Donald Trump vs. the Post-West

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Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, our civilization and to set free suffering humanity . . . and we know that by thy grace, and the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.”

Who wrote those words? Someone from the alt-Right? A white nationalist, perhaps?

In fact, they were composed personally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a D-Day prayer and read to the nation in a radio address on the evening of June 6, 1944. They exemplify the high-water mark of a confident mid-20th-century American liberalism that did not hesitate to attach the possessive pronoun “our” to concepts such as nation, religion, civilization, culture, and freedom.

The conceptual core of liberalism has been drastically altered since the halcyon days of FDR, Truman, and JFK. The reaction of mainstream 21st-century liberalism to President Trump’s historic Warsaw speech clearly reveals what today’s progressives value and what they debase. Thus, the president’s speech (besides presenting a clear vision of democratic sovereignty and a broad understanding of what constitutes the West), has the added advantage of having flushed out, for all to see, what progressive liberals really think of the institutions and ideals that have for centuries been at the center of any decent society.

When President Trump concluded his speech stating, “Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend upon [the] bonds of history, culture, and memory” and forthrightly declared “let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country, and for God”—the proponents of mainstream liberalism reacted with dismay and disgust. They bristle against all that “God and Country” talk and with unabashedly positive references to Western Civilization.

And so they came after the president’s conception of the West—not only from the fringes of the Far Left, but from the mainstream of American liberalism—“news” stories in the New York Times; Peter Beinart and James Fallows at the Atlantic; Jeet Heer from The New Republic; Lawrence Summers, E.J. Dionne, Anne Applebaum, Richard Cohen, Eugene Robinson, and the editorial board of the Washington Post; William Galston, the Wall Street Journal‘s token liberal commentator; and many others.

We were told, the president’s speech was “dark,” “negative,” and “nativist.” For Peter Beinart, Trump’s “West is a racial and religious term” and “His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means.” James Fallows sees echoes of the Nuremberg rallies and is reminded of the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Richard Cohen declares that on the plane to Warsaw, “President Trump opened the door and threw out American values.” Jeet Heer fulminates that Trump’s rhetoric “is meant to conjure blood-soil-nationalism.” Eugene Robinson thought Trump’s speech “might have been appropriate” for a time when “Europe’s great powers held dominion for ‘lesser’ peoples around the globe.” Lawrence Summers agrees with “the fears of those” who believe that the President’s “conduct” in Europe “is currently the greatest threat to American national security.”

What a Simple Google Search Would Show
Perhaps the silliest critique of Trump’s speech comes from Molly McKew (formerly with the Podesta group, the American Enterprise Institute, and an advisor to Georgian President Saakashvili.) Writing in Politico, McKew insists that Trump’s references to defending “civilization,” “history and religion,” “traditional values” and “sovereignty” parallel Putin’s worldview. Trump, she writes with contempt, “repeatedly spoke of souls and God.”

Further, McKew criticizes Trump “[going] so far as to say, ‘We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy at the center of our lives.’” According to McKew, this is just like “Putin [who] frequently refers to spiritual tradition as a core part of identity . . . [and lauds] the ‘ideals of the family.’” Apparently, if Putin says 2 plus 2 equals 4, an American president is supposed to say it’s really five. If Putin claims to be for God and Country, we must endorse the devil and treason.

Behind McKew’s smears there is the real issue of Putin making inroads with social conservatives in the West by appearing to champion traditional institutions and values against leftist activism in the EU. The situation was made worse by the Obama administration’s actions, promoting initiatives and groups working against traditional conservative European social and family policy and by collaborating closely with George Soros and leftist NGOs on these “progressive” cultural issues (e.g., abortion, LGBT, radical feminism, etc.)

If McKew had done so much as a Google search, she would have found one of the earliest and clearest responses to Putin’s challenge on the social values front came from Stephen K. Bannon in his (widely available) Vatican conference speech in the summer of 2014. Bannon noted that Putin was attempting to influence social conservatives by claiming to support traditional values and that “we have to be very much on guard” against Putin’s machinations. “Because at the end of the day, I think Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that wants to expand,” Bannon said. 

Given Bannon’s prescient understanding of Putin’s anti-Western goals, it is absurd to suggest that the Warsaw foreign policy vision that he apparently had some role in developing was in tune with Putin’s governing philosophy.

Trump Presents an Inclusive West
Interestingly (and, for many, ironically) the West outlined by Trump in the Warsaw speech is broader and more inclusive than the pinched secular and exclusionist West presented by Western progressives. The Trumpian version includes Christianity, the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, and our classical patrimony of Socratic questioning, as well as the Enlightenment and modernity.

On the other hand, the progressive version of the West, or more preferably for liberals, the post-Western “global community,” often pits a militant and narrow secularism against traditional Christian and Orthodox Jewish faiths and long accepted cultural and family values (although progressive secularism often makes an exception for Islamic practices).

Indeed, the once almost universal concept of a “Judeo-Christian West” is put into scare quotes and mocked as a Bannon trope by E.J. Dionne (a practicing Catholic) as he excoriates Trump’s Warsaw framework in the Washington Post. Like Tocqueville (and Leo Strauss), but unlike Voltaire (and American liberals and EU elites), Trump’s speech portrays traditional religious belief as fully compatible, and indeed complementary, with modern liberal democracy.

Perhaps, not surprisingly then, the establishment center-right almost unanimously praised Trump’s speech.  The day after the speech the editors of the Wall Street Journal lauded the president for “taking a clear stand against the kind of gauzy globalism and vague multiculturalism represented by the worldview of, say, Barack Obama and most contemporary Western intellectuals.” Charles Krauthammer declared, “this is the best speech he’s given. It was very Reaganesque.” Michael Barone found similarities to the great presidential speeches in Berlin of Reagan in 1987 and John F. Kennedy in 1962. The editors of National Review praised Trump’s defense of the West, noting, “This is not about race. It is one of the obvious achievements of Western civilization that its values and norms . . . have spread throughout the world, and wherever they have taken hold have contributed to the advance of human liberty and welfare.”

Democratic Sovereignty vs. Post-Democratic Bureaucracy
The 21st century Left in Europe, and to an extent in the United States, is often described as post-national and postmodern, seeking to move beyond the nation-state and the rational norms of modernism towards a more global and antinomian future.

The Left could also be considered Post-Western, as its elites have “deconstructed” the idea of the West using the ideological tools of postmodernism and multiculturalism. This deconstruction has made Western leaders for the past decade or so hesitant explicitly to articulate a public defense of our civilization. Twenty years ago, foreign policy scholar and Swarthmore professor James Kurth predicted in The National Interest, “The real clash of civilizations will not be between the West, and one or more of the Rest. It will be between the West and the Post-West, within the West itself.”

We see this clash being played out today between EU elites attempting to expand their supranational bureaucratic authority and independent nation-states within the EU, such as Poland who are fighting to preserve their democratic sovereignty. In other words, the Poles are insisting on the right of a free people to rule themselves. And Trump to his credit has given them aid and comfort. This desire for independence and sovereignty was the impetus for the British people’s decision to withdraw from the European Union.

Trump’s speech was criticized by a former Clinton State Department official for not endorsing the EU. For years, the U.S. position has been on autopilot, mindlessly advocating more European integration meaning more power to the Brussels bureaucracy and less to the nation-states. Todd Huizinga, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, has written the definitive work for understanding the European Union. In The New Totalitarian Temptation, Huizinga captures the essence of the EU as “a soft utopia,” a proposed secular heaven on earth, based on the ideology of “global governance.” This means it is inherently at odds with the concept of democratic sovereignty and, thus, not surprisingly, often in tension with nations that take self-government seriously such as the United States, Poland, and Israel.

“After sixty-five years,” Huizinga writes, “the EU has conclusively shown itself to be inherently undemocratic, unaccountable and unresponsive to the voters.” Put otherwise, the framework of the EU is post-democratic.

Restoring “Government by Consent of the Governed”
The time for the United States to promote more EU integration is long past, and it appears the Trump administration may have put an end to this policy. There are, after all, competing visions of a free, prosperous Europe. While the Merkel-Macron framework promotes more centralization in Brussels, both Margaret Thatcher and Charles de Gaulle advocated a more decentralized Europe of democratic nation-states. Significantly, Trump did reassure the Poles and warn the Russians by strongly endorsing NATO, which is an intergovernmental alliance of nation-states, not a transnational pan-European institution like the EU.

The chief organs of the EU constitute an administrative state that rules without the consent of the different peoples of Europe. A perfect example of this problem is the EU’s migration policy. The EU leadership backed by the governments (but not necessarily the people) of Germany and France have insisted that all EU member-states take a fixed quote of migrants/refugees from the developing world.

The Visegrad nations of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic (now Czechia) are resisting this EU diktat. The stakes for liberal democracy could not be higher. What is at issue is that old Lockean liberal notion of “government by consent of the governed.” Clearly, if democratic sovereignty (that is democratic self-government) means anything at all, it is the right of a free people to determine for themselves who may be residents and citizens in their own country.

EU elites, Merkel, and their transnational progressive allies are attempting to strip government by consent of the governed from the peoples of Central Europe and force new populations upon them without their consent.  This is a moral argument and Trump, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Slovaks, and the Czechs are on the side of the angels—the side of “Philadelphian Sovereignty,” that is, the side of the republican principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

In short, “We, the People” decide who we shall admit within our borders. These fundamental issues are not decided for us—and against our consent—by foreign leaders and institutions.

William Galston wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “along with Hungary’s Victor Orban, the current Polish government is Europe’s leading threat to liberal democracy.” Galston could not be more wrong. The threat to democracy comes from the transnational EU elites and the enforcers of the EU administrative state in Germany and France.  These are the same nations, after all, that several years ago, forced the ouster of democratically elected leaders in Italy and Greece.

Trump’s Warsaw speech has given hope to the peoples of Central Europe and crucially reiterated the core Enlightenment doctrine of “government by consent of the governed.” If Steve Bannon and Steven Miller had anything to do with formulating this new strategic outlook of democratic sovereignty, consensual government, and affirmation of the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment basis of Western Civilization, then perhaps those persistent conservative critics of Bannon and Miller ought to rethink their Pavlovian carping about these two gentlemen.

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67 responses to “Donald Trump vs. the Post-West”

  1. The radical hedonists that infest America today, are the
    “domestic enemy” I swore to protect America from when I enlisted.
    I still swear by that oath.
    These progressive hedonists can either move, or die trying to devastate MY COUNTRY.

  2. It would seem Globalism as a politic is attempting to promote the Peter Principal for the world! The fact is continental Europe has always been an unstable undertaking. Its best not to look back at their demise, you may turn into a pillar of salt.

  3. Very apt description of the anti-nationalist left. For decades they insisted that they were not trying to undermine national feeling or patriotism, now, thanks to Trump triggering their anger, the mask is fully dropped and they freely admit that nationalism is a bad thing. They may reject the name “reds,” but they are true believing Marxists, and have a dream that for the rest of us would be a nightmare of unimaginable proportions.

    • Am I alone in noticing the irony that Western ideology is what enables anti-Western ideology to flourish?

      • That speech really grinds your gears, doesn’t it. I see by your screen shot that you identify with mother Africa. Tell us again about the great civilizations of Africa and how they brought us into the modern age.

        Actually colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to your continent, and every other continent as well. It was Western ideology, incidentally, which created the modern world and ended slavery. But apparently you think it would have been better to leave you hominids on your own to continue killing, eating and enslaving each other ad infinitum.

      • Hey, imbecile – go read The Hominid’s posts – they’re open for everyone to see. I’ve made the point you just did multiple times over the past 50 years. Maybe you just have a reading comprehension deficiency.

      • My bad. You’re absolutely right, and I apologize for leaping when I should have looked first.

      • Kudos to a GENUINE MAN who will acknowledge his mistakes.

        I make plenty myself.

      • The relationship between relativism and ‘Western ideology’ is part of the ‘inherent contradiction’ within ‘liberal’ ideals of at the heart of what the West thinks of as ‘The West’. The idea — going back to Athens — of a free and open (public) exchange of ideas and arguments as the best way for human beings to *choose* what they think (and ultimately, do). But, again going back to Athens, there has been a ‘dark companion’: relativism. The Platonic dialogs contain any number of exchanges between ‘relativists’ of one kind or another with Socrates acting as a foil for more ‘universalist’ arguments. The ‘Protagoras’ is probably the most interesting in this area because (a) Protagoras was clearly a kind of relativist (‘man is the measure of all things’) and (b) was held in high regard in Athens and ancient Greece in general. As a result, Plato felt bound to present Protagoras in the best light possible and the ‘Protagoras’ allows Protagoras to present a compelling argument for *his* brand of relativism while Plato has Socrates present a much more restrained counter-argument than one finds in other Socratic dialogs with other relativists (‘Alcibiades’). Relativism is inherent in liberal ideals, in fact, one could argue (with justification) that the liberal ideal of an open exchange of ideas results from a ‘moderate’ reaction to both tyranny and relativism. It’s hard to see why a free and open exchange of ideas would be *necessary* if there was only *one* way of thinking about issues of the day, consequently, public debate *begins* with an assumption of relativity among views. However, if only *one* view is *permitted — the essence of intellectual tyranny — there would be no point in debate. The liberal ideal of a free and open exchange of ideas among contesting views attempts to make use of resources from both tyranny and relativism in that (a) all views are open to expression but at some point (b) *one* view will be deemed better than all others (perhaps only temporarily) and *elevated* to the position of the idea to be used as the basis for *action* (‘what is to be done’). All Western political philosophies exhibit tendencies along a continuum between tyranny and anarchy with Western liberalism operating somewhere in the middle, drawing on intellectual resources from both to produce notions of ‘free and open exchange’ and ‘representative governance’ (but governance nonetheless). Western liberal ideals can no more dispose of the necessity to encourage a host of ideas (relativism) or to pick *one* idea on which to *take action* (tyranny). Western ideology cannot throw out ‘the water’ of either relativism or tyranny without also throwing out ‘the baby’ of Western ideology itself. Since the central proposition of contemporary relativism — all views and actions resulting from those views is equally valid — is logically self-defeating (as the view that ‘relativism is not valid’ is also valid), relativism cannot be a philosophy of decision-making or governance. There are no relativists in the political arena because, in the end, the question of ‘what is to be done’ is always lurking. My feeling is that America could not exist without a certain amount of relativism as part of our civic philosophy (for which, to some extent, we can thank the early French settlers). At the same time, there is an aspect of the American character this is drawn to tyranny (for which, to some extent, we can thank the early English Puritan settlers). Americans are exceptionally lucky that the Founders were able to find a way to balance the impulse to *both* tyranny and anarchy in both the articulation of the Declaration (‘all men are created equal’, ‘unalienable rights’) and the structure of governance articulated in the core Constitution and the first ten Amendments. The notions of ‘a free and open exchange of ideas’ and ‘consent of the governed’, will *always* be under threat by the impulse to tyranny, but, at the same time, these ideals have enduring power and form the Perennial Philosophy of the West. Some part of each generation draws on these ideals, is nourished by them and promotes them. The difference between Thomas Jefferson and Milo Yiannopoulos is a difference of emphasis but not intent.

      • Geez-Louise!! What a vociferation!!

        In short, the human condition is ever and always paradoxical.

    • The only “true Marxists” are in the White House now, communicating with Putin daily,

      • The 80’s called and want their foreign policy back. “True Marxists in the WH? WTF? And don’t you think if they were “communicating with Putin daily” we would be getting daily leaks about it? Lets use some logic and common sense before lashing out mindlessly, please.

      • Says the guy who mindlessly “lashed out” at The Hominid below! Hypocrite much?

      • No, just someone with egg on his face as a result of an inexplicable bout of reading incomprehension.

      • Excusable. Sometimes the brawl gets so overpowering that I just sock the nearest jaw too.

  4. Yeah, according to McKew … and Putka for that matter … we must worship government and bureaucracy, and if we don’t, it’s to the “re-education camps” for us.

    By the way, “post West” is Islamic, which is where the sainted EU is headed.

  5. My compliments on this excellent essay. Such frank and clear thinking is all to rare. Gentlemen, the time to raise the black flag and start slitting throats may fast be approaching.

  6. While I do understand and sympathize with the general limp-dickedness of most liberal politicians (islamic apologetics, relativism, etc), I think that the author’s characterization of secularism and asserting the west as being defined by Christian morality are grossly inaccurate. Secular philosophy, as applied to government, science, morality has been the underpinning of western civilization since the enlightenment. True secularism opposes Islam as much as it does any other religious nonsense, and secular morality does not entail relativistic morality. The conflation of secularism with modern leftism is not an accurate consideration, but then again, I have yet to see any criticism of aspects of the left not be used opportunistically as a blanket indictment against everything it supposedly entails.
    That being said, I agree with the nature of the sentiment on the EU being an unresponsive democracy, and unresponsive democracy being bad, but I don’t think that can be an indictment of big government as a whole. Nor do I think the US is any model of sovereignty and responsive government. The US is very badly unresponsive.
    Putting it another way, I don’t think any rational person would object to defending western civilization, democracy, objectivistic secular ethics, and the science that have driven human progress since the enlightenment against tepid cultural relativism, theocracy (Both Muslim and Christain), anti-scientific garbage, and autocracy.
    So no, classical liberalism was not religious in nature as implied int he opening quote, it was fundamentally empirical and secular, seeking knowledge and ethics outside of scripture, not within it. Nor was it unabashedly apologetic of the shortcomings of the west, nor is it relativistic or postmodern in any core way (though one could say its political manifestations are now). However, I think that its fair to say that traditional liberalism (especially as it applies to the free trade economic dogmas that were traditionally associated with it) is globalist and supranational in nature, but that doesn’t entail an endorsement of autocratic, unresponsive government. I don’t think you could find a single element of modern liberalism that professes to be antidemocratic. However, you can easily find those elements on the right.

  7. Well,I guess I’m going to have to oil up the old chainsaw and butt phuque a few lefties….just to set an example for the rest of them

  8. Democrats literally do hate the West and want to see it destroyed. The sooner we realize this, the more effectively we can counter them.

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      • LoL. Russia! Russia! Russia! Please keep it up. You make Trump stronger and more popular with each and every paranoid word.

      • You apparently spend NO time talking with progressive liberals. The extent to which the “new left” distains western values is palpable. If you go on social media and say anything remotely positive about Western Culture and history writ large, you’re immediately attacked as an imperialist stooge. I’m a lifelong Democratic voter, age 18 to 34, but I jumped ship for the Republicans in 2016. The left fringe is going insane and taking their party with them.

      • The Lib-Leftists have been loony for at least a half century – they’ve just become more emboldened in the era of “tolerance” for all manner of decadence.

      • You haven’t responded to a single reply. What’s wrong donk baby?

  9. I work with many Vietnamese, Hispanics and Assyrians in Chicago. Is this a diverse workforce?

    I don’t feel it is because I don’t feel they’re any different. These are not the children of immigrants either. Most grew up in places like Iraq under Saddam, Vietnam ( before and after it fell to the communists ) and Mexico. One Mexican friend told me that in his state in Mexico ( Guerrero) there are 20 drug cartels. It’s very poor and pretty much lawless.

    Do I then feel my workplace is multicultural? I don’t because I know them quite well and I’ve never had a sense that they’re culturally different. If they were I’d sure know it by now.

    If a place like this isn’t really diverse or multicultural then what exactly do these terms really mean? Actually they’re just terms invented by the left to justify group rights for their preferred groups.

    None of the minorities I know feel excluded from society so when the left talks about “inclusion” they’re really just talking about proportional representation for their favored groups as a way to reward their support, solidify their support and gain new support from members of these groups.

    I think the left is simply awful. I believe we’ll all pay dearly for their lies and their insanity. Time will tell what fate has in store for us.

  10. Great piece. This is why we need to vehemently defend ourselves from modern liberals’ lunacy ideology. They will bring down civilization if we let them have their way

  11. The liberal wet dream of the USA becoming culturally amorphous is just that.

    Well explained in the book Who Are We by Samuel Huntington

  12. Analzing trumps speech is like analyzing donkey farts. His message changes every day . His positions change. Hes an empty suit.

    • That’s predictable from a guy whose been a LIBERAL huckster his whole life.

  13. The left must be destroyed by any and all means necessary

  14. Democrats and the elites from around the world have found a better way to total power and control of the masses by the left than competing by ideas and competency.

    Destroy western civilization by a tidal wave of low IQ welfare lovers and criminal from failed cultures around the world that will be content to live on welfare and crime and voting as directed by the elites.

    • They fancy themselves elites, which they are not. They are simply empty elitists who come from the right families and schools and look after one another with far more energy than any of them look after the rest of us.

      • You want to be “looked after,” Pajama Boy – that’s your problem.

      • No doubt I have been earning my way and paying my taxes longer than you have been alive.

      • The typical Lib baseless assumption that invariable make you look like the stupid fools you are.

  15. Why is “Make America Great Again [for Everyone]” such a powerful message?

    “…America is a shared idea. We’re people who think in a certain way, who believe that they can do the things they want to do. Everything else flows from that. It’s confidence, optimism, the one thing that other countries find so strange about us. If you take that away, …, we’re no different from anybody else…” Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor,” ISBN: 0-399-13954-0, p. 398.

    • I read “Debt of Honor” in 2004. Always think of Condi Rice testifying, about 9/11, “No one could imagine [flying a plane into] …”

      Clancy was/is always non-fiction written as fiction.

  16. It was not what trump said. Mr. Trump… is a habitual liar… and simply never means what he says.

    It is what trump does… especially… when he thinks no one is looking.
    HB

  17. Poor stupid GOP.

    Stop blaming social mores and societal trends on political figures and parties.

    Society itself defines popular culture, not politicians.

    The GOP needs to learn that pop culture simply reflect Americans’ preferences.

    The GOP can fight popular culture and societal norms, but they will lose.

    And that appears all they have left in their quiver.

  18. What a load of nonsense. This thing might as well have been written by a Putin apologist. You folks will do or say anything to deflect from your lack of patriotism. You folks are PINOs, Patriots IN Name Only. Russia attacked us and all you do is defend Trump/Putin. Real Americans stand up for their country when its attacked. But not you folks. PINOs, every one of you.

    • Drunk on the Russian meme and the sun’s not yet over the yardarm. Oh my.

  19. “are attempting to strip government by consent of the governed from the peoples of Central Europe and force new populations upon them without their consent.”

    This is exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing to the US for decades.

    The plan is as transparent as it is cynical – import a new electorate to overwhelm those who disagree with the dissolution of our sovereignty and Globalism.

    I say that as a Democratic voter. This issue is driving millions of Democratic voters away from the party.

    • I’m one. I left the Democratic Party after the globalists, neo-cons and Marxists wrested control during the Clinton Administration. Look at his actions from 1993-1995 and compare them to afterwards. You will note dubious American involvement in the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts. Shortly thereafter, Clinton, who opposed the open borders policies of G.H.W. Bush, himself stopped enforcing our immigration laws.

      The globalists are greedy, corrupt and power-hungry and this caused them to act too quickly rather than bide their time—thank God.

      Trump’s Warsaw speech was the most important an American president has delivered in three generations because it represented a push against this evil. We’ll see who prevails.

      • The Clinton Admin was a tough one to get through, I agree.

        I am not sure we are out of the woods concerning Globalist influence. They have successfully made the debate into a one-sided shout down – if you want any controls over immigration, you are a hopelessly racist knuckle-dragger.

        Very few people have the fortitude to stand up under that kind of attack.

  20. The globalist utopians who dominate the Democrats, Never Trump and the full spectrum of the Left and even much of the Republican Party are the heirs of Marx and communism. The nation-state is anathema to them, and their goal isn’t just the destruction of Western Civilization and the elimination of borders but one world controlled by them. Their end point is a dystopian one world government they and other power-hungry mediocrities control.

    Make no mistake: the current political Establishment hates the United States. Those elements must be defeated, destroyed and punished.

  21. The righties are lost in the woods, and looking to blame the hated ;liberal for their lack of direction!!! I laugh at their ineptness and imbecility!! American conservatism has devolved into alt-right neofascism!!!

  22. You know something, the problem is not what these people say, it’s that academics and pundits pay attention to them. The rest of the country doesn’t. Very few Americans have ever even heard of Jeet Heer, who is not even an American – he’s Canadian and an immigrant from Indonesia or somewhere. I know Fallows because long ago in a different time frame I used to take the Atlantic Monthly, until they started swinging so far to the left they became a political rag. I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today because I was a corporate pilot and we put them on our airplanes and with nothing to do while waiting for my high-dollar passengers, I read. But the reality is that the average Trump supporter doesn’t read any of those papers and magazines, nor, for that matter, do they read the various web sites (including this one.) I found it back during the campaign when I somehow came across The Flight 93 Election. Now, don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the articles on AM and look for them every day but remember that you’re preaching to a choir made up mostly of the same conservative audience Conservative, Inc. writes for – and who are for the most part as out of touch with the American voters as Conservative, Inc. The real issue today is not Donald Trump’s speeches, it’s the war against him by Democrats and the media. Yes, denigrating his speeches is part of it but what concerns me most is the narrative they’re spinning with unnamed sources such as the articles that came out today claiming Mueller is “looking into” Trump’s businesses. This is a free country but leftists and pseudo-conservatives are doing their dead level best to destroy freedom. That’s what the trumpets should be calling about.

  23. Blah blah blah. John, here’s the bottom line: at this point, Trumpies are nothing but pimps.

  24. The problem we have here is that even if it’s true that Trump is a totally worthless person he’s still infinitely better than anything on the hate whitey left. I do not have the slightest particle of trust for the left.

  25. All of these are just illustrations of Western Culture’s shift from historical Absolute Morality, as defined by Faith, to secular Moral Relativism, which is defined by constantly variable cultural tides.

    As such, the primary question is: Why has contemporary Western Culture rejected its moral foundation?

    Indeed there are many factors, but I am fairly certain that the horror of our two world wars challenged our Faith, cultural, and social institutions to an existential level. If German Christians killed and maimed Soviets, Jews, Polish, American, and French Christians, by the millions, of what value is Christianity? How could American Christians firebomb Dresden, and nuke two Japanese cities….killing tens of thousands of non-combatant women and children, again begging the question, What value is Christianity? How can such savagery be imagined by those who claim Christ as their Savior?

    The Sexual Revolution, and its all-encompassing reversal of traditional Christian sexual ethics, kicked off around 1960, exactly one generation after the end of WWII. This is no coincidence. Those 15 years of recovery and contemplation brewed a wholesale abandonment of Faith and conversion to secularism.

  26. “Judeo – Christian” and the Poles? Anybody hate the Jews more and more readily hand them over to the Nazils than Poles?
    Sure sign of non solvers are those that vilify the right or left or men or women or rich or poor or Christian or whatever. Like our Moron in chief the writer is a rock throwing loser. Real original, new stuff….gripping. GARBAGE

  27. What a wonderful analysis by John Fonte, and so glad I am he took it upon himself to wade through the reams of Liberal waste matter, those hysterical critics of the Warsaw speech, in his preparation for this article. I would have fallen asleep half way through all that cow dung.
    I don’t know whether or not Trump penned the speech or not, he owned it in delivering it, it was a seminal work, and believe me, it will have a lasting effect.