Trump is commonsensically
undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Donald Trump continues to baffle.
Never Trump Republicans
still struggle to square the circle of quietly agreeing so far with most of his
policies, as they loudly insist that his record is already nullified by its
supposedly odious author.
Or surely it soon will be discredited by the next
Trumpian outrage.
Or his successes belong to congressional and Cabinet members,
while his failures are all his own.
Rarely do they seriously reflect on what
otherwise over the last year might have been the trajectory of a Clinton
administration.
Contrary to popular supposition, the
Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed
with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.) Rather,
it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.
To many progressives and indeed
elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly
naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption;
repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent;
herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly
disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class
appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump’s very essence wars
with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity
Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The
Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a
concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of
forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town
in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf
strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States.
Yet one way of understanding Trump —
particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the
last eight years of the Obama administration. In reductionist terms, Trump is
the un-Obama.
Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple
reductive negativism. Republicans have not seriously attempted to roll back the
administrative state since Reagan. On key issues of climate change,
entitlements, illegal immigration, government spending, and globalization, it
was sometimes hard to distinguish a Bush initiative from a Clinton policy or a
McCain bill from a Biden proposal. There was often a reluctant acceptance of
the seemingly inevitable march to the European-style socialist administrative
state.
Of course, there were sometimes
differences between the two parties, such as the George W. Bush’s tax cuts or
the Republicans’ opposition to Obamacare.
Yet for the most part, since 1989,
we’ve had lots of rhetoric but otherwise no serious effort to prune back the
autonomous bureaucracy that grew ever larger.
Few Republicans in the executive
branch sought to reduce government employment, deregulate, sanction radical
expansion of fossil-fuel production, question the economic effects of
globalization on Americans between the coasts, address deindustrialization,
recalibrate the tax code, rein in the EPA, secure the border, reduce illegal
immigration, or question transnational organizations.
To do all that would
require a president to be largely hated by the Left, demonized by the media,
and caricatured in popular culture — and few were willing to endure the
commensurate ostracism.
Trump has done all that in a manner
perhaps more Reaganesque than Reagan himself.
In part, he has been able to make
such moves because of the Republican majority (though thin) in Congress and
also because of, not despite, his politically incorrect bluntness, his
in-your-face talk, innate cunning, reality-TV celebrity status, animalistic
energy, and his cynical appraisal that tangible success wins more support than
ideology.
And, yes, in part the wheeler-dealer Manhattan billionaire developed
real sympathy for the forgotten losers of globalization.
Even his critics sometimes concede
that his economic and foreign-policy agendas are bringing dividends. In some
sense, it is not so much because of innovative policy, but rather that he is
simply bullying his way back to basics we’ve forgotten over the past decades.
The wonder was never how to grow the
economy at 3 percent (all presidents prior to 2009 had at one time or another
done just that), but rather, contrary to “expert” economic opinion, how to
discover ways to prevent that organic occurrence.
Obama was the first modern president
who apparently figured out how.
It took the efforts of a 24/7 redistributionist
agenda of tax increases, federalizing health care, massive new debt, layers of
more regulation, zero-interest rates, neo-socialist regulatory appointments,
expansionary eligibility for entitlements, and constant anti-free-market
jawboning that created a psychological atmosphere conducive to real
retrenchment, mental holding patterns, and legitimate fears over discernable
success.
Obama weaponized federal agencies including the IRS, DOJ, and EPA in
such a manner as to worry anyone successful, prominent, and conservative enough
to come under the federal radar of a vindictive Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, or a
FISA court.
Trump has sought to undo all that,
point by point.
The initial result so far is not rocket science, but rather a
natural expression of what happens when millions of Americans believe they have
greater freedom and safety to profit and innovate, and trust they will not be
punished, materially or psychologically, for the ensuing successful results.
The radical upsurge in business and consumer confidence is not revolutionary
but almost natural.
The Left and Never Trump Right claim that Trump is Stalin,
Hitler, or Mussolini.
In fact, for the first time in eight years, it is
highly unlikely that the FBI, IRS, CIA, DOJ, and other alphabet-soup agencies
see their tasks as going after the president’s perceived opponents.
The same about-face is true on the
foreign-policy front, as the ancient practice of deterrence replaced the modern
therapeutic mindset.
Obama blurred, deliberately so, the lines between allies
and hostiles.
America experienced the worst of both worlds: We were rarely
respected by our friends, even more rarely feared by our enemies; loud
rhetorical muscularity was backed up only by “strategic patience” and “leading
from behind.”
On the supposedly friendly side,
Europe assumed that the United States would fawn after the virtue-signaling
Paris Climate Accord.
The Palestinians concluded that there was no shelf life
on victimhood and that America simply would not, could not, dare not move its
embassy to Jerusalem as the Congress had chronically showboated it would.
NATO
just knew that endless subsidies were its birthright and prior commitments were
debatable.
The West apparently lapped up Obama’s Cairo speech: But when even
the European Renaissance and Enlightenment were seen as derivatives of Islam,
there is not much left to boast about.
On the unfriendly side, China sensed
there was little danger in turning the Spratley Islands into an armed valve of
the South China Sea.
Russia understood that America was obsequiously “flexible”
and ready to push a red plastic reset button in times of crisis.
ISIS assumed that American lawyers
were vetoing air-strike targets.
Iran guessed rightly that the Obama
administration would concede a lot to strike a legacy deal on nonproliferation.
It was unsure only about whether the Obama administration’s eagerness to
dissimulate about the disadvantageous details were due to a sincere desire to
empower revolutionary, Shiite Iran as an antipode to Israel and the Sunni oil
monarchies, or arising from a reckless need to leave some sort of
foreign-policy signature.
Kim Jung-un concluded that the eight years of the
Obama administration provided a rare golden moment to vastly expand its nuclear
and missile capability — and then announce it as an irrevocable fait accompli
after Obama left office.
Again, the common denominator was
that the Obama administration, in quite radical fashion, had sought a therapeutic
inversion of foreign policy — in a way few other major nations had previously
envisioned.
Trump’s appointees almost
immediately began undoing all that.
There were no more effective avatars of
old-style deterrence than James Mattis and H. R. McMaster.
Neither was
political.
Both long ago embraced a realist appraisal of human nature,
predicated on two ancient ideas: We all are more likely to behave when we
accept that the alternative is far more dangerous to ourselves, and the world
is better off when everyone knows the laws in the arena.
Just as Obama’s
pseudo–red lines in Syria signaled to the Iranians or North Koreans that there
were few lines of any sort anywhere; so too the destruction of ISIS
suggested to others that there might be far fewer restrictions on an American
secretary of defense anywhere
On the cultural side, the Trump team
figuratively paused, examined its inheritance from the prior administration,
and apparently concluded something like “this is unhinged.” Then it proceeded,
to the degree possible, to undo it.
Open borders, illegal immigration,
and sanctuary cities are the norms of very few sovereign states. They are
aberrations that are unsustainable whether the practitioner is Canada, Mexico,
or the United States.
Calling a small pond or large puddle on a farm’s low
spot an “inland waterway” subject to federal regulation is deranged; undoing
that was not radical, but commonsensical.
Trump sought to revive the cultural
atmosphere prior to Obama’s assertion that he would fundamentally transform
what had already been a great country.
In 2008, it would have been
inconceivable that NFL multimillionaires would refuse to stand for the National
Anthem — much less in suicidal fashion insult their paying fans by insinuating
that they deserved such a snub because they were racists and xenophobes.
It was
Byzantine that a country would enter an iconoclastic frenzy in the dead of
night, smashing and defacing statues without legislative or popular democratic
sanction.
The Un-Obama agenda was not simply
reflexive or easy — given that Obama was the apotheosis of a decades-long
progressive dream.
After all, in year one, Trump has been demonized in a manner
unprecedented in post-war America, given the astonishing statistic that 90
percent of all media coverage of his person and policies has been negative.
Obama was a representation of a progressive view of the Constitution that
about a quarter of the population holds, but in Obama, that view found a rare
megaphone for an otherwise hard sell.
One would have thought that all
Republican presidents and presidential candidate would be something like the
antitheses to progressivism.
In truth, few really were.
So given the lateness
of the national hour, a President Nobama could prove to be quite a change.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis
Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and
Won, released in October from Basic
Books.
