{"id":4280,"date":"2018-08-29T15:03:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T15:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/08\/29\/what-the-fight-is-about\/"},"modified":"2018-08-29T15:03:35","modified_gmt":"2018-08-29T15:03:35","slug":"what-the-fight-is-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/08\/29\/what-the-fight-is-about\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Fight is About"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert W. Merry understands<\/a> that the fight is not primarily over Trump but over the soul of America and her future.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America\u2019s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

Before Trump\u2019s 2016 emergence onto the political scene, many liberals believed the American future belonged to what political analyst Ron Brownstein called the \u201ccoalition of the ascendant\u201d\u2014including racial minorities, immigrants, Millennials, and highly educated whites residing primarily along the nation\u2019s two coasts. They were convinced this ascendant force would eventually overwhelm the declining white majority and usher in a new era of globalism, open borders, identity politics, free trade, cultural individualism, foreign policy interventionism, and gun control.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump interrupted the coalition of the ascendant on its way to U.S. political hegemony. In the process, he touched off an epic struggle over the definition of America.<\/span><\/p>\n

For those committed to the new world envisioned by the coalition of the ascendant, it is easy to see Trump, with all of his crudeness and vulgarity, as evil. After all, he\u2019s personally distasteful and<\/em> he wants to destroy the America of their dreams. But for Trump supporters, he represents their last hope for preserving the old America. These people view the stakes as so high that the president\u2019s personal indecency and civic brutishness simply don\u2019t register as problems. They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Left's blind rage against Trump is not primarily because of the man and his personal style, but because of his threat to their agenda. If Trump had Hillary's ideas and policies, and Hillary Trump's, the Left would have overlooked Trump's personal behavior and supported him in the same way that they overlooked the bad behavior of Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton.  The would have dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as locker-room talk in the same way they dismissed Bill Clinton's much worse sexually predatory actions<\/em> as pecadilloes belonging to his personal life.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Never-Trumpers, on the other hand, hate Trump primarily because of the man he is, and not primarily because of his ideas and policies.  They hate him because he is a crude and obnoxious outsider, an interloper, who crashed their party and threatened to upset their cozy world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Proof of this is that Trump's solid conservative accomplishments mollify the bow-tie brigade not one bit.  Their hatred and mindless opposition is in no way reduced by the Gorsuch confirmation, the Kavanaugh nomination, the movement of the U. S. embassy to Israel, the surging stock market, the low unemployment numbers, the defense of religious liberty, and so on down the list.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert W. Merry understands that the fight is not primarily over Trump but over the soul of America and her future. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down … Continue reading “What the Fight is About”<\/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":[118,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-matters","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4280","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=4280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}