"President Donald J. Trump was spirited into office with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” This isolationistic ploy originated with General Robert E. Wood’s “American First Committee” in 1940, the foremost United States pressure group against entry into World War II." ...
He adds:
This is true, history repeats itself, and for understandable and justifiable reasons. Until Trump, the US had been going the opposite direction for 30 years, hoodwinked by the globalists, who aimed to weaken nation-states and elevate transnational corporations, which they did. Trump did not equate globalism with fascism, but that label fits, recalling Mussolini's vision of a partnership of government with big corporations, marginalizing the citizens. The South Korean miracle relied totally on protectionism. So did Japan's. China too used protectionism, with impunity, until Trump rode in. Clearly, the globalists meant for China to grow, exempting them from reciprocal free trade. All in plain sight. I'd call it corruption... 'the family' first. Successive US administrations, Republican and Democrat, we're happy to go along with it, turning a blind eye. Or were they just that stupid? Trump, being an outsider, was happy to say out loud what no one in 'the family' would ever say; the emperor has no clothes, and in the case of American workers, no good jobs and no corporate taxes to maintain infrastructure. So, America 1st was a long overdue reply to 'the family' 1st.
Some readers no doubt will have trouble with this assessment as they are preoccupied with what Trump is and not with what he attempted to do. This is not new. Some learned readers have bombarded me with their assessment of the man as if it were fundamental to what he does. To focus exclusively on “what a man is” often distracts from “what a man does.” Trump is no angel as “Men of Action” seldom appear to be throughout history as my new book attempts to show. That said, the ghosts in Trump’s personality often seemed to have had the upper hand.
Then there is the high jinx of the media, mainly CNN and FOX NEWS NETWORK whose talking heads behave like spoiled children trying to bring viewers to value their point of view as if it is infallible truth consistent with what Popes of the Roman Catholic Church once enjoyed with their encyclicals to believers, and earlier when monarchs with the dogma of the “Divine Rights of Kings” enjoyed absolute unquestioned authority in temporal and secular matters.
We like to believe we have moved on from this preoccupation with infallible authority, but as we see schadenfreude or the joy derived in insulting the character of those in positions of power that we dislike or hate has never been more evident. Trump is a delicious target as he has faults aplenty.
Interestingly, we forgive weaknesses in historic figures that we admire such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, FDR, John F, Kennedy. General Sherman, Lyndon Johnson, Gandhi, Winston Churchill, and Lincoln to name a few that psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi profiles in “A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” (2011). I’m sure Trump would be on this list, too, but he would not come to power until six years after the book was published.
My da, a Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad put this dilemma in much more simple terms. “Jimmy,” he said, “people of wealth and power commit mortal sins while people like us commit only venial sins as we possess neither wealth nor power.“
Once I grew up, I discovered although this was true it appeared more complicated than that. I found people like myself were afraid of freedom, what Isaiah Berlin calls “negative freedom” where we reject government invasion into our lives economically and politically, while “positive freedom” favors a welfare system where the government takes care of us and dictates the quality of our existence. Absurdly, even Corporate America favors a welfare state of existence.
Erich Fromm writes in “Escape From Freedom” (1941):
We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.
He writes elsewhere:
Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.
You will note that Berlin and Fromm define “positive freedom” differently although Berlin is speaking of the same thing as “negative freedom.”
Where the reader was wrong about Trump is that although the focus was misleadingly on what “he is” and might more relevantly have focused on “what he does,” he lacked the imagination, the maturity, or the depth of understanding to bring a diverse coalition of spirited individuals to see the wisdom of his ideas. Alas, he was a “Man of Action” when the moment required a “Man of Ideas,” something he lacked to a regrettable degree.
What happened on January 6, 2020, with Trump’s more fanatic supporters taking over to the disgust and embarrassment of many who simply wanted a peaceful demonstration of their disappointment that he had not been reelected. Leadership ultimately is symbolic at its zenith and Trump was the wrong man for that role whatever the merits of his agenda.
Books will be written on this tragedy far beyond my time, books I hope will be reasoned rather than polemical.
THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES WITH A READER
You'll see I've featured your remarks in my ADDENDUM to “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire," hoping to bring some Trump haters to come down off their self-righteous perches. I have no interest in ‘”the Donald” other than a data point to illustrate our collective cultural decline consistent with the theme of this book. Much as we like to generalize our culture rises and falls on the actions of individuals as it has throughout history.
THE READER RESPONDS
The Trump 'haters' movement, as you say, originated mainly with partisan players, thrilled to feast on the buffet of character flaws flaunted by the badass in chief. Trump must have the thickest skin of any public personality we have ever seen. I hesitate to say it since he was so flawed, but he martyred himself for the noble cause of opening the eyes of slumbering, brain-washed, abused, American workers. He truly was, as he is sometimes called, the blue-collar billionaire. Globalism is and was terrible for all the developed countries, the West in other words. Now that Globalism is losing its cachet, it is being replaced by Critical Theory or Critical Race Theory, as I see it. If you think that's a stretch, just remember the original goals of Globalism... wealth and power transfer from the haves (The West) to the have nots (3rd World). Now the 3rd world is here, among us, thanks to 3 decades of orchestrated mass immigration. Now that they are here, the culture wars continue, taking dead aim at the colonialist, white Euro-centric oppressors. You've seen it. It's being taught in our schools and has been for decades, especially the universities, which are rife with this hate propaganda. Woke, postmodern, cultural Marxism is what it is. It's unbelievably dangerous and I fear the average Canadian and American underestimates the level of threat to themselves personally.
MY RESPONSE
Again, I take some exception to your forgiving the WEST with our traditional bugaboo communism and Marxism that Mark Levin currently controls in the marketplace of paranoid ideas with his books and weekly FOX NEWS telecasts of “Life, Liberty & Levin.” The Donald didn’t drop the WEST down the rabbit hole of anxiety; he simply exploited it to his advantage, falling on the sword of his rhetoric.
Meanwhile, I haven’t heard from a single voice of dissent or confirmation everyone is too anxious consumed with misgivings about when this pandemic will end, wondering if we are on the brink of another Great Depression.
We have been here before. Queen Isabella was not yet Queen of all Spain in 1492. She however agreed to finance a voyage to the New World and named Columbus as the admiral, viceroy, and governor of any lands he should find after the defeat of the last Muslim stronghold in Spain which brought Queen Isabella and Ferdinand II of Aragon to power over all of Spain. During that same period, a Papal Bull Pope Sixtus IV gave the Conquistadores of Portugal the rights to all lands and people in the New World with the express purpose of spreading the influence and treasury of Roman Catholicism. These acts showed no regard for the indigenous peoples of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec who had developed complex civilizations in Mexico, Central America, and Peru before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
Young people in my experience although well educated with good professional careers – I am speaking of my more than a dozen granddaughters and grandsons – are neither interested in history or, indeed, pesky politics. We may like to separate those of us of European stock from all others but it doesn’t work as our history of good and evil, caring and cruelty, love, and hate, are all part of a single race, the human race. It is well time that we dispose of the identity of liberals and conservatives, fanatics and revolutionaries, and find a way of having room for each other on this small planet.
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