RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-and-the-new-new-world-order/

This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/video-victor-davis-hanson-on-trump-zelensky-dust-up-at-oval-office/

In this new video, historian and pundit Victor Davis Hanson discusses the Trump-Zelensky dust-up on Friday at the White House, reflecting on how, “usually, in international diplomacy, the client doesn’t dictate to the patron.”

Don’t miss it!

https://www.city-journal.org/article/liberal-democracy-trump-populism-conservatives

The Trump administration is hitting its allies with tariffs, pulling out of international agreements, withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine, pardoning January 6 rioters who attacked police, and going after the Department of Justice. At the precise moment when liberal elites are lamenting their overreach on wokeness and mass immigration, these actions risk discrediting national conservatism across the western world.

Populism, which Trump has embodied, is an important check on what Yascha Mounk has termed undemocratic liberalism. However, national populists must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship to construct a new, mainstream vision of national unity. The negative impulses of populism need to be reined in: we need a rational populism. Liberal institutions must learn from the populist moment, and populists need a vision for the institutions.

As progressivism has triumphed in the culture, its irrational and illiberal strands have come to the fore. This has pushed classical-liberal rationalists to the right, and convinced traditional conservatives to back free speech and Enlightenment truth.

The Right was not always amenable to the idea of evidence-based policy. James Burnham’s conservatism of the early 1960s, for example, still opposed Enlightenment reason and free speech, preferring tradition to planning and accumulated habit to consistent principle. That has changed, with free speech and science’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos now associated with the right. The new marriage is symbolized by Silicon-Valley tech elites throwing their lot in with national-populist conservatives like J. D. Vance.

Liberals have also been stunned into self-reflection by Trump’s convincing comeback. Whatever they think of Trump or the European populist Right, the lesson is clear: institutions must change if they are to regain the trust they have clearly lost.

https://reason.com/2025/02/26/why-do-many-americans-have-a-positive-view-of-socialism/

Socialism is popular!

A Pew study reports that more than a third of American adults view it positively.

How is this possible?

Little has brought more misery—first in the Soviet Union, then in China, Cuba, Nicaragua, now Venezuela.

One reason young people support socialism is because their social media feeds show videos made by popular but economically illiterate people.

TikTok star Madeline Pendleton has 1.6 million subscribers. My new video shows her telling them: “Socialism is working better than capitalism 93 percent of the time!”

Where does she get 93 percent?

https://thespectator.com/topic/behind-vicious-attacks-elon-musk/

Why are Democrats mounting such a ferocious assault on Elon Musk? Why are mainstream media outlets so eager to go along?

The simplest answers are the best. Musk is the most prominent member of the new administration aside from the president himself. He is Donald Trump’s point man for exposing malfeasance in federal bureaucracies, determining where the money is going and cutting the engorged payroll.

The more Musk and Trump succeed, the worse for Democrats. They created those agencies; their supporters staff them; and those supporters funnel lots of public money to specially favored institutions and projects. When Musk attacks this partisan nexus, he is attacking a major source of Democratic power and influence.

That is what’s really at stake here, beyond cutting the budget. The pickings are easy, and they’re popular. The latest poll shows 60 percent think DoGE is helping and 76 percent support eliminating fraud and waste. (Who, for heaven’s sake, are the 24 percent who don’t support eliminating fraud and waste?)

Why does the mainstream media oppose these popular efforts, marching in lockstep with the Democrats? Because they are Democrats. That’s why 60 Minutes deceptively edited their interview of candidate Kamala Harris to make her appear coherent and intelligent. She was neither, a point she continues to prove whenever she speaks. That’s why CBS refused to release the transcript before the election. Hey, what are friends for?

Of course, attacking Musk has its own attractions. He is the richest man in America and the best-known, aside from the president. Pillaring Musk for his wealth allows Democrats to pose as populists, hoping to regain voters they lost to Trump’s MAGA coalition.