RUTHFULLY YOURS

Europe owes everything to the beneficence of America, which was even prepared to sign up for mutually-assured destruction in its protection. When Trump accuses such generosity’s recipients of ingratitude the only surprise is that the complaint was so long in coming.
Out of despair, insight. A comment from a despairing American friend of mine suddenly helped me to understand Donald Trump and his context. “If Thomas Jefferson had foreseen Donald Trump,” he said, “he would have told his fellow revolutionaries that they must stop fighting immediately and make peace terms with George III.” There was further gloom. “Trouble is, and despite Jefferson, the Enlightenment only had shallow roots in the United States.” Thus an intellectual blue-stater, more influenced by Hollywood than he would ever acknowledge, looks down on the plain people of middle America: the Donald Trump electorate.

Forgetting Donald Trump for a moment, my friend was right, more so than he realises, about the long-term failure of the Enlightenment. Which, in turn, was partly responsible for the thirty-year failure of Western policy which threatens us with decline. If the West’s will to power and ability to exercise power are gone beyond recall, then anarchy and destruction loom over the entire planet.

In recent years, the world has been turned upside down. Old assumptions and old certainties no longer work. This means that there are no grounds for Western geopolitical self-confidence. At the beginning of the 1990s, we were invited to hail the new world order and the end of history. How hollow those phrases sound now. If they are ever recalled to mind, it is with bitter irony. Forget optimistic slogans: we are now in the era of the unknown unknowns.

Yet none of this is Donald Trump’s fault. The President is dramatising the problems, not creating them. He had no hand in the West’s failures in the Middle East. He did not create the threats to American jobs and living standards from automation, robotisation and globalisation. He is not responsible for the immigration pressures from the huddled masses in poor countries. He cannot be blamed for the failure of the European single currency, or for the West’s inability to reach a post-Cold War modus vivendi with Russia. Men who regard themselves as much wiser than Mr Trump and who have the academic credentials to prove it, if not necessarily the record of practical successes, ought to scrutinise their own motives. They clearly have an aesthetic objection to a Trump presidency: that is understandable. “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born.” Yet it may also be that they are angry with him because he is forcing them to confront their own failure.

This failure is not always blameworthy. Some of the challenges which face the West may be beyond the capacity of anyone to surmount, even Donald Trump. In the meantime, Mr Trump is at least forcing them onto the agenda. The wiser men usually prefer not to think about the insolubles, rather as the Eloi tried to ignore the Morlocks. But even if he might seem to resemble a Morlock, Mr Trump is a great stimulator of thought. Not just thought; action too. On at least three problems, he might even be able to rescue the West from some of the Enlightenment’s minor failures.

My gloomy friend seemed to take it for granted that even if his fellow Americans had not been worthy to receive the message, the Enlightenment had been successful in Europe. That, alas, is untrue. If one considers its high expectations, it has failed. This failure has been associated with the most tragic period in human history and may well lead to the destruction of the human race. But it should all have been so different. For countless millennia, and despite great cultural achievements, much of human life was a wretched business: nothing but the animal struggle for food, warmth and sex at a slightly higher technological level. Countless numbers of individual lives were a cry of pain.

Patriotism in the White House, in any other era, would not have been anything out of the ordinary. In the America of managerialism and ‘global governance’, not to mention identity politics, Trump’s patriotism plunges the chattering classes into fits of frothing indignation.
The rise and rise of Donald J. Trump is a revolution. While today’s leftists would call it a counter-revolution, we might all agree that the 2015-16 populist-nationalist insurrection, which swept President Trump to power, falls outside the category of business as usual. For the anti-Trump camp, from Hollywood celebrities to Obama holdouts in the Deep State, Trump’s inauguration represents the moral equivalent of January 30, 1933.

The short-lived Journal of American Greatness and now the quarterly journal American Affairs provide a counterpoint to this Antifa (anti-fascist) narrative. An integral aspect of this nascent Trumpist intelligentsia is a high regard for James Burnham (above), a founding editor of the National Review and the author of such formative works as The Managerial Revolution (1941), The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), The Struggle for the World (1947) and Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964).

When Burnham died in 1987, President Reagan described him as “one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century—the journey away from totalitarian statism and towards the uplifting doctrines of freedom”. Not everyone shared Ronald Reagan’s admiration. Old-style Leftists reviled Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians because these books repudiated their fantasy that socialism—that is to say, a classless people’s community—would emerge out of the ruins of capitalism. Trotskyists broke with Burnham (and vice versa) for his refusal to accept that Stalin’s Russia somehow remained a workers’ state, albeit a deformed or degenerated one. Communist apologists, in turn, were aghast at Burnham’s mid-war denunciation of the Soviet Union as “the most extreme totalitarian dictatorship in history”. Coming in the midst of the Swinging Sixties, the central thesis of Suicide of the West—that the real role of American-style liberalism is “to permit Western civilisation to be reconciled to its dissolution”—garnered few friends on the progressive side of politics.

It is a different story with conservatives, of course, but still complicated. During James Burnham’s lifetime his work was widely read and, in the case of the Cold War, highly consequential. Many of the ideas he articulated in The Struggle for the World were already in circulation as early as 1944. He had identified guerrilla skirmishes in Greece, a power vacuum opening up in Eastern Europe, and the Chiang Kai-Shek-Mao Zedong standoff as the early stages of a global conflagration entirely distinct from the Second World War. Winston Churchill would have been aware of Burnham’s thinking before he delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946.

Despite this, and his key role in the National Review for a lengthy period, Burnham was rarely a source of political debate in the decades after his death. In 2002, for instance, Roger Kimball wrote an appreciative essay but feared that not even a new biography by Daniel Kelly would rescue James Burnham from relative obscurity:

But in this world, the combination of Burnham’s ferocious intellectual independence and unclubbable heterodoxy long ago consigned him to the unglamorous limbo that established opinion reserves for those who challenge its pieties too forcefully.

A “general renaissance” did not appear to be on the cards—until the momentous events of 2016, that is. In October last year, the anti-Trump conservative Matthew Continetti, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, spoke of the need:

“to rehabilitate Burnham’s vision of a conservative-tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.”

Jeet Heer, a senior editor for the New Republic, lambasted Continetti for “holding up Burnham as an alternative to Trumpism, portraying him as an advocate of a measured, brainy, and pragmatic right-wing politics that seeks to shape elite institutions rather than to take populist delight in burning it all down”. Heer, who writes a bi-weekly column with headings such as “Steve Bannon is Turning Trump into an Ethno-Nationalist Ideologue” and “Donald Trump is the Bizarro Noam Chomsky”, appears to have contracted a particularly virulent strain of Trumpophobia. That said, Heer might be right to argue that Burnham is not “an alternative to Trumpism” and, if anything, “a precursor to Trump”.