Trump is, in the decisive sense, more conservative than the entire conservative establishment. Unlike them, he is actually trying to conserve something bigger than his job and status: namely, the American nation. Yet “Trumpism” needs something Trump himself cannot provide. John Derbyshire praises Trump’s “gut conservatism” as a welcome relief from the failures of the intellectual class. One can sympathize with his point without finding it altogether satisfying. “Gut conservatism” after all still depends on some definition of what conservatism is. Which requires thinking and writing, i.e., intellectualism, and perhaps even philosophy. The gut may be right more often than a broken clock, but—as Trump’s contradictory pronouncements over the years illustrate—it is unreliable and so must be ruled by the brain, which nature generously provides for the purpose. Derbyshire is thus too quick to dismiss conservative intellectualizing as irrelevant. Forging a fresh definition of conservatism, or of reinterpreting the old one to meet the necessities of the times, is not merely relevant but necessary.
Yet it is unquestionably true that to this task, our current crop of mainstream conservative intellectuals is not merely unsuited but wholly useless. National Review’s anti-Trump symposium reads as if it were written to make the point undeniable. Trump supports ethanol! Burn the heretic! At least listing the “conservative” boxes that Trump fails to check can be considered substantive. The rest of the symposium—like nearly all other conservative anti-Trump broadsides—consists merely of personal attacks. Many of which, to be fair, Trump has coming. But all this hardly amounts to a conservative refutation of, or counterproposal to, Trump’s program. The most they could say on that score was to paraphrase, probably subconsciously, Lionel Trilling’s dismissal of 20th century conservatism as “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas” and apply it to Trump.
But Trumpism, while not yet a coherent body of thought, points the way to one. Trump himself—no man of ideas, to say the least—is unsuited to the task of thinking through what his popularity means or how to build on it. Others will have to do the real work. Herewith, an attempt to get started.
America First
Trump’s two slogans—“Make America Great Again” and “Take Our Country Back”—point to the heart of Trumpism: “America First.” Some will no doubt flinch at being reminded of an alleged stain on America’s past. This is not the place to explain or defend 1940-41’s (unfairly maligned) America First Committee. It’s just that those two words capture the essence and appeal of Trumpism as no others do or could.
Trump seems to grasp intuitively something our elites have forgotten or smugly deny: politics is by nature particular. However arbitrary at the highest level of philosophical speculation, here on the ground, the distinctions between citizen and foreigner, compatriot and outsider, friend and enemy never go away. Even the ancient Greek philosophers—the greatest abstractionists of all time—understood the necessity of borders and the permanence of national distinctions. Socrates’ “city in speech”—the greatest political abstraction of all time—is closed to outsiders.
It’s not hard to understand why globalized elites—including the Republican billionaire donor class—favor the erasure of borders: they get, and stay, rich from it. More curious is why conservative intellectuals go along. No doubt some of their own funding comes from those same donors. Many of them also manifestly enjoy the preening that being on the side of enlightened opinion enables. In their hearts, nearly all “conservatives” long for absolution on the charge of “racism”. Like the atheist caricature of the devout husband guilt-wracked for coveting his own wife, the modern conservative believes the leftist lie that his natural affinity for people who look, think and speak like himself is shameful and illegitimate, to be internally repressed and publicly denied.
In this, the only difference between our “conservatives” and the liberals they claim to oppose is that the latter aren’t conflicted. Both groups have after all been educated at the same schools and steeped in the same post-American, far-left ideology. Thomas Sowell once eviscerated Rawls’ “difference principle”—the insistence that no policy, however beneficial to the common good, should be enacted if doesn’t help the lowest of the low—as the “wino’s veto.” Elite conservatives embrace it fully, not so much as an idea, but rather from the gut realization that privilege requires self-justification. Always taking the side of “the other”—the more alien and distant, the better—over and against their own people and country is a high-octane way to display high-mindedness. Speaking up for one’s own is the ultimate sign of a rube—or worse.
This yearning to appear high-minded has caused conservatives to equate principle with abstraction. They take the philosophic argument that “love of one’s own” is ultimately an insufficient basis for goodness to be reason’s last word and thus assume that anything particular—including their own country—must be, in and of itself, low and unworthy of their unalloyed allegiance: the high qua high always has some admixture of the abstract. Hence the continued insistence that, for America to be good, it must be conflated with its principles. Against any common-sense resistance to the latest righteous, destructive fad, conservatives and liberals alike scold from the same hymnal: “That’s not who we are.” To which Trump supporters instinctively respond: speak for yourselves. Maybe that’s not who you are, but it’s who we are, and we’re fed up with your sanctimony.
Paleo-conservatives are the notable hold-outs to this trend, but they embrace unreason in a different way. In their reverence for tradition, they must—if only implicitly—hold that tradition is good, or at the very least that their tradition is good for them. But for even that narrow formula to work, the good must have some content that transcends particulars. Those Greek philosophers—indispensable founders of “our tradition”—understood this clearly. But paleos are more hostile to abstraction than neocons are enamored of it, and insist that any theoretical investigation of the good or assertion of principle leads in a straight line to universalism, utopianism, quotas and open borders.
Both sects could learn something from their common inheritance. The American Founders managed to be principled and particularist, abstract and grounded, broad-minded and loyal, all at the same time. The Preamble to the United States Constitution pledges its purpose to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Note that there is no mention of tradition, culture or heritage. Not that the Founders dismissed or opposed these things, but they evidently—and wisely—concluded that unity, justice, tranquility, defense, welfare and liberty are all higher goods. And not merely our goods or good for us (though of course they are) but above all good simply.
Yet, as the Preamble’s final five words make abundantly clear, there are practical limits to how much good, and for whom, politics can accomplish. The Constitution and the social compact it enshrines are for us—the American people—and not for foreigners, immigrants (except those we choose to welcome), or anyone else. The original state constitutions of Massachusetts and Virginia—twin cradles of the American Revolution—state much the same: “The end of … government is to secure the existence of the body-politic; to protect it; and to furnish the individuals who compose it”; and “government is … instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community.” The same men who declared that “all men are created equal” also, and in virtually the same breath, excluded “all men” from de facto or implicit membership in the American nation.
The American people—like every people—have always felt in their bones their particularity, their uniqueness, their status as a people distinct from other peoples. Elites—donors and intellectuals alike, on both the left and the “right”—scoff at this natural, healthy and true belief as “nativism.” Is it then any wonder that the first presidential candidate in a generation to speak of America as something more than just a “shining city on a hill”—as an actual country, to be loved for what it is and not merely for what it represents or could become—has found enormous appeal?
Truth at Last!
The other, related source of Trump’s appeal is his willingness—eagerness—gleefulness!—to mock the ridiculous lies we’ve been incessantly force-fed for the past 15 years (at least) and tell the truth. “Diversity” is not “our strength”; it’s a source of weakness, tension and disunion. America is not a “nation of immigrants”; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants, and later still not to, and who may justly open or close our doors solely at our own discretion, without deference to forced pieties. Immigration today is not “good for the economy”; it undercuts American wages, costs Americans jobs, and reduces Americans’ standard of living. Islam is not a “religion of peace”; it’s a militant faith that exalts conversion by the sword and inspires thousands to acts of terror—and millions more to support and sympathize with terror. “American exceptionalism” does not require, or even encourage, us to democratize the world—a task of which we are in any case incapable. The Iraq War was a strategic and tactical blunder that destroyed a country (however badly governed), destabilized a region, and harmed American interests. The benefits of free trade concentrate at the top (outsize profits) and bottom (cheap panem et circenses); the middle, and especially the working, classes have been hurt by globalization.
When one hears words coming out of a politician’s mouth finally reflect—rather than diametrically oppose—what one can see with one’s own eyes, the effect, we’ve (re)discovered, can be exhilarating.
All of which is to say, the root cause of Trumpism is the spectacular failure of our elites to serve the people they ostensibly lead. Those howling the loudest about Trump—the Davos overclass, establishment Republicans, and American “conservative” intellectuals—are in Stage 4C denial that their obliviousness, coupled with their ability (ante Trump) to silence and marginalize all opposition, are the principal causes of his rise. Whether their failures stem from cynicism, venality, greed, rationalization, delusion or honest disagreement (I think it’s all of the above) will need to be thought through by later historians. For now, it’s enough finally to see clearly their errors and—to revive and rehabilitate a Clinton-era phrase—“move on.”
Nationhood, Sovereignty and Immigration
The first task is a simple reassertion of American nationhood and sovereignty. Which begins, yes, with regaining control over our borders and dismantling our insane immigration policies, both formal (e.g., the idiotic visa lottery) and informal (the bipartisan consensus not to enforce any law that results in less immigration—at least from non-European sources).
Let the full enormity of the crisis we face finally be realized. The left supports mass immigration and the Davos economy—top plus bottom against the middle—for obvious reasons. Republicans support it in fealty to their true masters (their donor class) and in the vain hope that they will get credit from the left for not being “racist.” More mysterious is why conservative intellectuals, whom one would think should know better, use abstractions to happy-talk themselves into believing all will turn out for the best, despite all observable evidence showing the contrary.
Here I address my neoconservative friends specifically, and also those Trump supporters who are either hostile to or try to wave away America’s founding creed. Yes, it is true that “all men are created equal.” But Lincoln adds the crucial caveat: all men are not “equal in all respects” (emphasis in the original). They are not “equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments or social capacity.” People from different nations with different circumstances, histories, beliefs and traditions will—by definition—hold very different conceptions of good government, some irreconcilably opposed to our own. It has been said that a principal cause of Rome’s fall was that “many men who never knew republican life and did not care for it … became Roman citizens.” Why then do we Americans continue to import millions upon millions who have never known republican life and do not care for it? In doing so, we do not uphold our Founding creed; we hasten and enable its oblivion.
