By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
We are being hit with a deluge of articles attempting to explain Donald Trump’s victory in his run for the presidency. Some of the most insightful are appearing in the online edition of National Review, whose editors and contributors led the right-wing campaign against Trump. They were proud Never Trumpers.
They are eating their crow in an admirably honest manner. Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg have been especially impressive. They still don’t like Trump, but they are making a sincere effort to understand why so many on their side of the ideological fence voted for him. It would be well worth your time to spend some time examining the website (nationalreview.com) on the days immediately following the election, especially the article entitled “American Nationalism Returns” by John Fonte and John O’Sullivan.
Fonte and O’Sullivan see Trump’s election as an event of great importance in our history, a sea change, as they say. I am convinced that even many of Hillary’s voters would respond favorably if they could somehow be persuaded to read and ponder what Fonte and O’Sullivan have to say. I don’t put in that category the hardcore leftists in Hollywood, the media, and the academy. They are not likely to be won over.
But not all Hillary’s voters are like them. Among her backers were trade union members with the American flag on their hard hats, good-hearted patriotic women who were caught up in their hopes for a woman president, and well-meaning yuppies and impressionable college kids who bought into the caricature of Trump manufactured by the media. They might listen to Forte’s and O’Sullivan’s thesis, and perhaps become part of a new Republican majority in the country forged by Trump’s victory. Seriously. Let me explain.
Forte and O’Sullivan argue that Trump’s backers were not — in the main — “a basket of racists, sexists, xenophobes, and homophobes,” as Hillary described them, but Americans who saw what Forte and O’Sullivan describe as “the elephants in the room,” the left-wing partisans promoting “multiculturalism, diversity, bilingualism, identity politics, political correctness…and gender politics” for the purpose of “fundamentally transforming America.” They voted for Trump because they didn’t want any transforming.
Trump was willing to take on the secular leftists, unlike, as Forte and O’Sullivan describe them, the “professional Republicans at all levels — the donors, consultants, candidates, and incumbents” who “were bullied away from raising the issue, for fear of being thought unrespectable.”
It is a sound point. Trump got in the face of Hillary, the press, and the Hollywood elites. He didn’t give a fig whether they liked him or not. That combativeness was a key to his victory. Can you picture any other of this year’s Republican candidates who would have been willing to accept the contempt of the “right people” in that manner? I can’t, even those I preferred to Trump during his primary run.
Forte and O’Sullivan understand why many “movement conservatives” opposed Trump. He is not one of them. Forte and O’Sullivan correctly note that Trump does not reflect the views of certain pioneers of conservatism, the “Hayekian libertarians and the Kirkian traditionalists,” for example.
But free-market economics and a fondness for the literary heritage of the Christian West are not the only elements in American conservatism. There is also what Forte and O’Sullivan call “Burnhamite nationalism,” in reference to the writings of James Burnham, who called for a defense of America’s national interests through a vigorous application of American power in the world arena.
I can’t prove this, of course, but it struck me throughout these months when National Review was leading the Never Trump movement, that not all of the leading lights during the publication’s best years would have been on board. Not just Burnham, but also individuals such as Whittaker Chambers, Willmoore Kendall, and a favorite of readers of this publication, Joseph Sobran.
Forte and O’Sullivan see Trump’s willingness to fight to defend our “national fabric” in line with “Burnhamite nationalism.” They reject the contention that “nationalism is an alien element in American conservatism.” They do not see it as “exclusive, aggressive, and undemocratic,” but as “prudent, open, and appreciative that others love their countries, too.”
Nor do they see it as hateful of immigrants. They ask whether immigrants should be “Americanized” or “integrated into a multicultural/transnational society? How should we be governed — by American constitutionalism, or by international law? Should our government be rooted in American sovereignty, or in global governance? And should our policies on language and education be inspired by ideas of national coherence, or by those of ethnic separatism and/or transnational identity?”
There is nothing racist or xenophobic, when considering the above questions, to come down against the push for ethnic separatism and a globalist, transnational identity. It is a view, write Forte and O’Sullivan, that is rooted in “the good sense, decency, and aspirations of the American people for self-government, national independence, and the perpetuation of our way of life.”
Trump voters may not have been able to articulate their views as artfully as Forte and O’Sullivan, but they were making the same point when they noted that their government in recent years seemed more concerned about the rights and well-being of illegal immigrants sneaking across our borders and transgenders than with the legitimate needs of middle America.
Forte and O’Sullivan call upon American conservatives to seize the moment of Trump’s victory to articulate the view that the “U.S. Constitution is superior to international law, that immigrants — though welcome — should become part of a united national community rather than join an ethnic enclave in a balkanized America, and that our national identity is more important than any ethnic or transnational loyalty.”
They argue that this view is not an expression of “nationalist selfishness but the moral high ground of democratic self-government in a particular society.”
There are signs that the Never Trumpers among conservative intellectuals are beginning to grasp Forte and O’Sullivan’s point; that they are willing to back Trump’s effort to “reach out to new immigrant voters not from a position of weakness with pandering ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’ but from a position of strength, with the spirit of inclusive patriotism and the promise of equality of opportunity. We should say to the newcomers: ‘We welcome you first and foremost as Americans. They — progressives, liberals, Democrats — want to put you in a box as part of a victim group. We welcome you as equal citizens, they patronize you as childlike clients’.”
I submit that Forte and O’Sullivan offer a winning — as well as morally and ethically sound — approach to this matter, and one which, I repeat, large numbers of patriotic Democrats with traditional values will be drawn to if articulated and enacted with honesty and a good heart. Forte and O’Sullivan close with the following: Trump’s “emphasis on the unum, not the pluribus, should prove more attractive to an electorate than the designedly fractious minority-majority coalition on the Democratic side. After all, most people in America want to be Americans, not ambassadors from their family’s past.”
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