The MAGA Doctrine Page 9
The MAGA Doctrine means defending our soldiers and the average Joe filling up his gas tank instead of putting them in harm’s way, no matter what the big oil companies, radical environmental groups, or Middle Eastern despots want.
Part of the answer, of course, is to change our military strategy, our understanding of our responsibilities to military allies, and our inflated conception of the ease with which other nations’ cultures can be remolded and their regimes replaced. But another part of the answer is, conservatives have to admit, about oil production. The temptation to go to war decreases if oil becomes significantly more plentiful, less necessary for energy production, and more readily found right here at home without having to worry about the stability of regimes on other continents.
Less than a half-century ago, the Arab oil cartel called OPEC nearly brought America to its knees by temporarily reducing oil production—leading to the so-called energy crisis of the 1970s and the protracted economic slowdown that helped end Jimmy Carter’s presidency and put Ronald Reagan in office.
Now, a combination of fracking, more precise drilling, and more efficient use of natural gas and coal are helping to make the United States nearly “energy independent,” a stated but seemingly unachievable goal of every president since Nixon. It looked like an impossible dream for decades, something akin to “zero carbon emissions.” But now the dream is in sight, in part thanks to Republican insistence on pursuing “all of the above” energy strategies.
Hillary Clinton predicted that under her administration, “We’re gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies outta business.” Instead, President Trump drilled (quite carefully and safely) in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, exited the Paris Climate Agreement, ended the Obama administration’s regulatory “war on coal,” and approved for use several oil and gas pipelines that had languished in environmental-regulation red tape.
Trump’s reduction and streamlining of regulations and permitting procedures has helped push oil and natural gas production to record highs not seen since before the 1970s crisis (and the ensuing explosion in regulation). The United States doubled crude oil exports in 2018 and is a net exporter of natural gas for the first time in sixty years (exports to the European Union have nearly tripled).
All of this means an economic boon for the United States, but there is also an immense, more long-term political boon: The less dependent we are on the political stability of foreign regimes for our energy needs, the harder it becomes for military interventionists to justify risky military engagement abroad. That’s a heartbreaking side effect for a few relentless hawks who, in their own perversely patriotic way, think that the more the United States meddles abroad, the better for everyone. It would be nice if it were that simple, but the body count and unpaid bills suggest otherwise.
When Trump says we are living in a “golden age of American energy dominance,” he’s not announcing a triumphalist oil-wars regime like that in the mad dreams of some of the neoconservatives. He’s announcing the foundation for a new century of peace.
The left hasn’t been without its energy plans, of course.
There’s the Green New Deal touted by Democratic socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, intended to effect in a few short years the complete transformation of civilization into one characterized by central industrial and economic planning, full employment but drastically reduced plane flights, and the adoption of delusional “modern monetary theory” under which no amount of government spending matters because the printing of new currency just crowds out old, pre-green activities in favor of all the wonderful new government-directed green ones.
Notoriously, after months of praising the plan, Senate Democrats voted “present” on the Green New Deal when given a chance to reveal where they stood on the proposal, with Republicans overwhelmingly opposing it and the whole deal going down to a stunning 57–0 defeat. The deal’s pragmatist inspiration, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have shifted quickly to another tactic, and the Democrats probably will, too, if only to avoid having to talk about the debacle again.
Some would-be Democratic presidential nominees have plans of their own as asinine as the Green New Deal, though. Bernie Sanders’s plan would spend a stunning $16 trillion to nationalize large parts of the energy-production economy into something he describes as akin to a giant Tennessee Valley Authority. I mean, I guess it’s better he’s taken inspiration from that than from Stalin’s Five Year Plans, but I wouldn’t trust the government to do more with less under any circumstances. Nationalizing a big chunk of the economy probably means making it dirtier, less productive, and more expensive. “If you like your electricity, you can keep it.” No thanks.
Most left-wing energy plans for a long time now, starting during that ’70s crisis and accelerating during the big environmentalism fad of the ’90s, have mainly focused on convincing Americans to use less energy. Their assumption—driven in part by an excessive fear of global warming—is always that we should be cutting back use, not increasing production. It’s a stealth-Luddite agenda that implies humanity and all its activity is making things worse, is sinful in a sense, and ideally should stop altogether.
Former vice president Al Gore’s climate change plan, touted in part through his film An Inconvenient Truth, would involve cutting human energy use by about one fourth, not the sort of thing you achieve just by doing a little extra weather-stripping around drafty windows. That’d be a big, sudden decrease in civilization’s output and activity, likely yielding very little change in the Earth’s (mostly naturally) ever-fluctuating temperature.
Despite all the efforts to terrify us about global warming, by the way, the fact remains that the Earth’s temperature, to the extent it can even be reliably measured, has gone up only about one degree Celsius over the past hundred years, and sea levels have risen about three inches, which appears to be about the same amount they rose the previous century despite increasing industrial activity since then—and in any case, leaving people plenty of time to move a few inches farther away from the shore if necessary.
The Obamas don’t seem too worried about the problem now that they’re out of the White House and in mid-2019 bought a $15 million mansion right on the edge of a very flat stretch of Martha’s Vineyard beachfront.
If the left sometimes show their hypocrisy and indifference to the masses on the energy and climate issue by doing things like flying private jets all the time or living right next to oceans they claim will rise to kill us all any minute, we should not become complacent about hypocrisy on the right, either.
The willingness of, for example, generations of the elite to fight those devastating wars over oil-rich regions is a perverse side effect of the mingling of private interests and public power. Just as government subsidies for pharmaceutical purchases start looking like a great idea if your family is in the pharmaceutical industry (or, like Medicare Part D architect and former senate majority leader Bill Frist, the hospital management industry), your family being in the oil business just might make you more willing, on a subconscious level, to tolerate great sacrifices (on the part of others, including taxpayers) in the name of keeping the black lifeblood of industry flowing.
It’s not so crazy—it just isn’t necessarily as objective an accounting of the costs as would be made in a pure free market, where you had to pay for the land where pipelines sit with your own money, defend pipelines in trouble spots with your own gun, and fight foreign dictators with your own mercenary army. If you’re willing to do all that—without violating human rights in those countries—more power to you, no pun intended.
President Trump embraces ideas advanced by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been equally skeptical of our so-called alliances in the Middle East. The more energy-dominant we become, the more we produce in forms ranging from oil to coal to hydroelectric, the less oil we have to buy from countries like Saudi Arabia (let us not forget fifteen out of nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian) and Ira
n, which promotes terror throughout the Middle East and vows to bring about the destruction of Israel and America.
The philosophy of America First means that we no longer have to look outside our shores to fuel our ambitions or make strategic decisions.
The more we can steer clear of the trouble spots of the Arab world, the better, at least until such time as it has become a bit more tolerant and politically open. Having to recognize the United States as an energy exporter instead of importer might give some in that region just the dash of humility necessary in any culture, including our own, to foster civility.
In the long run, the best thing the United States may have going for it in a world desperate for steady energy supplies—so desperate it is sometimes willing to kill and be killed—is a culture of technological innovation. A few decades ago, virtually no one was writing about extracting oil from shale rocks or natural gas via fracking. Now the debate is often over whether these methods are too effective and have (minor) environmental side effects we dislike. So quickly we forget the old problems, like being at the mercy of the Middle East for our energy needs, and move on to more rarefied, relatively pleasant concerns.
Technological advances and growing wealth are like that. Long may they increase. I for one would take more pride in the United States coming up with whole new methods of producing energy—whether from oil, fusion, clean coal, or other methods we haven’t even imagined yet—than in teaching a rising generation it needs to stop using light bulbs and driving cars.
Industry uses energy and ever-advancing technology, and that’s something to be proud of, the hallmark of our species, not a sign of shame.
Chapter 8
America Is Not a Mistake
Imagine the world without America.
If you think America isn’t so “great,” with all its materialism and individualism, take a moment to consider what most of human history was like before the relatively recent eruption of America onto the scene. Two and a half centuries is just a blip in the grand scheme of time, after all. What was life like before?
Civilization as we know it has existed for only about twelve thousand years, with humans roaming in bands before that, searching for plants and prey to eat but not yet building farms and cities.
Then, for thousands of years, as cities grew into empires and culture became more complex, most people took it for granted that their lives would be run by tyrants—kings, emperors, Genghis Khan, maybe if you were lucky wise village elders who knew you well enough to show some mercy in their edicts about what you could say, do, hunt, draw, think.
Wars, though less likely to annihilate the planet than today’s wars, were frequent and largely amoral. Your tribe raided the next village over because it could. Captives might be taken and enslaved. There was little talk of human rights or constitutions in the distant past.
An early death was the norm, with most children dying before they reached puberty, the average adult probably living to about the age of forty, and medical options very limited.
Over those millennia, virtually no human beings were lucky enough to accumulate wealth. That was for kings. Subsistence-level farming—growing just enough so that your family could survive (if you were lucky and worked from dawn to dusk)—was the norm, as some environmentalists in our day wish it still were.
America became the land to which people from the Old World could flee to ply their trades without answering to guilds, farm land without answering to the lord of the manor, pray without permission from the government’s bishops, and talk about the affairs of the day without fearing reprisals from the king.
By no means were things fair from the outset in the eighteenth century, but the model of individual freedom that at first was applied only to white males was later expanded to women and ethnic minorities, to the benefit of all. That—not ditching the whole enterprise of American freedom—was the right thing to do.
Today, not only are there more Americans employed than ever before, but black unemployment is at historic lows, about 5%, and Latino unemployment hit a record low of about 4% in April 2019. It is amazing that this has happened on the watch of a president condemned as racist and anti-Latino by the entire liberal establishment (one of the leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, Elizabeth Warren, tweeted an unqualified “yes” to the question of whether President Trump is a “white supremacist”).
There’s never been a better time to be a black American than during the Trump administration. Why? Because conservative policies have led to:
Record low unemployment
Record high wage growth
Booming black business growth
We all recognize the tragic history of ethnic conflict in the United States, but that’s not the country’s whole story, obviously. This is the nation that inspired slave revolts around the world when its own revolution succeeded. This is the nation that took in more immigrants than any in history and made them rich. This is the nation that showed a doubled human lifespan—and a higher standard of living than had before been thought possible.
America has made mistakes, but America is not a mistake.
Our goal should be to fulfill its promise of freedom, not debunk that promise. Yet the current generation—the luckiest cohort of human beings who have ever lived—want to be the ones to give it all up. In three centuries, about three human lifetimes, this country grew to lead the world into unprecedented health, freedom, and prosperity, but somehow the fashionable political view of the moment among many members of my generation is socialism. Socialism?
I can’t entirely blame them. They’re listening to “experts” like the ones who have advised governments for a hundred years to regulate more, tax more, intervene in the economy at every opportunity—to imitate Continental Europe, even when Europe was at its most economically stagnant. But the experts can be wrong, even when armed with statistics. (Remember how wrong they were about Donald Trump’s chances of being elected in 2016.) I fear that without America’s influence, the experts who encourage socialism would long since have carried the day throughout the world, and there would be no beacon for the devotees of liberty to point to as a counterexample.
I bear no nation ill will, but we know—and most people in other countries know—that it will not be the United Kingdom or Belgium that will determine the future of the world. It will be the United States. To the extent that Trump is the defender and advocate of the United States, he functions as a vessel for Western civilization, which is humanity’s best hope of living better than our distant ancestors.
“Our agenda is pro-worker and pro-family,” Trump told that 2019 TPUSA crowd. While the phrasing might sound a little like that of a Progressive Democrat, that is because they have condescended from time to time to use populist instead of elitist rhetoric.
He sounded less like a Progressive when he said that the socialist ideas of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Rashida Tlaib, and their allies in Congress are “not American values.” To some on the hair-trigger left, this would likely be taken as further evidence that Trump wants to exclude Hispanics and Muslims or that he dislikes women, seeing them as outsiders to a society that should welcome only white males. But he’s not objecting to such fringe political figures’ last names or ancestry. He’s objecting to their desire to break with the practices and values that create the opportunities immigrants come here for.
The MAGA Doctrine is not the belief that one is compassionate toward some families and hostile toward others. Protecting the little guy means protecting the rights of refugees and immigrants, but not at the expense of other Americans’ rights or the values that made America unique. It begins with the belief that we should take pride in America’s past achievements and recognize that certain beliefs made those achievements possible. Wanting the best for Americans and wanting the ideas of Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk kept at bay are two sides of the same compassionate attitude. We wouldn’t wish socialism on our worst enemies—such as, in the second h
alf of the twentieth century, the Russians. They have moved away from socialism in the past thirty years, and we should be smart enough not to repeat the huge mistake they made before that. (In fact, if the Russians have been moving away from socialism, maybe we could afford to be a bit less paranoid about them. We want everyone to wise up and try freedom, and when they do, we can be friends to them all.)
We didn’t land men on the Moon, defeat Nazism, defeat Communism in Europe, and create the first society in history where most workers live in air-conditioned comfort by bashing America. We took a certain healthy pride in our way of doing things—not just an arbitrary pride “because it’s us” but a rational recognition that humanity has benefited from some of the things America has gotten right.
Students on campuses all over America are being taught to be ashamed of America, but it makes sense to be proud. If shame makes us carelessly adopt ideas antithetical to American success, our shame will be no virtue.
An optimistic America—not a shamed America, nor a hateful and arrogant America—is one of the greatest blessings the world can know. As Trump put it in that same speech, sticking up for America against its enemies and against radically anti-American political ideas isn’t a case of wanting a bully to overcome the weak: “It’s right overcoming wrong.”
We know how the left sees the president. They snicker at images such as the often-shared photo of Trump literally hugging an American flag onstage. What could such a display be except completely cynical theatrics, in their minds? (Since Progressives are very uptight, some might even add that this is technically a violation of official flag-handling protocol, as if they care.) I think, on the contrary, it’s Trump at his most heartfelt and honest. He’s smiling in that photo not because he thinks he’s doing something ridiculous but because he knows he’s doing what comes naturally to patriots everywhere. He’s happy in that photo! He’s celebrating America for a moment, and as he so often does, implicitly giving the rest of us encouragement to carry on that celebration every day.