Wheat from chaff - today's edition
Now that Trump 2.0 is underway, extricating them from each other becomes a quixotic undertaking, but no less imperative
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Of the various forms of damage that Donald Trump has inflicted on post-America, arguably the most egregious is the co-opting of actual conservative positions into the incoherent populism by which he operates.
In a piece for The Freemen News-letter in November titled “The Conflation Problem,” I put it this way:
We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine.
This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.
The next step is for the left to oh-so-cordially invite conservatives to consider the question: "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?”
I’d wager that it doesn’t. There are still so many voices—The Freemen News-letter, among them—as well as National Review and The Dispatch (and my Substack Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.
But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.
The task among those who still prioritize clarity is to strive with all available effort to disentangle this conflation. It is going to increasingly require a supreme steadiness of nerves.
A few days later, here at Precipice, I posted the first in what has become a series of essays on separating the wheat from the chaff. I listed a few examples of what I meant:
Laudable stuff going on
The move to get wokeness out of the military
Resolute affirmation that Israel is one of the US’s closest allies
Reining in the EPA
Lowering the nation’s tax burden
Getting rid of the Department of Education
Stuff going on that is bad
“America First”
Rampant use of crude language in our public discourse
Strong hints from the Trumpists that Ukraine will be handled differently that Israel
Refusal to level with the American people that the cause of our appointment with financial ruin is the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare
Trump’s pressure on Congress to use recess to hurry through cabinet appointments
Yesterday was the Inauguration, so it’s not longer necessary to characterize such bullet-point enumerations as a picture of what would happen were the Very Stable Genius to win the election. That’s a done deal, which ups the stakes for maintaining a distinction between the worldview bequeathed to us by Burke, Tocqueville, Kirk and Scruton and the hot mess to which the drool-besotted are enthralled.
Tone takes on a more vigorous significance as does content now that VSG 2.0 is a fait accompli.
Yesterday’s proceedings were brimming with tone. His inaugural address was intentionally not designed to be a grand pronouncement of an American vision for the ages, but rather yet another opportunity to brag about how minority demographics turned out for him in November, how the outgoing administration botched pretty much everything (which it did, but focus on which was a look backward, and a signal that the extending of grace will have no place in what is shaping up) and the cryptic yet not-too-hard-to-decipher proclamation that “we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”
The whole damn thing was a rally. We now have a precedent for turning executive order-signing into a forum for pop-concert-level adulation, with his setting up a desk for the task onstage at Capitol One Arena. And let’s not forget the Village People.
The spectacle of seeing the children from all three of his marriages standing behind him is a reminder that the VSG basks in a perception of himself as a stud muffin, even as the first two mothers have been consigned to obscurity. The third? Well, this is her moment in the limelight, and she showed up decked out to the nines for it. But no one has forgotten the dalliances with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal when Barron was an infant. But then, public humiliation in the form of infidelity hasn’t stopped anyone willing to make that trade-off since Hillary Clinton proceeded into her own political career on the heels of the Lewinsky revelation.
Not that the giddy minions care, but Trumpism has handed the Left its lowest-hanging fruit yet. The muddled batter into which some actually conservative elements have been folded is now set to become US administration policy.
And progressives are already taking advantage of it. A column in the UK Independent bears the come-on title “My Biggest Fear as Trump Takes Office: Moral Apathy,” which could be interpreted any number of ways. What the author means by it is in large part that the new administration is going to abruptly shift from government subsidization of the play-like energy forms back to taking the shackles off of the ones with proven reliability and affordability - which is a good thing. But such is the degree to which the term “morality” has been distorted in our time.
So a fresh and current bullet-point listing of what constitutes wheat and what constitutes chaff is warranted this morning.
Herewith:
Wheat
The above-mentioned energy policy. Fossil fuels remain key to human advancement, and the Paris Climate Agreement is an erosion of all signatories’ sovereignty, as well as a massive redistribution scheme. And electric-vehicles mandates are antithetical to the free market which actual conservatives understand to be a key component of their worldview.
Affirming that there are only two genders, which was assumed as a basic biological fact prior to five minutes ago.
The objective of revamping federal government disaster relief.
Chaff:
A transactional approach to the situations in Ukraine and Israel. To speak of deals is to demonstrate a willingness to meet evil halfway. With sufficient Western resolve, and a recognizable United States in the lead, both of those countries could repel their invaders and be secure in their sovereignty.
Protectionism. Trump made it very clear yesterday that tariffs are front and center in his economic vision.
The expansionist impulse. While a cogent argument can be made that the Carter-era handing over of the Panama Canal was ill-considered, undoing it, in a sane world, would require the same kind of negotiation by which the hand-over was crafted. The Gulf of Mexico has been called that since the 1600s. Denmark was an original signatory to NATO and has been an unfailingly reliable ally ever since. And now its alienation has become a factor in US relations with it, due to the Greenland blather. Canada is likewise an historically friendly neighbor and NATO ally.
Ending birthright citizenship. Fortunately, this one will surely end up in the Supreme Court, where Trump’s three appointments will surely hew to the Constitution and strike down his edict.
The above-mentioned tone. Trumpism intends to stomp into the dust anything and everything outside its perimeter, and crudeness is the go-to arrow in its quiver for achieving that.
It’s a tall order, but we must not lose our balance standing on the ever-more-narrow sliver of terrain. Few post-Americans have any interest in listening to us, but such was the case when Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, or when National Review was launched.
Conservatism’s emphasis has always been on the immutable. We don’t tweak what we know to be true and changeless to meet the present moment’s snapshot of humanity’s situation.
I’ll continue to look for signs that the nation’s bedrock institutions can withstand what is coming, but I confess I’m not confident that they can.