Heather Mac Donald An Inauguration Both Exhilarating and Problematic President Trump has laid out a policy agenda of conservative dreams—but a touch of magnanimity wouldn’t have hurt.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-inauguration-speech-biden
The 1619 Project is routed, at least for now.
“Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers,” declared Donald Trump in his second Inaugural address. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. . . . Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on earth. . . . Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”
Anyone steeped—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the critical historiography that culminated in the New York Times’s post-George Floyd hit job on America was thinking at that point:
“Wait! You can’t say that! What about the Indians? What about instituting slavery—not just allegedly “ending” it [insert ironic air quotes]? What about the three-fifths and the fugitive slave clauses of the Constitution? What about the oppression of women, LatinX, gays, and every manner of “marginalized Other?” What about environmental rapine and imperial conquest? Surely one needs to acknowledge the many sins that the just-departing president insisted are written into America’s (or at least white Americans’) very soul?”
Nope.
Those days are over, at least in official Washington and its tributaries throughout the federal and state bureaucracies.
Trump aims to make America patriotic again. Many Americans never stopped being patriotic, but their patriotism was viewed as a mark of ignorance by the coastal elites and the academy.
In fact, it was the reflexive left-wing critics who were ignorant. They are seemingly untouched by any awareness of how hard-won was the vast catalogue of Western achievement, whose roots were laid millennia ago, before accelerating during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, until today modern man takes for granted the freedom, affluence, comfort, and health that were unthinkable for most of human history.
The self-regarding apologies are done. The Americans who created this country, Trump said, “pushed onward, marched forward, and let no obstacle defeat their spirit or their pride. Together, they laid down the railroads, raised up the skyscrapers, built great highways, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and triumphed over every single challenge that they faced.” No footnotes about racism and sexism.
To be sure, past patriotic narratives contained their own blind spots. The “history from the bottom up” critiques that led to the 1619 Project exhumed important facts. But a course correction is desperately needed. We are in no danger of historical amnesia. We have incorporated the country’s past hypocrisies, tragic compromises, and gratuitous racial cruelties into our understanding of the present. We will not unlearn those lessons.
As if to prove that it is safe to be a white male again, Trump conducted a reverse land acknowledgement, re-renaming Mount McKinley after the National Park Service renamed the Alaskan peak “Denali” in 2015 after a tribe—the Koyukon—that once lived around its base.
The rest of the second Inaugural was, like all things Trumpian, alternately exhilarating and problematic. The list of policy initiatives that came rolling out was beyond a conservative’s wildest dream: the elimination of racial double standards and a return to color-blind merit; an end to the government’s shocking arrogation of power to declare what is “true,” what is censorable “misinformation,” and what is possibly punishable “hate speech”; an end to the federal imprimatur on the fantastical idea that gender is a choice; torpedoing the charade of carbon neutrality; eviscerating electric vehicle mandates; development of all American energy resources (one hopes with a strong emphasis on nuclear); the end to the weaponization of the Justice Department to punish political enemies (it remains to be seen if Trump carries through on that one); and a slew of measures to restore border integrity and to treat illegal entry as the assault on national sovereignty that it is.
The absence of any reference to climate change must have caused as many heart attacks among the global climate industry as the absence of any reference to racism did among race activists.
As for tariffs as a solution to inflation, their efficacy is an empirical question deserving of a real-world test.
The speed with which Trump is moving on his policies is a stunning testament to his team’s organization. Trump started signing executive orders upending the last half century of progressive dominance the minute that the official inaugural ceremony concluded. Those orders are weapons of war, however legally complex and carefully drafted, and will be fought as such. If they survive challenge, they will usher in a counterrevolution as significant as the progressive revolution that they seek to destroy.
Nevertheless, a note of caution. The declarations of national emergencies to clear the way for unilateral executive actions set a worrisome precedent. There is an arguable case for declaring a border emergency, though the persistence of illegal entry over decades makes the problem seem more routine than suddenly cataclysmic. But there is no basis for declaring a national energy emergency. Trump is doing so to set aside the environmental regulations that block more resource extraction on federal and private lands. There is no current energy crisis, though there would be one if Democrats’ wind and solar mandates were ever realized. The next Democratic president will simply follow Trump’s lead in declaring a national climate emergency as the pretext for taking control of the U.S. economy.
The most disappointing (but unsurprising) aspect of the speech was the absence of any gestures of reconciliation toward the previous administration. Abraham Lincoln’s inaugurals are revered for their superhuman grace, coming on the eve, and in the immediate aftermath, of the Civil War:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. (March 4, 1861)
With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (March 4, 1865)
Granted, Trump was the target of unprecedented abuse of power. And Trump’s enemies also failed the magnanimity test. An ABC reporter pointed out Michelle Obama’s absence at the speech, in alleged protest at the lack of diversity at Trump’s first inauguration. Biden’s last minute preemptive pardons and efforts to Trump-proof his climate regulations were an insult to his successor and hardly respected polite norms of governance.
Granted, too, the verbal formulae for a non-acrimonious transition may rarely be sincere. But conservatives are supposed to honor conventions that check destructive emotion, even when it is “their” guy who is breaking them. Thanking the Biden administration for its service and for its assistance in setting up a new government would have made Trump stronger, not weaker. If Lincoln could call the imminent secessionists “friends,” Trump could show some generosity.
Instead, Trump sounded like he was still in campaign mode: “We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. . . . Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina being treated so badly and other states who are still suffering from a hurricane that took place many months ago. Or more recently, Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense.”
Fact! many will say, and with some justification. Nevertheless, Republicans would feel that a remaining guard rail on partisan animosity had been overrun if an incoming Democratic administration spoke at an inauguration with such contempt about its predecessor. Everything that Trump is now doing to the Democrats, Republicans must be prepared to have done to them when power changes hands.
The thirst for retribution led Trump to pardon the January 6 rioters who had assaulted police officers, undercutting his stated support for law enforcement. That contradiction is as nothing, however, compared with the piteous solicitude for cops suddenly shown by Democrats who stood by silently during the George Floyd summer of 2020 as race rioters battered police officers with explosives, rocks, bottles, cars, and flamethrowers.
Those with lingering qualms about Trump’s public persona may come around to the view that the end justifies the means. The payoff from Trump’s norm-breaking is simply too great to cavil with. Trump will continue saying things that one is not supposed to say—and most of the time, those things will be the simple truth, now liberated from suppression. If Trump can achieve all he sets out to do, the country will have undergone possibly the most sudden course correction in its history. Perhaps in four years, a successor will emerge who matches the nobility of Trump’s agenda with a corresponding spirit.
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