Donald
Trump deserves to be president. More than any of the current
candidates—although not to their exclusion—he is the best choice to lead
this nation.
This is not an easy position to hold in DC. Having already lost friends
of multiple years and having been subjected to practically every
hysterical insult you expect people to stop using at the age of 15, I
think it’s safe to say that the social pressure so many #NeverTrump
people want to bring to bear on Trump supporters has materialized.
Speaking for those same Trump supporters, I also would say that it only
hardens our opinions. I have never been so certain of anything as I am
now that Trump is the one man who could deliver on a promise to make not
just America, but the Republican Party, great again.
However, I owe those railing against me an answer to this question: “Why?”
It’s a valid question, even if those asking it often do so because of
bigoted and incorrect assumptions about Trump supporters. Some of our
detractors think we’re all old, stupid, kneejerk reactionaries with poor
bank accounts and even poorer educations, not to mention total
bankruptcy in the realm of conservative principle, if we even knew
conservative principles existed. Others think we’re simply
unaccomplished, cynical opportunists trying to introduce toxic white
identity politics (or worse, white nationalism) into the GOP to feather
our own nests while destroying the party.
I’m Not the Trump Caricature You Think I Am
For me, nothing could be further from the truth. I am young, financially
secure, and graduated from one of America’s elite liberal arts colleges
with strong academic distinctions thanks to a senior thesis attempting
to reconstruct Frank Meyer’s fusionism post-George W. Bush. I once
vocally supported the Gang of Eight immigration bill, and my employers
since leaving college have included National Review, the Senate GOP leadership, the Washington Times,
Glenn Beck, and former Republican Party Web Director and anti-Trump
gadfly Liz Mair, none of whom could be accused of being either fringe or
unprincipled.
My resume needs no help, and without going into detail, it would
probably be far better for me from a career standpoint if I had backed
Ted Cruz this entire time. However, deciding who to support for
president isn’t about me. It’s about what’s best for the country and for
the Republican Party. Trump is both.
How can I say that? I could make the standard boilerplate argument about
qualifications for the job. After all, Trump is probably the most
accomplished man in recent history to make a run at the presidency. He
has built an international business empire that is instantly
identifiable. Furthermore, unlike Mitt Romney, whose business experience
was arguably difficult to transfer into the realm of politics, the
specific type of business Trump does has required him to work with
everyone from local politicians to foreign heads of state in order to
succeed. The man knows his way around finessing politicians probably as
much as some diplomats do, and, given the president’s responsibility to
represent America to the world, this experience is invaluable.
Furthermore, Trump’s capacity to adopt the posture of a strongman is an
asset in dealing with illiberal foreign regimes, which generally view
the heads of Western liberal democracies as easy dupes and empty suits.
Trump’s presentational style is a type of politician they recognize, and
I daresay one they will respect more easily.
Or, I could talk about Trump’s great personal virtues. Yes, I said personal virtues. For while it has become de rigeur among
conservatives to sneer at Trump as a man who personifies the opposite
of family values, I submit that the evidence of Trump’s character as a
family man and father is not only irrefutable: it literally stands
beside him every time he wins a primary. I’m talking, of course, about
Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. Any parent who had raised even one child to
turn out as well as any of those three adults would have cause to beam
with pride. To have raised all three is simply mind-boggling.
Whatever Trump’s flaws as a spouse—and to be sure, they exist—we should
all be so lucky as to have a father like him. In fact, one of the
filthiest and most transparently dishonest memes to have emerged from
this election is the image of Trump as a leering incestuous molester
because of some (admittedly cringe-worthy) comments he made about
Ivanka. However, if Trump was crawling into his daughter’s bed to molest
her, let’s just say Ivanka doesn’t seem to have noticed and leave this disgusting smear in the trash where it belongs.
The First Part of the Intellectual Case for Donald Trump
However, convincing as I do think these arguments are, there is a
conspicuous absence of a third case, which one usually sees being made
for presumptive GOP nominees (and whatever the denialists say, yes,
Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee now) at this point in their run—i.e., to my knowledge, no one has yet made an intellectual case for Trump.
No one has marshaled philosophical, practical, and principled
arguments in defense of the idea that thinking people who care about
such things should, without any compromise of their own critical
faculties, decide that Trump is the man to lead America.
Make no mistake, it is not an easy case to make, not because there
are no arguments for it, but because you can’t meaningfully separate
Trump from the numerous other cultural and historical phenomena that
gave rise to his candidacy, many of which are far from obvious without
being exposited. However, at its most basic, that case will advance
three arguments:
- That Trump, alone among the candidates, is forcing conservatives to
defend the people left behind by liberalism, however unfashionable they
may be, and however culturally alien they may have once been to our
movement.
- That Trump’s candidacy is about more than one man becoming
president: it is symbolic of a national cultural Zeitgeist, and speaks
to the modern political moment, in ways that no other candidate has been
willing or able to do.
- That Trump’s candidacy is the only tonic that can cure the
conservative movement of its many ills, by forcing it to reckon both
with the many ways in which the country has left it behind, and with the
damning ways in which it has betrayed itself: in short, that Trump is
chemotherapy for the soul of the Right.
Now, the reader can probably tell that this isn’t so much a hard case
to make as a big one. When it comes to the first prong, I speak not
merely from dusty Ivory Tower pontification, but from actual real-world
experience with my subject matter. When I say “the people left behind by
liberalism,” I’m not speaking of some abstract demographic category.
I’m speaking of actual people whom I really knew, including some of the
very people whose attraction to Trump most frightens his critics.
For this reason, and also because (being a Trump supporter) I’m
not exactly above a little sensationalism, I’m going to start this piece
by answering a very uncomfortable question: Why do white nationalists
support Trump, if he isn’t one himself?
I’m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I’m pretty sure I’m
disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I
do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I do
have a fairly unique ability to answer this question, and with apologies
to Lloyd Bentsen, it can be summed up this way: I know white
nationalism. A white nationalist was a friend of mine. Trump is no white nationalist.
If he’s president, there might well be fewer of them. Why? Well, if
you’ll indulge me in just a little more autobiographical navel-gazing,
you’ll find out.
The Girl in the Brown Skirt
“Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the
too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.” —“A Christmas
Carol,” Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits
I once met a young woman whom I will call Sylvia, after her favorite
poet, Sylvia Plath. At the time, Sylvia had been raised as a member of
an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean “infamous.”
These weren’t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend
conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who
probably get raided by the FBI.
Where I met her was probably the last place you might expect to
find white nationalists, closeted or otherwise. Now since I am, as
already established, Jewish, this obviously made me initially regard the
girl with something less than charity. I was almost afraid to speak to
her.
That is, until I actually did speak to her, in the company of another
friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her
ideology, a task with which I agreed to help, mostly out of morbid
intellectual curiosity. When we first spoke to her, Sylvia was fairly
careful with her words, and obviously seemed to realize she wasn’t among
company who’d take kindly to open admiration of Adolf Hitler. She was,
however, more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and
restricting immigration.
Now, at the time, I was fresh off having argued for the Gang of Eight
bill until I was proverbially blue in the face, so when Sylvia started
talking about immigration, I obviously pounced on this as a first
opportunity to break down her worldview. I’m fairly certain that all I
managed to do was scare her, though she did actually put up a far better
fight than any white nationalist has a right to, probably because,
despite her sheltered upbringing, she was off-the-charts brilliant. This
instantly registered with me, and was later confirmed when she later
revealed she’d learned a new language in only two weeks.
Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and
message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret
at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells.
After a while, she got used to me, and we bonded over our mutual love of
H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor. As a result, she began to open
up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle
prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.
Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew. Needless to
say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people
train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone’s features,
yet I had registered as pure Aryan. The realization that “they can look
like us,” to use her words, set off something of a minor existential
crisis for her, but I’m pleased to report that she got over it, and that
my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.
When Two Worlds Collide
That’s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that
I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with
her like a human being and an equal. From someone who belonged to a
group that she’d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people
like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual
on my end.
After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was
out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball
straight through its foundation. What happened instead was that, with
the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other’s decency and
humanity, we started dissecting the other’s culture as it actually
existed rather than how we’d been taught to believe it did. To make a
very long story short, she came away understanding that my people
weren’t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an
appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were
hurting.
I say “unfairly” for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as
brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable
white trash. Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means
everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling. One
doesn’t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan
Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is
not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are.
In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they
think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at
its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.
The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia’s community is
unfair is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss
uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish
white nationalist society does better than our own. Ironically, given
their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual
education.
One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every
other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English,
and achieved total fluency in both by their teens. I’m from California,
and our own education system wishes it were that good. We don’t
have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior
such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do. After
all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn’t mean
punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC
Metro system pretends.
Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family
and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a
pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews
turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they
didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out
at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.
Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.
Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture
This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson
that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white
nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor
spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession
No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone”
ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over
cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white
nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by
economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now
adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their
heritage for no good reason.
That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the
heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which
is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western
European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of
the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the
consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and
reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford
to keep).
They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own
communities follow, but also because they think these norms make
constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism
possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every
day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if
they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will
become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of
paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional
government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a
separation of powers.
Where this otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride
in Western culture atrophies into white nationalism when the person
holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western
civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race. One particularly
irreverent white nationalist YouTube songster sums this attitude up in a video mocking libertarians: “It’s not that freedom is bad/But only whites think it’s rad.”
Moreover, and this cannot be stated enough: these people genuinely
believe that to be proud of the history of Western European
accomplishment, and one’s own descent from the people responsible, is
taboo in modern America. If you look at what cultural studies
departments, much of modern media, left-wing college students, and the
crazy wing of the Democratic Party says, this is probably at least
partially accurate. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just leftists who
are responsible for the rise of white nationalism in communities like
Sylvia’s. We conservatives bear some blame too, though in this case,
largely because of misunderstandings of how our own behavior is
perceived.
The Right Has Also Failed
The biggest problem we have is that many conservatives are,
understandably, reluctant to engage with the sort of leftist,
victim-culture-spouting loons who regard Western civilization as
unrepentantly evil. This is not because we have no good arguments
against them; we do. But to argue with them, we think, makes them look
more serious and relevant than they are. If you live in the rarefied
world of Washington policy debates, this approach probably makes sense
and even seems obvious.
But if you’re a blue-collar worker in Appalachia being screamed
at by leftist protesters that you have “white privilege” and all you
hear from the official Right is stony silence, you come to a wildly
different conclusion: you assume conservatives are either ashamed to
express our disagreement, or don’t disagree.
Add to this the fact that so much of the official Right’s response to
left-wing attacks about diversity involves not denying their premise,
but instead pointing to how many token members of each ethnic group are
Republicans, or the fact that we’ll throw accusations like “racist”
around over issues like immigration, and it gets harder and harder for
otherwise conservative people to deny the idea that “conservatism”
doesn’t want to conserve them, or the Western values and norms that made conservatism and constitutionalism possible, at all. The only people who do seem to want to man those barricades, from their perspective, are white nationalists.
This is not ground we should be ceding to extremists. Yet, so far,
only one candidate has refused to do such a thing: Donald Trump.
Trump, whatever else he might be, is unabashedly pro-Western. What’s
more, he understands the essentially cultural and even spiritual nature
of the vacuum white nationalism fills. Unlike so many so-called
“reformocons,” who wax poetic about the need to empathize with
blue-collar workers’ economic concerns, yet are only willing to throw
“family-friendly” tax credits at them like table scraps to starving
dogs, Trump understands that however besieged people like Sylvia feel by
economic woes, they feel even more besieged by attacks on their pride
and dignity.
Unlike the white nationalists, Trump has defended that pride and
dignity without once mentioning race, but instead with reference to the
historical reality and promise of uniquely American greatness.
His pitch is nationalist, yes, but it is not racist, and so immediately
understandable that you can even put it on a baseball cap.
In fact, Trump, and Trump alone, has been willing to say what should
have been obvious from the start: that the universalism and Whig
historical pretensions of Kemp-and-W-style “bleeding heart conservatism”
are dangerous distractions if they leave the American people as wounded
prey for anti-American, extremist bottom feeders.
His image of a man fighting for America and its allies, and only them
is a long-overdue return to form for a GOP long since captured by
delusions of immanentizing the eschaton at the point of a gun. Those
delusions have to stop, and Trump has to be allowed to punch through
them.
Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on
Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as
proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own
empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.
God bless,
JohnnyD