The MAGA Doctrine Page 17

  The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement at the end of 2020, assuming Trump is still in charge. We’ll be free of all of those photo ops—and all that hot air—in Paris, and a world that treats climate fear almost as a new, unifying religion. Despite this, our nation’s carbon footprint shrinks every year through innovation, not harassment.

  The Iran deal—under which Obama let Iran keep working on nukes while being paid vast amounts, receiving additional money in secret off-the-books shipments, and having sanctions lifted, all without stopping its terrorist activities and endless America-is-Satan rhetoric—was ended abruptly when Trump took office. Obama must have been pained to see yet another fragile piece of his dubious legacy fall apart, to America’s benefit.

  In fact, let’s pause for a moment to remember the real legacy of Obama, this man who so many still talk about as if he were not just a good president but an inspiring, almost spiritual leader.

  Obama gave billions to Iran and was willing to be quite sneaky about it.

  Obama retrieved a US military traitor by exchanging him for terrorists who we released. So we gained a terrorist who now has to be cared for and monitored, and the terrorists gained several fighters destined to return to the battlefield.

  Obama did nothing when ISIS took power in Iraq and Syria. As noted earlier, he arguably facilitated those horrible events by recklessly funding Syrian rebels.

  Obama let Assad gas his citizens, even as we were supposedly drawing uncrossable red lines and demanding Syrian regime change. Embarrassing. Trump twice hit Assad’s forces with missiles after he crossed that line.

  Obama repeatedly embarrassed and shamed Israel, our greatest ally. Trump, who some thought would be insufficiently supportive of Israel because of his noninterventionist tendencies, took the immense and unprecedented step of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a city of clashing Israeli and Palestinian claims. No wonder Trump is popular in Israel and considered an important ally by Netanyahu.

  No foreign nation has found a greater friend in President Trump than Israel. That nation is a tiny miracle, surrounded by hostile, often theocratic Muslim nations. It is the one real democracy in a sea of totalitarianism and archaic monarchies. Israel has flourished spectacularly, its economic growth and contributions to the world unmatched by the other nations of the Middle East. It has virtually no oil, unlike its neighbors, and has been able to defeat countless attacks, repeated intifada attack campaigns, and even all-out wars.

  It is a nation just a bit like Donald Trump: always surrounded by hostile neighbors, yet always moving ahead and winning.

  As for Obama: He could have been worse. He was neither the far-left radical some of his conservative critics made him out to be—too friendly with big Wall Street donors for that, really—nor the capitalist neoliberal sellout that some of his disappointed left-wing critics charged. But he was handed an opportunity with his big win in 2008 to fix some longstanding problems in the United States, and for the most part, he just kicked the can down the road, sounding like a slightly less ambitious version of Bill Clinton.

  When he failed to get the things he wanted, he constantly blamed his predecessor, George W. Bush, or obstructionist Republicans in Congress. When he did get what he wanted, particularly his signature program, Obamacare, it imposed new burdens on already cash-strapped Americans—and had its key provision, the insurance-buying mandate, eliminated under his successor.

  Obama is still talked about in warm, glowy terms by some voters, in particular many of my fellow millennials. But he didn’t do that much for you (no thanks). Trump promised, and Trump delivered. His critics are angrier than if he’d reneged on every promise.

  Chapter 16

  The Great Agitator

  One arena for fights between President Trump and his critics, an arena decidedly less dangerous than coups d’etat or shooting wars, is Twitter. I know that there have been well-meaning advisors to the president since he took office saying that Twitter use might look unpresidential. It was entertaining during the 2016 campaign, but maybe he should stop once he takes office.

  I’m so happy that the president tweets, and not just because that’s the medium through which I expressed my enthusiasm for him back in 2011 and 2012. I think it’s natural for a president whose personality is such an important element of his presidency—and who created the MAGA Doctrine largely through his force of will—to communicate so directly with his fellow citizens. What could be a better expression of his brand of populism?

  The people who claim Trump is autocratic should be happiest of all about his Twitter use. You want to know what President Trump is thinking? I don’t think you could ask for a more direct glimpse of his train of thought than that. It’s direct, personal use of technology that was never available to presidents and citizens in the twentieth century, and it jibes perfectly with Trump’s democratizing, decentralizing impulses.

  Consider how abstract—and often how phony—political communications were in the last century. A few political philosophers and pundits gave you the idealized version of some faction’s main argument in the form of a tidy manifesto, and its argument stood, in theory, for all time, contested only by other slowly crafted, infrequently published treatises. If people were lucky, perhaps they got a fuller look at what went on in their heads of states’ heads years later when the heads of states’ letters were published.

  It may sound calmer and more stately than today’s frenzy of communications and rapid-fire online arguments. But maybe that’s why some terrible arguments and terrible philosophies lingered as long as they did. How long would Marxism have lasted if Karl Marx had been tweeting his basic ideas to the world way back in 1848 when he wrote The Communist Manifesto? A few tentative tweets might have entered his feed, and then a more market-oriented economics writer such as France’s Frédéric Bastiat would have torn him apart.

  Twitter can be ridiculous, but it can also be a crucible for getting at the truth—and shooting down nonsense—very quickly. We should be grateful we have a president so willing to show us his ongoing thought processes. True, Obama tweeted, but it’s safe to say he didn’t tweet in the Trump fashion, sticking to safe topics, formally phrased. The difference between the two men online speaks volumes: Obama cool and considered and still wrong, Trump spontaneous, sometimes combative, but generally incensed about exactly the right things (and people).

  Trump’s Twitter use is a little hint that he’s achieved something truly historic. He has reversed patterns of political change that seemed to be headed inexorably in one direction for not just decades but thousands of years.

  Think about it. From the days when villages first began to be absorbed into empires, the world has grown more intimately connected over larger and larger geographic distances. Unfortunately, the growth of empires also meant that with every expansion, there was a tendency toward the creation of a more elite ruling class shaping the affairs of more distant citizens. The twentieth century may have been the peak of that process, with the British Empire, the trading and military partners of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China vying for spheres of influence. The independent nations of Europe, whose clashes had produced many of our notions of nationalism and democracy, were absorbed into the shaky larger entity called the European Union. At the UN, particularly in its early, more naïve days, some delegates talked about the idea of securing perpetual peace by creating a true world government.

  Only a killjoy, it seemed, would tell the global elite that this process was headed anywhere other than toward tighter and tighter unification. The idea that One World was our natural political destination was so woven into our culture that it popped up in our thinking in many different areas, from music (“We Are the World”) to the children-holding-hands designs favored by groups like the United Nations. To care deeply was to want a homogeneous, centrally planned world, all the smartest people seemed to be telling us for a long time, from the age of warrior-emperors to the age of the Europe
an Parliament.

  But then cracks started to appear.

  The United States was born in a separation from the most expansive empire the world ever knew, the British. The empires of Old Europe fell apart in World War I and World War II. The Soviet Union shattered due to an unworkable economic system, and its subsidiary republics quickly reasserted their independence, while Russia itself grew more nationalist and conventionally patriotic. Talk of world revolution faded. China struggled to keep a couple of its subordinate units, such as Tibet and Hong Kong, in line.

  But the centrifugal force didn’t stop there. As people on both left and right began to recognize that imperial dreams had suppressed local, traditional desires, it became newly intellectually acceptable once more to say that local determination might be a good thing, and those who aspired to rule everything from afar—from places like Geneva or Brussels—might not know everything. Greeks groaning under the restrictions imposed by membership in the Euro, Europe’s shared new currency, began to hint at the unthinkable: that the process of European unification could be reversed. A member state was at least considering leaving.

  Then, in June 2016, the United Kingdom shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. Brexit could have been viewed as a mere local spat—the United Kingdom had always been stubbornly independent-minded. But interestingly, observers immediately took it as an indicator that Donald Trump could, just maybe, win the presidential election five months later.

  In the old right/left terms, the two events would have seemed unconnected, but people were starting intuitively to recognize what was really at stake: mindless continued progress toward centralized bureaucracy or the reassertion of local autonomy. Dishonest commentators would point to the centrifugal force, and instead of calling it, as they well might have, anti-imperialist, they called it racist. Who wouldn’t want to be ruled as part of a much larger, more international political unit, the liberal elite tastemakers asked? Surely, they concluded, only people so self-absorbed and hateful that they do not want to interact with the wider world.

  But the word the left would have used in any earlier period for this trend of resistance to the center and the elite is still apt: liberation.

  Donald Trump was the ultimate confirmation that what looked like an inevitable, “natural” political process—the watered-down twenty-first-century version of the nineteenth century’s dialectic of Hegel or the twentieth century’s acceptance of socialist revolutions throughout the developing world—could be stopped, even reversed. It is in this sense, not in the sense of turning the clock back to a time of greater intolerance or ignorance, that Donald Trump has stopped the Wheel of Time and shown it to be a gaudy and expendable prop.

  No wonder the elite were scared. No wonder dozens of corporate jets flew to an emergency meeting in 2016 to discuss how to derail Trump’s nomination to be the GOP’s presidential candidate. Even many rank-and-file Republicans who (grudgingly at first in some cases) supported Trump likely did not understand the real historic significance of his achievement in getting elected and his mission since. Trump wasn’t just going to be a figurehead occupying the Oval Office. He wasn’t just going to nudge American policy a few clicks to the right instead of the left.

  Trump threatened to end the whole system of the world, by showing it didn’t have to be accepted passively. The United States was not going to fade into a world government. The United Kingdom does not have to become the northern branch of Brussels. A different outcome to history was still possible, is still possible.

  Trump, the America-loving nationalist, has global implications.

  The analogies are readily apparent between this changed view of the globe, the changed view of military priorities that goes with it, and the attitude with which Trump-style populists view domestic US politics.

  The recurring theme is a refusal to let vast, impersonal forces, masquerading as historical destiny, decide what will become of us.

  The United States doesn’t have to become China—or a mere extension of Latin America.

  The world doesn’t have to be subdued by a single military hegemon responsible for ending—or sometimes it seems more like starting—all conflicts.

  And individual human initiative doesn’t have to give way to rule by the central planners and the elite scolds.

  On all these levels, we are still humans capable of reasserting ourselves and controlling our destinies. Is it any wonder that message resonated with so many people who had long felt alienated from the political process? Is it any wonder some very powerful, very smooth-talking experts would like us to go back to sleep? Think of all the things they would be on the verge of getting away with if we did, from population control to the elimination of vast portions of industry in the name of reducing greenhouse gases.

  The big political picture, stretching back centuries, even millennia, is a little unsettling when you consider America’s strange place in it. If the long-term elite goal, usually unconscious but in more recent times quite conscious, was a unified, homogenized world, the United States continuing to assert its independence would be a colossal sticking point. But no nation truly asserts its right to independence without first feeling some measure of pride. If they could make us lose faith in America, they could absorb us into their larger designs for the world without a peep of objection.

  The global elite needed America humbled. They loved Obama’s so-called apology tour, his low-key bowing to world leaders, however well-intentioned and polite. It was one sign among many that America was finally learning to stop thinking of itself as special. It was a sign America was falling in line.

  The United Nations and other international bodies are so often frustrated by America’s skepticism about climate change or international wealth redistribution (two policies the elite have repeatedly tried to roll into one, developing nations being more likely to suffer climate-related damage if the worst predictions about global warming–related flooding were true). The last thing the UN needs is a United States full of go-it-alone survivalists or conservative gun collectors admiring their antique flintlocks, not to mention untamable businesspeople or flag-waving nationalists.

  US nationalism has always been a threat to the larger scheme of globalist, internationalist rule-making. Now I’m not talking about hate groups such as white racists; the vision that Trump offers on nationalism has nothing to do with race. It’s nationalism for the entire nation, for the United States of America, not for a particular group, race, religion, or sect. One nation, united versus globalist elites. No matter how often we point out this very important distinction, some on the left continue to falsely group these impulses together. It’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s the biggest, most obvious truth about global historical trends. That makes Donald Trump, in some people’s eyes, the most dangerous man in history.

  How do you keep a people’s spirit of independence, of self-determination, alive? For starters, you give them a country worth defending. You Make America Great Again.

  Other nations needn’t fear—on the contrary, they should learn from our example, if we succeed. Much like the “shot heard ’round the world” that began the American Revolution but also inspired thoughts of resistance to imperial rule around the world, thoughts that would not come to fruition for most for another two centuries, the MAGA Doctrine is a jolt to the very organizing principles of the modern world. It is a refusal to accept our place. It is a refusal to accept mediocrity. It is a refusal to await instructions from on high—especially if “on high” means some consensus plan conceived in Brussels or at a special session of the UN.

  You know, there’s a hotel directly across from the United Nations headquarters in New York City called the Trump World Tower, and I think I’d feel much more at ease and have much more fun in the latter, in part because I wouldn’t be there scheming to control the rest of the world’s population. No one should be. Trump isn’t. He wants everyone to chart their destiny, as he has.

  Instead of imagining the world
ruled with an iron fist by Trump, as the hysterical left has for the past four years, try instead imagining a world full of people each inspired to take charge of their own lives and to live as passionately, as fully, as productively, as Trump has. They say one of the reasons people liked Trump so much when he began appearing in presidential debates was that he seemed like a free man. In a world of the regulated and politically correct, he was still daring to speak his mind and do as he pleased. What if we all followed that example?

  The MAGA Doctrine may be a nationalist, not a globalist, creed, but it has implications for the lives of people everywhere, just as Athenian democracy did, just as the American Revolution’s historic overthrow of the monarchy did. In addition to giving us a glimpse of how to Make America Great Again, Trump has given us a glimpse of how to regain lost confidence and lost individualism and make ourselves great again—or at least keep trying. America should not impose its will upon the world, especially not by military force. But, by its example, it can help Make the World Great.

  The nationalists of all nations, the individuals living under all regimes, and the strivers within all systems do share a common interest—without bowing to a common government or master. Each person in the world deserves the chance to develop himself to his fullest potential, potentially to live as large as President Donald J. Trump. On some level, they already know that will not happen if they live by defeatist philosophies that say we cannot compete, we cannot joke, we cannot build, we cannot feel pride, we cannot break from the pack and shine.

  Whether a human being’s goal is virtue, wealth, travel to the stars, a happy family, or amazing art, she must begin by accepting personal responsibility for the outcome. Survival can sometimes be eked out by following orders or letting the experts call the shots. Greatness, on the other hand, requires the liberty and the drive to make the most of yourself. I want to see my entire country free to try. I think we’ll win.