Photo Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a
defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since
2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the
Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect.
No longer.
Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to
buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology,
to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding
cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.
No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the
flawed deal without a second thought.
Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and
eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating
sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran
knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were
to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an
American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of
Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the
plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the
mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate
response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.
Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for
elites to virtue signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in
their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both
to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and
to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not
now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions
reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed
convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S.
departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own
targeted goals.
Rich NATO allies either could not or would not pay their
promised defense commitments to the alliance. To embarrass them into doing so
was seen as heretical. No more.
Trump jawboned and ranted about the asymmetries. And more
nations are increasing rather than decreasing their defense budgets. The
private consensus is that the NATO allies knew all along that they were exactly
what Barack Obama once called “free riders” and justified that subsidization by
ankle-biting the foreign policies of the United States—as if an uncouth America
was lucky to underwrite such principled members. Again, no more fantasies.
China was fated to rule the world. Period. Whining about
its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the
inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on. Progressives knew the
Communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and
destroyed civil liberties, and yet in “woke” fashion tip-toed around criticizing
the Other. Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant
to the family of nations. In a protracted tariff struggle, there are lots of
countries in Asia that could produce cheap goods as readily as China, but far
fewer countries like the United States that have money to be siphoned off in
mercantilist trade deals, or the technology to steal, or the preferred homes
and universities in which to invest.
The Palestinians were canonized as permanent refugees.
The U.S. embassy could never safely move to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem.
The Golan Heights were Syrian. Only a two-state solution requiring Israel to
give back all the strategic border land it inherited when its defeated enemies
sought to destroy it in five prior losing wars would bring peace. Not now.
The Palestinians for the last 50 years were always about
as much refugees as the East Prussian Germans or the Egyptian Jews and Greeks
that were cleansed from their ancestral homelands in the Middle East in the
same period of turbulence as the birth of Israel. “Occupied” land more likely
conjures up Tibet and Cyprus not the West Bank, and persecuted Muslims are not
found in Israel, but in China.
Suddenly Redeemable
An aging population, the veritable end to U.S.
manufacturing and heavy industry, and an opioid epidemic meant that America
needed to get used to stagnant 1 percent growth, a declining standard of
living, a permanent large pool of the unemployed, an annual increasing labor
non-participation rate, and a lasting rust belt of deplorables, irredeemables,
clingers and “crazies” who needed to be analyzed by Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton. At best, a middle-aged deplorable was supposed to learn to code or
relocate to the Texas fracking fields. Perhaps not now.
In the last 30 months, the question of the Rust Belt has
been reframed to why, with a great workforce, cheap energy, good administrative
talent, and a business-friendly administration, cannot the United States make
more of what it needs? Why, if trade deficits are irrelevant, do Germany,
China, Japan, and Mexico find them so unpleasant? If unfettered trade is so
essential, why do so many of our enemies and friends insist that we almost
alone trade “fairly,” while they trade freely and unfairly? Why do not Germany
and China argue that their vast global account surpluses are largely
irrelevant?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) assured
us that the world would be suffocating under greenhouse gases within 12 years.
Doom-and-gloom prophecies of “peak” oil warned us that our oil reserves would
dry up by the early 21st century. Former Vice President Al Gore warned us that
our port cities would soon be underwater. Economists claimed Saudi Arabia or Russia
would one day control the world by opening and closing their oil spigots. Not
now.
Three million more barrels of American oil are being
produced per day just since Trump took office. New pipelines will ensure that
the United States is not just the world’s greatest producer of natural gas but
perhaps its largest exporter as well.
Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them
with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve
affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more
cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East, and that ensuring
increased energy could revive places in the United States that were supposedly
fossilized and irrelevant. Normal is utilizing to the fullest extent a resource
that can discourage military adventurism in the Middle East, provide jobs to
the unemployed, and reduce the cost of living for the middle class; abnormal is
listening to the progressive elite for whom spiking gasoline and power bills
were a very minor nuisance.
Changing Roles
Open borders were our unspoken future. The best of the
Chamber of Commerce Republicans felt that millions of illegal aliens might
eventually break faith with the progressive party of entitlements; the worst of
the open borders lot argued that cheap labor was more important than
sovereignty and certainly more in their interests than any worry over the poor
working classes of their own country. And so Republicans for the last 40 years
joined progressives in ensuring that illegal immigration was mostly not
measured, meritocratic, diverse, or lawful, but instead a means to serve a
number of political agendas.
Most Americans demurred, but kept silent given the
barrage of “racist,” “xenophobe,” and “nativist” cries that met any measured
objection. Not so much now. Few any longer claim that the southern border is
not being overrun, much less that allowing a non-diverse million illegal aliens
in six months to flood into the United States without audit is proof that
“diversity is our strength.”
The Republican Party’s prior role was to slow down the
inevitable trajectory to European socialism, the end of American
exceptionalism, and homogenized globalized culture. Losing nobly in national
elections was one way of keeping one’s dignity, weepy wounded-fawn style, while
the progressive historical arc kept bending to our collective future. Rolling
one’s eyes on Sunday talk shows as a progressive outlined the next unhinged
agenda was proof of tough resistance.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged
the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and
showed us what progressives had in store for America.
On one side in 2020 is socialism, “Medicare for All,”
wealth taxes, top income tax rates of 70 or 80 or 90 percent, a desire for a
Supreme Court of full of “wise Latinas” like Sonia Sotomayor, insidious
curtailment of the First and Second Amendments, open borders, blanket
amnesties, reparations, judges as progressive legislators, permissible
infanticide, abolition of student debt, elimination of the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement bureau and the Electoral College, voting rights for
16-year-olds and felons, and free college tuition.
On the other side is free-market capitalism but within a
framework of fair rather than unfettered international trade, a smaller
administrative state, less taxation and regulation, constitutionalist judges, more gas and oil, record low
unemployment, 3-4 percent economic growth, and pressure on colleges to honor
the Bill of Rights.
The New, New Normal
The choices are at least starker now. The strategy is
not, as in 2008 and 2012, to offer a moderate slow-down of progressivism, but
rather a complete repudiation of it.
One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the
proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china
shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying
porcelain shards. But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used
to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,”
but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be
heretical and deserving of censure and worse.
The current normal correctives were denounced as
abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that
the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship
was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful
Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now
somehow aberrant or perverse.
Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the
accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now
seen as sacrilege.
Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on
political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing
the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the
Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for
pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near
coup was abnormal.
Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal
remedy to the normal pathology.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian,
columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a
professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently
the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W.
Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma,
California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism.
He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global
Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
