Saying what we've always said - because it's right and true

Don't confuse us with what Trumpists are peddling

The media company that owns the newspaper in my city has published an array of magazines for several years. There are a couple of general-interest / lifestyle magazines, a business quarterly, a publication geared toward the Boomer demographic. There was a farming magazine, but ad revenue dropped off and it was discontinued. I’ve written regularly for them, and still do for the ones still in existence, as well as special publications of the paper itself, such as one with a focus on veterans every spring, and one on cancer survivors every fall.

I also used to write a regular opinion column for the paper itself. I freely chose national- and even world-stage-scope topics until I was told to keep it local. Okay, I thought, there’s plenty to examine right around these parts from my point of view.

Destiny exquisitely timed a spring 2015 column to appear the day after our city’s primary, and when I realized that, I came up with a no-holds-barred piece that went like this:

This is an interesting week to have a column due date.  The finished product will be in your hands the day after the Athens of the Prairie has determined who it wants as its next mayor.

What I offer, then, is the victory speech I would give had it been me instead of one of the two actual contenders - and rest assured, this pundit has zero interest in vying for the position.

But here goes:

Thank you for your expression of confidence in my vision of leadership.

Let me reiterate the themes I ran on, as I have no intention of diluting them or compromising on them.  After all, you knew what you’d be getting, and pressed the button that you did.

As I said during the campaign, government can’t create jobs.  It’s not even very good at “fostering an environment” for job creation.  Human ingenuity and the faith placed in it by investment capital creates jobs, and there’s no way to tell what someone is going to come up with that is a game-changer. A year before Clessie Cummins put his first diesel engine in a Packard and took W.G. Irwin for a ride, no one anticipated that development.  Ditto the Reeves brothers and their variable-speed pulley.

So, while the Economic Development Board’s studies, surveys and outreach junkets can yield useful information to those with either ideas or capital, there’s not much of a role for government beyond taking every step to keep regulation and taxation to a bare minimum.

Don’t look for my administration to put all its education eggs in the public basket.  In particular, the push for ever-proliferating pre-K will fall on deaf ears in my office.  It’s yet another bureaucratic busy-work scheme.  If it has any purpose beyond that, it’s to indoctrinate each new crop of our youngest citizens in the ways of a centrally planned society.  Ditto job training.  We must champion private-sector alternatives to the twin aims of the public sector: preparing the youth for some kind of pre-determined “jobs of tomorrow” and filling their heads with all kinds of mischievous notions about “social justice” and “sustainability.”

Speaking of this latter notion, don’t look for my administration to channel any resources toward anything “green.”  The global climate is not in any kind of trouble, and so we’re not going to formulate policy on a fiction.

And with regard to the other notion mentioned above, you won’t be seeing any kind of programs wasting your tax dollars on “diversity” or “inclusion.” The 44,000 people who live here come in all kinds of colors.  A few of them have unconventional notions of companionship.  Making this a point of focus presumes that some of these demographics are subject to discrimination, and need government to erode everyone’s general liberty to protect them.  This is as much of a fiction as a troubled global climate.

With regard to how people in my administration treat each other, I’ll be setting a tone of mutual respect.  That said, I’ll not brook any subversion of the orientation I’m outlining here.  Furthermore, I understand that, at the local level, government and politics are particularly susceptible to turf battles and gossip.  If such conduct comes to my attention, or that of the human-resources office and is shown to be detrimental to my aims, those involved will get one chance to knock it off and act like team players.

Mainly, my administration is here to keep you safe, keep our public property modernized and upgraded, and get out of your way. 

It’s your Columbus.

The letters to the editor castigating me (“surely a more responsible conservative voice can be found”) started coming in. I remember two in particular: one from a longtime Democratic state representative, and one from a city resident who happens to be world-famous in the folk-music realm.

I think the paper let me write two or three more columns, and then I received a call from the main editor with whom I’d worked. He usually communicated with me by email, so I knew something was up. He said that all the editors with whom I worked, as well as the paper’s publisher, had met to discuss the “increasingly strident” tone of my most recent columns. I was given a choice: the column or my magazine work. Running the numbers made that one a no-brainer.

I didn’t like it, of course. I felt that a big part of my mission as a writer was to forthrightly state the conservative case in a world increasingly hostile to that perspective. I took comfort in the fact that I still had Late in the Day, where I could, can, and do opine freely from a three-pillared conservative perspective. I’ve since added Barney and Clyde, the biweekly podcast I cohost with libertarian Clyde Myers, and, of course, Precipice.

It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that my column got the axe just months before the Very Stable Genius descended the Trump Tower escalator and irrevocably changed post-America’s political landscape. One can see how the Trump phenomenon happened. Conservatives, and, more broadly speaking, Republican voters were aghast that the country had elected a former community organizer with a past of being mentored by the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Rashid Khalidi, the Midwest Academy and Jeremiah Wright to the presidency. They were further outraged at what a limp-cookie response Republicans on Capitol Hill offered as developments such as the “Affordable” Care Act and the stimulus came down the pike. The Tea Party was the product of this frustration. For a while, it fired up the Right, but when that didn’t translate into any moving of the policy needle, another layer of dismay set in. The VSG, with his brash demeanor, looked like just the ticket for finally putting up a fight against the Left’s agenda.

And then the platelets shifted to reveal the fault lines we see today. There’s no denying that Trump has a base at least as steeped in cult worship as the Most Equal Comrade had. Trump can easily fill a stadium for one of his rallies. His shills comprise, I would say, a good 80 percent of right-of-center television and radio punditry. Some publications have been founded that have tasked themselves with trying to distill Trumpism into a coherent body of principles and ideas.

The Trump base hasn’t contented itself with stating and defending its own case in the marketplace of ideas, however. The remainder of the Right became the object of derision and ostracism. We were told that our public assertions of Trump’s unfitness were downright seditious, that we were giving aid and comfort to the Left.

But the unfolding of the Trump era has proven us right. There is no consistency to his approach. He doesn’t read - anything, from policy papers to history to novels to philosophy. He has gone from promising to eliminate the deficit in eight years to telling a roomful of supporters at Mar-a-Lago, “Who the hell cares about the budget?” On the heels of the unmistakably great results of the 2017 tax cut, he embarked on a trade war with China and the imposition of tariffs on the goods of several other nations. He has appeased Kim Jong-Un to no avail. He wants to see nations such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia pay the US to host troops, reducing our formidable defense apparatus to a mercenary business. He called an assemblage of the nation’s top military leaders, intelligence leaders and diplomats that they were “dopes and babies.”

When he gets stuff right, such as pulling out of the Paris climate accord, or prying back regulations, or supporting religious freedom, he sounds like someone coached him in what to say that would make him look like a “winner.” It doesn’t come across like the pronouncements of someone equipped with a bedrock set of principles.

Therein lies the additional layer of difficulty with which he has saddled actual conservatives. There is still an urgent need for the stating of the conservative case, of pointing out the nightmarish nature of the progressive vision. Now, however, it’s more challenging than ever to disseminate this message without it being confused in the public’s mind with “owning the libs” for emotional gratification.

Conservative commentary does indeed need to be razor-sharp and rock-solid, but it also needs to sound like it’s coming from grownups with consistent worldviews. Most people are not exposed to actual defenses of freedom, and to learning about the lineage of the ideas that have formed the conservative vision. Someone needs to be about that business.

They will not get that exposure if the perception is that those espousing conservatives are just yay-hoos shooting off their mouths - that is to say, Trumpists.

So that’s the line that must be walked. In walking it, we must comport ourselves in such a way that there is no confusion about who is espousing what.

We’re the alternative, not only to the Left, but to the emotion-driven, short-sighted, cult-figure-focused message of Trumpism.

We’re the voice for what is immutable. We’re the ones inviting our fellow citizens to cast their lot with something that’s not fleeting.