{"id":3274,"date":"2020-03-20T14:06:14","date_gmt":"2020-03-20T14:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/20\/why-we-defend-trump\/"},"modified":"2020-03-20T14:06:14","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T14:06:14","slug":"why-we-defend-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/20\/why-we-defend-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Defend Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Replying to a young friend who loathes the man, Malcolm Pollack explains<\/a> why so many of us stand with President Trump despite his manifold and manifest faults:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge), he lacks dignity and gravitas, he calls people childish names, he can be vulgar (though surely no more so than LBJ, Clinton, and a host of others), he is a philanderer (though of course JFK and Clinton put him to shame in that department, with the latter likely being guilty of actual rape<\/em>). He is, as you say, not one to show much in the way of humility (though of course he is a dwarf in that regard compared to his immediate predecessor, whom Mike Bloomberg \u2014 Mike Bloomberg! \u2014 called \u201cthe most arrogant man he\u2019d ever met\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

He is, however, the duly elected president of the United States, elevated to office by a vast segment of the traditional American nation who rightly have felt despised and marginalized for a long time now by their globalist, \u201cprogressive\u201d overlords \u2014 a scornful and condescending secular priesthood who occupy, by powerful means of enforcement, the commanding heights of media, academia, popular culture, and the enormous edifice of the unelected, administrative state. Donald Trump was seen by these \u201cDeplorables\u201d \u2014 and rightly so \u2014 as their last hope against a leftist juggernaut that sought to trample into dust all of the founding norms and traditions of the American nation, to throw open the borders, to distend and distort the Constitution into gelatinous goo, and to crush all resistance by a combination of judicial activism, executive fiat and suffocating social ostracism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s voters understood that the First and Second Amendments, those great bulwarks of liberty, were under increasingly withering assault; they had to look no further than Canada, Britain, and Europe \u2014 where the people are forcibly disarmed, and criticism of government policy is now enough to land you in jail \u2014 to see what lay ahead if the eight -year catastrophe of the Obama administration were to be repeated by re-installing those despicable grifters the Clintons. They saw in Donald Trump, for all of his obvious flaws (and yes, they are just as obvious to me as they are to you), a man who genuinely loved the free and self-confident America of his youth, who saw the nation\u2019s long story, though of course tainted by sin and error (as all national stories are), as a story of the triumph of the human spirit, guided by a set of transcendent principles rooted in the natural, God-given dignity of every human being, and given form by a Constitution unlike any ever seen in history: the product of the coming together at a unique moment in the development of mankind by men of genius (compared to whom, by the way, our current crop of \u201cstatesmen\u201d, including both Trump and his predecessors, are intellectual gnats).<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump clearly, if only intuitively, understood the existential horror of this century-long acceleration of consolidating, totalizing statism, the effect of which is to reduce men to children, and to crush from existence the essential mediating layer of \u201ccivil society\u201d \u2014 the great web of voluntary and independent association that forms the sinews and ligaments of healthy, organic societies \u2014 replacing it with an atomizing, vertical order in which every man and woman depends first and foremost upon the great State above, from which all blessings \u2014 and all guidance \u2014 must flow.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The conservative commentariat does not pay sufficient attention to the Left's assault on civil society. So I am pleased that Mr Pollack has reminded us of this "great web of voluntary and independent association" that stands between the naked individual and Leviathan.  <\/span><\/p>\n

For more on civil society see my<\/span><\/p>\n

Subsidiarity as Bulwark Against the Left's Assault on Civil Society<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

and <\/span><\/p>\n

Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Replying to a young friend who loathes the man, Malcolm Pollack explains why so many of us stand with President Trump despite his manifold and manifest faults: I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge), … Continue reading “Why We Defend Donald Trump”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,56,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-politics","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}