RUTHFULLY YOURS

(JTA) — Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL whose seven military awards include the Bronze Star, has become the first Jewish governor of Missouri.

Greitens, 42, a Republican, also is a former Rhodes scholar and the founder of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps veterans integrate themselves back into their communities through volunteer work.

On Tuesday, Greitens — who emphasized he would rid the state capital, Jefferson City, of “bad ethics” — defeated Democrat Chris Koster with 51 percent of the vote. His opponent, the state’s attorney general, received 45 percent.

“Tonight, we did more than win an election; we restored power to the people and we took our state back!” Greitens told supporters at a hotel in Chesterfield, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

A former Democrat, Greitens positioned himself as a conservative who wasn’t a “career politician.” It was his first run for office.

“I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News in July 2015.

Greitens, a Purple Heart recipient, served in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. His fourth book, “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life” — a collection of inspirational letters to a fellow Navy SEAL struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder — was published in March 2015.

Donald Trump’s election is above all else a rebellion of the voters against identity politics enforced by political correctness, and it opens the way to a new politics of moderate levels of immigration, patriotic assimilation, and, in foreign policy, the defense of U.S. sovereignty. In the past few months, Trump put together a winning electoral coalition that stressed the unity and common interests of all Americans across the full spectrum of policy, from immigration to diplomacy.

Because of Trump’s electoral success, this combination of policies rooted in the national interest and patriotism has suddenly begun to sound like common sense. That was not so only yesterday, when political correctness made it hard even to examine such ideas as “multiculturalism.” In February, David Gelernter stated that the “havoc” that political correctness “has wreaked for 40 years [has been made] worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.” Indeed, he noted, “only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.” Defeating political correctness — or, in positive terms, expanding real freedom of speech — made it possible to raise other issues that worried the voters but that a bland bipartisan consensus pushed to the sidelines.

Once that happened, it became clear that the room was simply packed with elephants: multiculturalism, diversity, bilingualism, identity politics, political correctness itself, and much more, extending to the wilder shores of gender politics. All of these were involved in the progressive project of “fundamentally transforming” America. All of them acquired corporate and establishment support almost magically. But the major driver of this project was mass immigration without assimilation. Since the fight over the Gang of Eight immigration bill in 2013, patriotic and populist opposition to amnesty and to increases in low-skilled immigration has intensified. But Republicans in general, and presidential candidates in particular, were late to the party. Except for Senator Jeff Sessions, who led the fight in Congress, and Donald Trump, who did so in the primaries, professional Republicans at all levels — donors, consultants, candidates, and incumbents — were bullied away from raising the issue, for fear of being thought unrespectable. Even some conservatives felt the same.

And then Trump’s bold grasp of the immigration issue propelled him to the GOP’s presidential nomination. Though other issues are important here, no other single one explains his rise as clearly or as simply. So conservatives had (and have) to deal with it.

In its relatively brief life, American conservatism has been built on three groups: economic conservatives (fiscal restraint, limited government); social conservatives (faith, family values); and national conservatives (immigration, law and order, the social fabric — i.e., national cohesion as well as national security). All of these factions are the grandchildren of the early years of National Review: Hayekian libertarians, Kirkian traditionalists, and Burnhamite nationalists concerned at times with national strategy, at others with combating national decay. All are key to it.

While Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes, tenured professors, and fainthearted college students nationwide continue to react to Donald Trump’s presidential election with anger, bewilderment, bouts of weeping, and illiterate tweets, the core leaders of the political Left are already busy planning how they will seek to deligitimize and destroy Trump’s presidency before it even gets off the ground.

The first major effort in that direction occurred this week in Washington’s luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where a group of super-wealthy leftist funders known as the Democracy Alliance sponsored a three-day, closed-door meeting attended by the multi-billionaire George Soros, the leaders of many left-wing activist groups and labor unions, and Congressional luminaries like Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Keith Ellison. Over the past decade, the Democracy Alliance has given at least $500 million to pro-Democrat and leftist causes. High on the list of priorities at its Washington conference was a discussion of how to derail Trump’s “100-day plan,” which the Alliance characterizes as “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements — and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”

In a recent email to his allies and donors, Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche offered a clear indication of where the Democrats plan to direct their attention and resources over the next few years. Specifically, he said that this week’s conference would focus on assessing “what steps we will take together to … take back power, beginning in the states in 2017 and 2018.” Raj Goyle, a Democratic activist who is also involved with the Democracy Alliance, concurred that “progressive donors and organizations need to immediately correct the lack of investment in state and local strategies.”

Let that sink in: State and local … State and local … State and local.

I’m beginning this commentary on the recent assaults on Steve Bannon by quoting my response to questions that a CNN-Digital reporter asked me concerning President-elect Trump’s friend and adviser:

There’s no indication that Steve Bannon, the Breitbart executive and Donald Trump adviser, who has been characterized as a white nationalist, is a racist or anti-Semite. Bannon is not a white identitarian or race realist. He comes from the world of Washington politics and journalism, not white identity politics. Although I don’t know the man, I doubt Bannon hangs out with people who burn crosses on other people’s lawns.

I expressed this view, more or less, not only to CNN-Digital. I also expressed it in a phone-call marathon to representatives of a Danish daily and the Jewish Forward and, in an hour and a half German conversation, with an editor of the German conservative weekly Junge Freiheit. In all these exchanges I had to answer the question of whether Steve Bannon was in fact an anti-Semite and racist, a judgment that was coming from, among others, such exemplary American “conservatives” as Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, and writers for the Wall Street Journal. I was also asked whether as the co-inventor of the term “Alternative Right,” which has now been shortened to “Altright,” I could tell if Bannon, who likes the term in question, enjoys the company of “white nationalists.”

I tried to explain that the exceedingly elastic term “Altright” has been claimed by a number of groups that belong to the non-establishment Right. All those on the Right who are at war with the GOP establishment and neoconservative politics and who are combatting PC with particular ferocity have embraced the designation “Altright.” This is especially true of Millennials who scorn establishmentarian positions. But it’s not at all clear to me that those who write for Bannon’s website publication, some of whom are Orthodox Jews, have much to do with white identitarians who also use the term “Altright.” I would doubt that these writers go out to drink with the Philonazi blogger Matt Heimbach, who also claims the Altright moniker.

Having been whipped and humiliated on Election Day, those protesters now clogging streets in the US are consoling themselves as leftists always do when things don’t go their way at the ballot box: a perverse delight in flaunting the welts of their imagined victimhood.
P. G. Wodehouse, in Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), has his eponymous manservant tell a story that bears on the election of Donald Trump.

In my own family … it was a generally accepted axiom that in times of domestic disagreement it was necessary only to invite my Aunt Annie for a visit to heal all breaches between the other members of the household. In the mutual animosity excited by Aunt Annie, those who had become estranged were reconciled almost immediately.

Donald Trump is Aunt Annie.

He has succeeded in bringing together the Left and a large chunk of the Right, united in deploring his election. He has catapulted Democrats and half of his own party into dithyrambs of grief and shared detestation of his person and his politics. They’re still in shock that this coarse and lascivious upstart, this xenophobic warmonger who will never be a statesman, could get his finger on the button.

This alliance is temporary, as no doubt was the reconciliation in Jeeves’s family when Aunt Annie went home. It’s already begun to fray and tatter. Once Trump is installed in the White House and we start getting used to him it will be forgotten. The Right will get over its distaste for Trump and regroup behind him, especially if he begins to implement policies it likes, gets on with “draining the swamp”, doesn’t send us all to Kingdom Come and – perhaps? – sees Hillary sent up the river. The Left will become increasingly bitter, violent and uncooperative.

Trump is a gift to the Left. The whole sad world of print and online whingers, with splenetic tweets their substitute for a fulfilling existence, will have a single individual on whom to focus their perpetual dissatisfaction with everything. Those wells of choleric rage that never run dry have a new focus. Feminism, gender politics, climate change – anything lefties don’t get their way on in the next four years can be laid at the door of this, as they see him, vulgar usurper of Hillary’s right to succession.

Intellectual snobbery looms large in the contempt the leftist Establishment feels for Trump voters. They “should be subjected to an IQ test,” sneered ABC presenter Virginia Trioli, although with the competence we associate with the national broadcaster she didn’t know the microphone was still on when she gave us this glimpse of supposedly nonexistent ABC bias. (A word of advice, Virginia: apart from checking the mike always be careful of calling other people unintelligent: there are plenty brighter than you who don’t think you’re a giant brain either. And when it comes to IQs, what about all those ingenuous suckers who drive around with “An independent media? It’s as easy as ABC” stickers on their ancient Volvos?)

Trump might turn out to be a Reagan, in which case the Right and the middle will soon be all for him. The office will shape the man and Trump will adjust his style. But the manic Left will go on loathing him with hysterical intensity. Lachrymose Fairfax columnist Wendy Squires set the tone within seconds of his victory. “I am woman,” she wrote redundantly under her byline, “hear me sob” (why do feminists always fall back on old-fashioned female tears when they don’t get their own way?). Wendy was distraught that Americans had elected a “narcissist, megalomaniac oaf” (one of her kinder descriptions) instead of the female president “the world was ready for”. People like her seem to think an election should be an exercise in affirmative action, though you never hear them rejoicing in the achievements of Mrs May, who, not being of the Left, presumably doesn’t count as a woman.

Wendy’s distress is as nothing compared with the groans and weeping that have been echoing for a week around the quangoes and cocktail circuits frequented by Americans of the kind Virginia would consider don’t need IQ tests. Campus safe spaces are so wet with Generation Snowflake’s tears they’ve probably run out of mops and buckets. Democratic Party HQ must look as though the sprinklers have gone off.