{"id":5845,"date":"2017-01-22T04:08:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T04:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/22\/the-central-dividing-line-in-american-politics-2\/"},"modified":"2017-01-22T04:08:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T04:08:00","slug":"the-central-dividing-line-in-american-politics-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/22\/the-central-dividing-line-in-american-politics-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Central Dividing Line in American Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-american-interest.com\/2017\/01\/19\/the-winners-of-2016\/\">Here<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">[Samuel] Huntington is most famous for arguing in&#0160;<em>The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order<\/em> that the post-Cold War world&#0160;would not be defined by the universalization of liberal values but by&#0160;ethnic frictions within nations&#0160;and civilizational clashes between them (the most volatile fault lines, he said, were between the West and Islam and the West and China). Even&#0160;more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-american-interest.com\/2016\/07\/14\/how-samuel-huntington-predicted-our-political-moment\/\">prescient<\/a>, at least as far as the United States is concerned, was Huntington\u2019s 2004 book, <em>Who Are We?<\/em>, which&#0160;described&#0160;\u201cnationalism versus cosmopolitanism\u201d&#0160;as the central dividing line in American politics, with immigration as its focal point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">Huntington identified two forms of cosmopolitanism\u2014neoconservatism, popular on the right, which promised to bring America\u2019s values to the world, and multiculturalism, popular on the left, which promised to bring the world\u2019s values to America\u2014both of which he&#0160;attacked as destructive and unsustainable. The 2016 election campaign was one long demonstration of how right Huntington was, and how blind were his liberal and neoconservative critics who had no idea of the forces building in American politics.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is <em>one<\/em> mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">Along comes Trump. Whatever you think of the <em>man<\/em> and his ostentation, self-absorption, slovenly speech, occasional feel-ups of members of the distaff contingent, and all the rest, he is a powerful <em>vehicle<\/em> of a necessary correction away from both forms of cosmopolitanism\/globalism toward a saner view.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">Donald J. Trump, the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a necessary correction. &#0160;Without course correction the cliff is up ahead to be approached either by Donkey Express (Hillary) or more slowly but just as surely by Elephant (Jeb! and colleagues).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">So how does the Left respond? In their usual vile and thoughtless way by the hurling of such epithets as sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, fascist . . . you know the litany. According to Chris Mathews of MSNBC, Trump&#39;s inaugural speech was &quot;Hitlerian.&quot;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">The alacrity with which these leftist bums reach for the Hitler comparison shows the poverty of their &#39;thought.&#39;&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\"><strong>Addendum<\/strong>. Tony Bevin writes:<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino;\">In your post you write:<\/span><\/div>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<div><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino;\">The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.&#0160;<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino;\">This is of a mind with Milton Friedman&#39;s observation about the Euro.&#0160; He noted that <strong>one cannot impose&#0160;a common currency that is not supported by&#0160;a common political will<\/strong>&#0160;[emphasis added by BV]and gave the Euro 10 years before it became extinct.<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#0160;<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino;\">I think he (and you above) are correct.&#0160; Friedman may have only been wrong about the timeline. By the way, the Euro, which consistently traded at about $1.33 is now down to the $1.02-$1.05 range and Deutsche Wealth management expects it to be about $0.85 toward the end of this year.&#0160; With Brexit, Italexit and other countries beginning to discuss the possibility of leaving the EU, is the beginning of the end near?&#0160; We shall see.<\/span><\/div>\n<div>&#0160;<\/div>\n<fieldset class=\"zemanta-related\">\n<legend class=\"zemanta-related-title\">Related articles<\/legend>\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul zemanta-article-ul-image\" style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; overflow: hidden;\">\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul-li-image zemanta-article-ul-li\" style=\"padding: 0; background: none; list-style: none; display: block; float: left; vertical-align: top; text-align: left; width: 84px; font-size: 11px; margin: 2px 10px 10px 2px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2015\/07\/a-complaint-from-an-irish-reader.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"box-shadow: 0px 0px 4px #999; 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<a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/22\/the-central-dividing-line-in-american-politics-2\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Central Dividing Line in American Politics&#8221;<\/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":[180,56,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west","category-politics","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845","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=5845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}