish a particular political order which is their own.  (And not in Kant’s meaning of “freedom” and “dignity,” but the meaning established by the earlier philosophical and theological tradition).

Recreating the political authority of one people is the first step on the road to re-establishing the political conditions of civil and religious liberty, provided there is sufficient civic spiritedness, if not yet virtue, in the citizenry.  But that requires political leadership that is capable of animating the civic spiritedness necessary for the revival of the political virtues required for self-rule.  The administrative state has fragmented, isolated, and infantilized the people.  Constitutionalism is at its core a political defense of the sovereignty of the people.  Consequently, the fundamental problem is how to reestablish the sovereignty of one people, and restore the political authority of a Constitution that protects the natural rights of its citizens.  Is Donald Trump up to the task?

—CATO THE ELDER

The 8th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

Gawker is congratulating itself for having “tricked” (their word) Trump into re-tweeting quotes from Mussolini.

The quotes themselves don’t seem all that outrageous.  E.g., “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” There’s doubt that Mussolini actually originated this one.  But even if he had, how is this sentiment any different from Achilles’ preference for an early death and immortal glory over a long life in obscurity (Iliad IX 410-417)?  Would these same leftist scolds impugn Trump for re-tweeting Homer?  Probably, as books of that kind are close to being banned in the West, and already must carry “trigger warnings” at our universities.

Well over a half century ago, Leo Strauss diagnosed a new strain of intellectual corruption: the “reductio ad Hitlerum.” Strauss cautioned that “a view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler” (Natural Right and History, pp. 42-43).  Nearly two-thirds of a century on, our intellectual discourse is significantly stupider than what Strauss diagnosed.  Thankfully, the Journal of American Greatness is here to rectify that.

—Decius

The 7th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

A friend (whom we hope will shortly begin writing here) likes to say the left is expert at using its pawns to tie up the right’s rooks, knights and bishops.

Case in point: the old left-wing chestnut that “The media can’t have a liberal bias because the media is owned by big business and big business is conservative.”  The right has established and funded entire think-tanks with no other purpose than to stack examples of leftist media bias like cordwood, and still the “debate” goes on without a single mind having been changed, with the shameless left not having backed off an inch.  To the contrary, showing how far brazenness can go, the left instead founded their own—and much more effective—think tank (led by the odiously reptilian Clinton hit-man David Brock) to “prove” conservative bias!

That old left-wing chestnut does, however, contain a grain of truth, just one that the left would ever admit.  Because the media—whether openly leftist or nominally conservative—is owned by corporations that are controlled by billionaires, it does share certain common interests.  One of those is a commitment to open borders—the ultimate class interest of transnational billionaires.

The New York Times (whose largest shareholder is the rent-seeking Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim) reports that Marco Rubio—along with Republican turncoat Lindsay Graham and Chuck Schumer (who at least is loyal to his own party; he only tries to sell out America)—lobbied Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes to tone down opposition from Murdoch’s “conservative” media properties to the “Gang of 8” amnesty.  Naturally, the two fat cats obliged.

This shouldn’t be surprising.  There is nothing especially “conservative” about Murdoch and never has been.  Time and again, he’s shown that over and against the interests of the American people, he takes the side of the transnational billionaire class every time.  Why wouldn’t he?  He’s one of its most important members.  On the core tenets of Trumpism—secure borders, economic nationalism, interests-based foreign policy—Murdoch is indistinguishable from that other resident enemy alien George Soros. That’s why Murdoch’s premier “conservative” media properties are so tenaciously anti-Trump.

Murdoch has a problem, though, in that the audiences of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are far from identical.  The latter naturally embrace the Davoisie agenda in toto and hate Trump with a passion.  The former is made up of a lot of middle American patriots who don’t like mass immigration and who do like Trump.  Moreover, Fox is far more profitable than the Journal, and thus far more important to the continued viability of the Murdoch empire, which is weighed down by the declining balance sheets of its nearly 200 print publications.  We look forward to this tension rising and intend to enjoy the difficult position into which it puts one of the premier opponents of Trumpism.

—DECIUS