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One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)

Tuesday, October 03, 2017

The Left's War With Trump: Is America An Insane Monster Or Is America The Beautiful?

President Donald Trump (image via author)
by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: Is America an “insane monster," "a nation of madmen and sociopaths?” So says the hard left.

Meanwhile, Trump, his followers, and the right, contend for America the Beautiful.

What we are observing now is nothing less than a religious war, using the dictionary definition of religion broadly as “a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.” A "Holy War of the Worldviews” is far more apt than one of Judaeo-Christianity vs. Islam, a false dichotomy.

It's a Really Big Deal.

What’s really behind the left’s unbridled fury at Donald Trump?

His foibles alone do not explain it.

Irritation? Sure. Policy disputes? Definitely.

Unbridled fury? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Trump rides a populist nationalist wave to make explicit a fundamental clash of narratives between the left and the right. The hard left holds America to be Evil while the "globalist” elites hold America to be an atavistic, irrelevant artifact.

Trump, his followers, and the right, take an unflinching stand that America is Beautiful.
Not perfect. But Beautiful.

This is a clash of worldviews and a kind of civil war. And to quote a former future president: “In my opinion, [the agitation] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.… It will become all one thing or all the other.'" Follow along.“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”

Trump took the stage in Huntsville, Alabama, on Friday in support of Republican Sen. Luther Strange and diverted himself into criticism of athletes.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘get that son of a bitch off the field right now — he’s fired,’” Trump said at a rally in Alabama for Republican Sen. Luther Strange.

He added, “We’re proud of our country, and we’re proud of our flag.”

He repeated the sentiment on Saturday afternoon after Goodell responded, tweeting: “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL,or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”
First, though, to thicken the plot there are patriots on both sides of the ideological fence. The labor and ethnic left trends as patriotic as the right, and there are some beautiful classical liberals in the elite left. Yet their voices are hardly audible. It is the nomenklatura left, which holds the megaphone over there, that calls America Evil.

Rather than strictly left vs. right another way of framing this struggle -- for you transpartisans out there -- is as one between the Insiders, the “Elect,” and the Outsiders, the “Preterite.” Disclosure: I, a proud partisan, serve by sufferance of its editors as a grumpy advisor, and occasional contributor, to the Transpartisan Review.

Drawn from Puritan doctrine, which remains a chthonic force in America's psyche, the Elect are those supposedly predestined to go to Heaven whose marks of election include elite status on Earth. We Preterite are predestined to Hell, as revealed by our lack of fame, fortune, and other Earthly goodies.

The elite trend smug and hold us commoners in contempt. That contempt does not endear them to us.

For the Elect, America is considered more an atavism in this era of multinational corporate hegemony than, as by the left, Evil.

The overt political struggle in which we now are engaged, while painful, is a good thing. The long struggle coming out of the cultural shadows might resolve our long-festering cognitive dissonance. That term is defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.” It is the source of many a nervous breakdown.

Is America beautiful? Or evil?

President Trump’s narrative about America was on view in his recent speech before the United Nations: “The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.”

This speech appalled the hard left (and the Elect). Why?

They consider America fundamentally Evil. (Or Over.)

The political Holy War on view is one for the very definition, meaning, and legitimacy of what America has meant, and means, and for what it means to be an American. Trump and his supporters, notwithstanding his doctrinal inconsistencies, see America as fundamentally Beautiful. So does the right.

Rolling Stone’s brilliant Matt Taibbi in his most recent column puts the left’s view in his characteristically vivid terms:This is who we've always been, a nation of madmen and sociopaths, for whom murder is a line item, kept hidden via a long list of semantic self-deceptions, from "manifest destiny" to "collateral damage." We're used to presidents being the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible responsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodness. Now, the mask of respectability is gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, because the sickness is showing.

So much of the Trump phenomenon is about history. Fueling the divide between pro- and anti-Trump camps is exactly the fact that we've never had a real reckoning with either our terrible past or our similarly bloody present. The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should America's president look like?

Trump is no malfunction. He's a perfect representation of who, as a country, we are and always have been: an insane monster.
Taibbi’s view is by no means an outlier. There is a spellbinding article in a recent New Yorker making "the case against civilization" itself. It is an extensive meditation on “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” by James C. Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, and anthropologist James Suzman’s Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen. Short, oversimplified, summary: civilization itself is Bad.

That article’s author, John Lanchester, observes that “War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing." “It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping.” “Scott maintains … 'The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great.'”

This worldview used to be called “pastoral utopianism.” It can be traced back at least to Rousseau, who famously commenced his Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Law with the words “MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Pastoral utopianism -- the virtue of pure nature over impure civilization -- is very much part of the left’s core doctrine. Back to the Stone Age!

An “America the Evil” stance is not new, thank you very much Noam Chomsky. Yet it is getting mainstreamed. Last May, The New Yorker published a long, candid, essay by the Canadian-rooted Adam Gopnik. As I thereafter wrote here:Gopnik savagely takes his rhetorical tomahawk to the scalps of the Founders:

"And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy."
The mimetic power of “the Wall,” in the popular imagination, derives from its making vivid Trump’s protecting the narrative of America the Beautiful.

Yet, pace Gopnik, President Trump may be proposing to build the Wall on the wrong border.

Two of the left’s most brilliant, and potent, strategists, Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, in the second edition of their compelling -- essential -- work Re:Imagining Change (which I am preparing to review) present their, and the hard left’s, core narrative about America in terms no less vivid than Taibbi’s or Gopnik’s:"Five centuries of European colonial expansion and organized white supremacy have wiped out countless cultures, devastated ecosystems, and left us with a legacy of racism, economic disparity, militarism, and global inequity. Over 200 years of resource extraction, industrialization, and fossil fuel-driven economic growth have pushed our planet’s life-support systems to their breaking point.

Over time, the greed, racism, and violence of this history has become hardwired into many of the institutions and operating assumptions that define the global system: from government policies, to the influence of multinational corporations, to international financial and trade regimes, to the collective sense of what is politically possible. Underlying those overlapping systems is the logic of the past: rationalizing, justifying, normalizing. The mythologies of the conquistador, the slave master, and the Indian-killing “pioneer” live on in the economist who sees looted ecosystems merely as entries on a corporate balance sheet; the politician who exploits fear and racism to build their own power; or the corporate CEO who maximizes profits by paying his workers poverty wages.”
So, the hard left is appalled by Trump. Its level of unadulterated fury can best be interpreted as a reaction to his so nakedly pro-America and, also, pro-civilization, stance. The level of the left’s hysteria just cannot be explained by Trump's considerable, sometimes heroic, foibles or galootish tweets.

Nor can the enthusiasm of Trump's base be understood by reference to his mercurial agenda or his performance to date.

Something much deeper is afoot. It’s a Holy War of Worldviews.

What we are observing, especially through the media’s dark glass, is politically baffling. Certainly, the Politico-Media complex is baffled. Our situation can only be understood in quasi-theological terms ... as a “religious” war between those who are taking a stand for America the Beautiful, and civilization, and those who consider America Evil or, at best, Over.

The good news? This struggle being conducted explicitly and overtly, instead of implicitly and covertly, is a healthy -- even existentially necessary -- process.

The most important job of a president is that of national dramaturge composing the national narrative. A president’s most important role is that of articulating the story that defines our national identity.

A long twilight struggle of worldviews has, with Trump, moved from a covert fight, a form of guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare in the margins and shadows of society, to an overt one, fought out in the broad daylight of our political battlefields. This emergence gives America, and the world, a fighting chance to process the massive cognitive dissonance that has been debilitating us for at least a generation.

Let the sun shine in and thereby restore our culture to health. One side or the other’s narrative, at last, will prevail.

Either the hard left’s view that America is an “insane monster” will prevail and it will proceed to round us reactionaries up, conduct a purge, send the worst of us to the firing squads and the rest of us to the gulags. They believe that then, at long last, they will establish the Socialist Workers' Paradise we have so heroically thwarted.

(Or mess things up monumentally in the attempt. Hello Venezuela! There is also a fascinating tension in evidence between the left and the Democratic Elect, a topic beyond the scope of this column. Suffice to say for now that a recent Time Magazine characterized this as "the furies that threaten to tear it" -- the Democratic Party -- "apart.")

Or the right, and Trump, will prevail respecting the core Narrative. If so, the right will need to give all them leftists tenured professorships at various universities to get them out of our hair and put them somewhere where they can do minimal harm.

Yes. We've already done that! Obviously, however, we missed a few and must establish more endowed chairs to complete their exile from polite society and get the stragglers out of the way of “sovereignty, security and prosperity for all.”

That said, the socialists, whether national or international -- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. -- have availed themselves more amply of firing squads than has the right. That puts us at a slight tactical disadvantage but gives us a strategic advantage.

As the fictional Pierre Raspeguy said in Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurians, “You’ve got to have the people on your side … if you want to win….” This observation was translated into military doctrine by the great General David Petraeus, rescuing America’s military from the death grip of William Westmoreland’s doctrine of overwhelming firepower.

Somehow, the populace doesn’t find firing squads really endearing. If a stray left winger accidentally stumbles across this column please advise Vast Left Wing Conspiracy Headquarters.

If you, like me, have been finding the political action befuddling the crystal ball now begins to clear. I previously wrote here that the left was contesting Trump’s claim to America’s once-and-future greatness.

That was a callow reading on my part. It goes much deeper.

The hard left is not merely contesting America’s greatness.

It is contesting America’s goodness.

The hard left is holding America, explicitly and virulently, up as Evil.

Trump, his eclectic supporters, and the right, hold America as Beautiful.

Welcome to the Holy War of the Worldviews.

Much is at stake:

America.

Beautiful?

Evil?

Pick a side.
-----------------
Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

Tags: Ralph Benko, Left's War With Trump, America, Insane Monster, America The Beautiful? To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
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