https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272412/new-years-resolutions-we-should-be-making-bruce-thornton
Since Election Day 2016, one story has dominated our attention––the person and rhetoric of Donald Trump. No amount of achievements by Trump and the Republican Congress at home or abroad can distract the bipartisan NeverTrump chorus from shrieking over tabloid trivia ranging from mysterious nudie selfies, to the president’s fifty-year-old draft deferments.
Expect 2019 to be even more all Trump, all the time. For Democrats, Trump has become their Moby Dick, the hated monster they’ll destroy themselves to kill. For the media, Trump has been a ratings gold-mine. As now disgraced CBS honcho Les Moonves said two years ago, Trump is “damn good for CBS.” This year promises to be no different. The progressive media will likely keep its long-running series, “The Mueller Show,” and the start this year of the 2020 presidential primary season will see “The Primary Follies” improve its ratings with numerous Dem guest-stars for the intergenerational war between the rich, old white establishment, and the “woke” young guns “of color.” And don’t forget the long-running show “Family Feud,” featuring pouting NeverTrump Republicans with their snarky patter and virtue-signaling verbal tics.
All very entertaining, no doubt. But while we gorge on this high-carb junk TV fare, serious issues confront the Republic. We need to make a collective New Year’s resolution to pull the plug, and focus on these looming challenges.
On the foreign policy front, our continued clinging to the old narrative of moralizing internationalism needs to end. The idea that, as Woodrow Wilson expressed this faith in 1917, “National purposes have fallen more and more into the background; and the common purpose of enlightened mankind has taken their place,” began to be exposed as a pipe-dream long before Trump came on the scene. The populist and nationalist revolts across the West have shown that the bulk of ordinary citizens are tired of pampered, patronizing global elites presuming to know what’s best for them, and demanding ever more power in order to effect the improving changes they claim will usher in utopia.
That dream of world governance, moreover, is contrary to the conditions of most peoples’ existence. A critical mass of citizens still finds their identities in the particular traditions, histories, faiths, mores, landscapes, customs, cultures, and languages among which they live. Their revolt is against an imperial cosmopolitanism which demonizes that rich diversity as retrograde and bigoted, a troublesome poltergeist from our benighted past. But there is no “common purpose of enlightened mankind,” for there are no “citizens of the world” or “global community,” apart from the tiny elite of credentialed and privileged managers of the “new world order.” Ordinary people are loath to cede their national identities, freedom, and sovereignty to such haughty, self-selected overseers.