The end of the Trump era?

Angelo Codevilla writes in American Greatness,

...when Trump joked that his supporters would stand with him even if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, he had already fallen into the delusion that dooms so many politicians—believing that people support him for who he is rather than as a vehicle for their own concerns.

The 2016 election cycle was not about Donald J. Trump. It unfolded as it did because most Americans were seeking desperately to shake off the uniform, bipartisan, progressive class that rules the country unaccountably—a class including most of the bureaucracies of federal and state governments, the judiciary, the educational establishment, the media, as well as major corporate officials that had separated itself socially, morally, and politically from the rest of society. It’s a class that affirms its superior worth by endlessly humiliating other Americans, people who feel good about themselves by deploring, hating, and hurting those they deem their inferiors.

...What they truly fear is the Deplorables’ resistance to their rule. Their purpose was and remains to crush the Deplorables’ resistance.

...But Trump has proved he is no barrier, no defense. Today, Trump notwithstanding, political correctness weighs upon Americans more than ever, and speech is becoming more constrained by the day. Being on the wrong side of the right people is more dangerous than ever.

Trump’s fiery speeches had led some supporters to look past the fact he has found it easier to proclaim victories over middle America’s enemies than to achieve them, that he makes loud statements and then quietly walks them back, that often he protests the ruling class’s outrages while gratuitously acquiescing in them, as he did on March 23, 2018, when he signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus bill that financed every progressive cause and priority but contained not a dime for a wall. That is also what he did on September 14, 2017, by signing a joint congressional resolution that urged all U.S agencies to combat “hate speech”—and defined “hate speech” in such a way as to accuse his own supporters of it. Having finally declared that he would declassify some of the trumped-up documents by which the intelligence agencies had maligned him to the media, he let himself be convinced to continue letting these agencies play their illegal games. Bluster followed by surrender has political legs both short and shaky.

...His voters continued to believe that, in a crunch, Trump would be true to his vows.

Then the crunch came. What Trump did on January 25, 2019, was infidelity itself, of the in-your-face, unforgivable kind.

...Trump’s self-humiliating surrender to the ruling class, despite his possession of full power to trump that class by declaring the national emergency that he said he was ready, willing, and able to declare, showed he really had never prepared nor meant to declare it. Or if he had, he had been frightened into blowing with the prevailing wind. Thereby, the president proved either contempt for his supporters, cowardice with regard to his opponents, or both. By so doing, he cut one of his own main political arteries and started a hemorrhage of support that it may well be impossible to stop.

Subsequently, the Left crowed victory, not in one battle, rightly, but in the war itself, mistakenly. They ridiculed Trump, whose promise to fight another day is incredibly sad.

...For better and for worse, the Trump era is over. Time to deal with the stark choices that our would-be totalitarian ruling class poses. We cannot know who will lead 2016’s winning coalition in 2020. Positively and negatively, Trump’s virtues and vices helped define what the characteristics of that leadership must be. Neither ambiguity nor flirtations. Integrity, personal and political. Commitments explained relentlessly and redeemed with every ounce of available power. The ruling class’s “full court press,” answered in kind and in detail. Bloodyminded determination to undo the layers of unearned privileges that are making a mockery of the idea that “all men are created equal.”

Read more here.

Did you know that we are already in the third turn of a new American revolution?

Angelo Codevilla believes we Americans are in the third turn of a revolution. He writes in the American Mind,

The 2008 financial crisis sparked an incipient revolution. Previously, Americans dissatisfied with their Progressive rulers had imagined that voting for Republicans might counter them. But then, as three-fourths of Americans opposed bailing out big banks with nearly a trillion dollars, the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates joined; most Republican legislators joined all Democrats; The Wall Street Journal joined The New York Times, and National Review joined The Nation; in telling Americans that doing this was essential, and that their disapproval counted for nothing. And then, just as high-handedly, all these bipartisan rulers dropped that bailout scheme, and adopted another—just as unaccountably. They showed “government by the people, for the people” to be a fable.

This forced the recognition that there exists a remarkably uniform, bipartisan, Progressive ruling class; that it includes, most of the bureaucracies of federal and state governments, the judiciary, the educational establishment, the media, as well as major corporate officials; that it had separated itself socially, morally, and politically from the rest of society, whose commanding heights it monopolized; above all that it has contempt for the rest of America, and that ordinary Americans have no means of persuading this class of anything, because they don’t count.

As the majority of Americans have become conscious of the differences between this class and themselves they have sought ever more passionately to shake it off. That is the ground of our revolution.

Our time’s sharp distinction between rulers and ruled, the ever decreasing interchange and sympathy between them, is rooted in the disdain for ordinary Americans that the universities have sown since the Civil War. Ordinary Americans and their rulers are alienated now in ways unimaginable to the Northerners and Southerners who killed each other a century and a half ago, but who nodded when Abraham Lincoln noted that they “prayed to the same God.” Both revered the American founding. Both aspired to the same family life. Often, opposite sides’ generals were personal friends. And why not? The schools they attended, the books they read, did not teach them the others’ inferiority. They were one people. Now, we are no longer one people.

In our time, the most widespread of differences between rulers and ruled is also the deepest: The ruled go to church and synagogue. The rulers are militantly irreligious and contemptuous of those who are not. Progressives since Herbert Croly’s and Woodrow Wilson’s generation have nursed a superiority complex. They distrust elections because they think that power should be in expert hands—their own. They believe that the U.S Constitution gave too much freedom to ordinary Americans and not enough power to themselves, and that America’s history is one of wrongs. The books they read pretend to argue scientifically that the rest of Americans are racist, sexist, maybe fascists, but above all stupid. For them, Americans are harmful to themselves and to the world, and have no right to self-rule. That is why our revolution started from a point more advanced in its logic than many others.

...The voters who, over four election cycles, stripped the Democratic Party of the U.S. Presidency, left it in the minority in both Houses of Congress, without Governors in two-thirds of the States, and in the minority in two-thirds of the state legislatures did so not out of love for the Republican Party. They were being insulted and made to feel strangers in their own country, and wanted that to stop. But elections did not stop the ruling class’s assaults on their supposed inferiors. Instead, the “resistance” increased pressures on them. Political correctness is more virulent than ever, speech is more restricted than ever. Being on the wrong side of the right people is more dangerous than ever.

...Trump’s rousing speeches feed the body politic as empty calories feed the human body. Bluster followed by surrender has political legs both short and shaky. Trump’s tone has lifted his constituencies’ expectations. But tone does not give substance to public opinion, poses but a flimsy barrier to the ruling class’s concerted power, and does not begin to satisfy constituencies threatened by the ruling class machine that came of age in the anti-Kavanaugh campaign.

Read more here.

War and peace

At CRB David Goldman writes,

In the decade since President George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech, America has gone from hyperpower to hyperventilater. The Obama Administration and the Republican leadership quibble about the modalities of an illusory two-state solution in Israel, or the best means to make democracy bloom in the Middle East’s deserts, or how vehemently to denounce Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, everything that could go wrong, has. Europe’s frontiers are in play for the first time since the fall of Communism; Russia and China have a new rapprochement; American enemies like Iran have a free hand while traditional American allies in the Sunni world feel betrayed; and China has all but neutralized American sea power within hundreds of miles of its coast.

America’s credibility around the world is weaker than at any time since the Carter Administration. American policy evokes contempt overseas, and even more at home, where the mere suggestion of intervention is ballot box poison, while the Republicans’ isolationist fringe wins straw polls among the party’s core constituents. In 2013 the Pew Survey found 53% of U.S. respondents considered America less important and powerful than a decade earlier, the first time a majority held that view since 1974, just before the fall of Saigon. And four-fifths of respondents told Pew that the U.S. should not think so much in international terms but concentrate on its own problems, the highest proportion to agree with that proposition since the survey began posing it in 1964.

Goldman reviews To Make and Keep Peace: Among Ourselves and with All Nations, by Angelo M. Codevilla. ...Codevilla approves the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a way to hold local rulers responsible for the hostile actions of their subjects, but abhors the ensuing occupation and counterinsurgency campaign, which only “hardened the divisions between this artificial country’s main religious-ethnic groups.” As for “democracy,” he scoffs that “U.S. viceroys spent most of a decade fruitlessly trying to negate the Shias’, Sunnis’, and Kurds’ democratically expressed mutual antagonism.” The much-lauded “surge” “consisted of turning over to Sunni insurgents the tribal areas into which the Shia were pushing them. Rather than defeating them, the U.S. government began arming them.” And the result: “After a bloody decade, Iraq ended up divided along ancient ethno-religious fault lines but more mutually bitter.”

He rejects intervention in the Syrian civil war as such. “It is not clear by what right or to what good we Americans should foster a set of killings, the bounds of which we know not and cannot control, nor, above all, whom that would benefit. Thus Syria’s internal struggle falls under the heading of ‘their business.’” But he laments the lost opportunity to punish Syria after Damascus instigated the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut; our failure to use the 150,000 American troops in Iraq in 2003 to destroy the Bashar al-Assad regime in retaliation for hosting anti-American forces; and the Bush Administration’s 2006 decision to halt Israel’s attack on Hezbollah. These were Syrian acts of war against America, and America should have responded with war. A fortiori, Codevilla argues, America should have made war on Iran in response to the 1979 seizure of American diplomats and other acts of war. The same criterion applies to other Islamic regimes that support terror: “Our business now is forcefully to restore respect for ourselves by holding those rulers responsible. The longer we wait, the more force will be needed.”

After Lincoln’s election, Jefferson Davis offered to stop secession if Lincoln would annex Cuba and other prospective slave territories to the South. I call attention to this episode not to argue details with Codevilla, but rather to broach a broader issue. Slavery trumped matters of principle or sentiment because of a circumstance beyond any American’s control: soil exhaustion by intensive cotton cultivation, which would have strangled the South’s economy unless America acquired new land. The economics of slavery, that is, arguably turned a comedy of errors into a tragedy in which the main participants could not act other than they did.

America got “such a peace as the circumstances permitted” after the Civil War, Codevilla argues, although “the Republican Party inflicted twelve years of attempted nation-building on Southern states—sucking their remaining wealth, building political rotten-boroughs to pad its powers in Congress, and rubbing salt into wounds by appointing Negroes to positions with punitive powers.” Here Codevilla seems callous. There is a difference between American efforts to impose democracy on foreign lands, and a commitment to extend democratic rights to people born on American soil but previously denied such rights. It was not the freed slaves’ fault that they were ill-prepared for democratic citizenship: America had imported them against their will and therefore bore the responsibility for their condition. Codevilla argues that it was inevitable for a century to pass between the end of the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; but he does not dissuade me from believing that the tardy fulfillment of Reconstruction’s promise was a scandal.

If America’s Civil War had broken out later, after 1861, the Union well might have lost and slavery would have spread throughout South America. Had the South enjoyed time to link up with Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico in 1862, and perhaps also with Lord Palmerston’s Britain, the blockade of Southern ports and even the Union cause would have been untenable. In that sense, John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid and other abolitionist actions drew out the South prematurely and contributed to Union victory.

Ronald Reagan and his national security team, at least in his first administration, understood that the sclerotic Soviet economy could not compete with America’s, and that Russia understood its window to project power was closing. That insight informed Reagan’s commitment to Cold War victory. Détente with a declining superpower was not an option: America had to win. For the same reason, it is misguided to expect a negotiated settlement with Iran.

Codevilla calls for the formation of a different, genuine elite aligned with the outlook of America’s founders: “America needs a new generation of statesmen,” he contends, who “would have to affirm their craft’s forgotten fundamental: that the search for peace begins with neutrality in others’ affairs and that when others trouble our peace we impose it upon them by war—war as terribly decisive as we can make it.”

Read more here.

How to defeat the Islamic State

Angelo Codevilla writes about what it take to defeat Islamic State, IS:

The first strike against the IS must be aimed at its sources of material support. Turkey and Qatar are very much part of the global economy—one arena where the U.S. government has enormous power, should it decide to use it. If and when—a key if—the United States decides to kill the IS, it can simply inform Turkey, Qatar, and the world it will have zero economic dealings with these countries and with any country that has any economic dealing with them, unless these countries cease any and all relations with the IS. This un-bloody step—no different from the economic warfare the United States waged in World War II—is both essential and the touchstone of seriousness. Deprived of money to pay for “stuff” and the Turkish pipeline for that stuff, the IS would start to go hungry, lose easy enthusiasm, and wear out its welcome.

Next, the Air War

Striking at the state’s belly would also be one of the objectives of the massive air campaign that the U.S. government could and should orchestrate. “Orchestrate.” Not primarily wage.

Saudi Arabia has some 300 U.S. F-15 fighter planes plus another hundred or so modern combat aircraft, with bases that can be used conveniently for strikes against the IS. Because Saudi Arabia is key to the IS’s existence, to any campaign to destroy it, and to any U.S. decision regarding such a campaign, a word about the Saudi role is essential.
Wahabism validates the Saudis’ Islamic purity while rich Saudis live dissolute lives—a mutually rewarding, but tenuous deal for all.

The IS ideology is neither more nor less than that of the Wahabi sect, which is the official religion of Saudi Arabia, which has been intertwined with its royal family since the eighteenth century, and which Saudi money has made arguably the most pervasive version of Islam in the world (including the United States). Wahabism validates the Saudis’ Islamic purity while rich Saudis live dissolute lives—a mutually rewarding, but tenuous deal for all. But increasingly, the Saudi royals have realized they are riding a tiger. Wahabi-educated youth are seeing the royals for what they are. The IS, by declaring itself a Caliphate, explicitly challenged the Saudis’ legitimacy. The kingdom’s Grand Mufti, a descendant of Ab al Wahab himself, declared the IS an enemy of Islam. But while the kingdom officially forbids its subjects from joining IS, its ties with Wahabism are such that it would take an awful lot to make the kingdom wage war against it.

American diplomacy’s task is precisely to supply that awful lot.

Given enough willpower, America has enough leverage to cause the Saudis to fight in their own interest. Without American technicians and spare parts, the Saudi arsenal is useless. Nor does Saudi Arabia have an alternative to American protection. If a really hard push were required, the U.S. government might begin to establish relations with the Shia tribes that inhabit the oil regions of eastern Arabia.

Day after day after day, hundreds of Saudi (and Jordanian) fighters, directed by American AWACS radar planes, could systematically destroy the Islamic State—literally anything of value to military or even to civil life. It is essential to keep in mind that the Islamic State exists in a desert region which offers no place to hide and where clear skies permit constant, pitiless bombing and strafing. These militaries do not have the excessive aversions to collateral damage that Americans have imposed upon themselves.

Destruction from the air, of course, is never enough. Once the Shia death squads see their enemy disarmed and hungry, the United States probably would not have to do anything for the main engine of massive killing to descend on the Islamic State and finish it off. U.S. special forces would serve primarily to hunt down and kill whatever jihadists seemed to be escaping the general disaster of their kind.

That would be war—a war waged by a people with whom nobody would want to mess. Many readers are likely to comment: “but we’re not going to do anything like that.” They may be correct. In which case, the consequences are all too predictable.

Read more here.