By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
President Trump’s call for a rigorous defense of Western Civilization in his July 6 speech in Poland stirred up a hornet’s nest in liberal circles. The left’s outrage over what they claimed were the racist and nationalist “dog whistles” in the speech tells us a great deal about where things stand in the culture wars: about the modern left, more than about Trump.
It illustrates how fully the left has bought into the Marxist deconstructionist premises taught in American universities since the late 1960s: The proposition that the Christian West is built upon racism, xenophobia, and capitalist exploitation of the poor and the Third World masses.
Before going further, let us deal with this “dog whistle” meme. It has caught on in media and academic circles in recent years. It implies that a speaker is saying something seemingly unobjectionable, but with a hidden meaning directed at a specific segment of the audience. In the case of Trump’s speech in Poland, it contends that his references to Western Civilization were meant to appeal to a racist and crypto-fascist fringe in American society.
It is not an invalid metaphor; such things can happen. I’ll use an example of a right-wing commentator to demonstrate my willingness to be objective in this matter.
Back in the 1980s in New York City there was a loud and brash talk show named Bob Grant who went out of his way to insult in coarse language his callers and liberal politicians. It was central to his persona. He could be humorous, if you were not the one being insulted. For example, I couldn’t help laughing when Grant would employ insulting Italian-American slang expressions for New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Nothing underhanded there. His intention was obvious in regard to Cuomo. But for a number of years Grant would also use the term “mulignan” in a way that he thought would be understood only by Italian-Americans in his audience. No question, it was a dog whistle for them.
He was right about that, for a while. I grew up in the playgrounds of New York City and had many Italian-American friends and thought I knew their vernacular, but it took me a year or so before I realized that when Grant used terms such as “mulignan-bashing contest,” he was referring to African-Americans. Italian-American friends of mine let me in on the joke: that “mulignan” is a derogatory slang term for a black person, derived from “melanzana,” the Italian word for eggplant.
Grant, as far as I know, never made an apology, but he stopped using the term “mulignan” once people became aware of what he was doing.
There is nothing comparable in Trump’s speech in Poland. Not even close. “Western Civilization” is a term that liberal politicians and academics not that long ago would routinely use to describe the literary and artistic achievements and defense of individual rights rooted in the history of Western Europe. American universities would include courses in “Western Civ” in their curricula to introduce their students to its role in shaping our intellectual and moral heritage.
Jesse Jackson, you may remember, did not like that fact, as he led demonstrations chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” But he was considered an eccentric for doing that, at the time. Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy would not have thought twice about incorporating the term into a speech.
It does not detract from what Trump was saying if some eccentric extremist groups on the right like what they heard in his speech, any more than if some ISIS supporters were happy with something they heard in a speech by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. We have to judge a speech by its contents, not by alleged dog whistles — unless, of course, they are obvious.
This dispute over Trump’s speech in Poland is reminiscent of the brouhaha a few years ago over the term “American exceptionalism.” The left contended it was hate-filled “ethnocentrism” and “flag-waving.” Obama offered us a genteel version of that proposition: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Obama’s supporters trotted out a litany of statistics to make the case that the U.S. is not all that special: that, for example, American students’ scores in math and science on standardized tests are below those of many industrialized countries, that the U.S. Agriculture Department reports one in six Americans faces hunger, and that the income disparity between the richest Americans and the poorest is more extreme than in the rest of the industrialized world.
The reaction of Obama and his supporters to “American exceptionalism” is rooted in the same relativistic, transnational, and one-worlder frame of mind of the left-wing faculty rooms that leads to an abhorrence of the term Western Civilization. It is what led to the use of the term “Amerika” by left-wing protesters in the late 1960s.
But isn’t there something to the proposition that using terms like Western Civilization and American exceptionalism implies that other civilizations are inferior? No; there is no reason to come to that conclusion. Making the case for American exceptionalism and Western Civilization does not require that we demean or belittle other countries and their historical and cultural record.
All that it means is that we see something unique and special in our cultural patrimony, something we are determined to preserve and defend in the face of historical forces that would undermine or transform it. Serious students of Western Civilization do not acquire a contempt for the writings of Confucius, the Upanishads, the Arabian roots of mathematics, and the architects of the pyramids and the Mayan temples as a result of their studies. Quite the contrary. There is nothing arrogant or close-minded about the people of the West taking pride in the fact that it was their forebears who demonstrated the worth of the individual and that free men were able to rule themselves without kings and a ruling class. The American Constitution and the Bill of Rights have become the model for people in all parts of the world who seek to overthrow tyrants. This is a country where the poorest of the poor from all parts of the world have been able to achieve a degree of economic success unimaginable in their countries of origin (which is why people still try to sneak across our borders, rather than into places like Cuba and the former Soviet Union).
The scientists and entrepreneurs of the West have led the world in the development of electricity, the phone, the automobile, space exploration, and the computer; also in combatting disease. European and American military hospital ships are the first to arrive on the scene of world catastrophes. Our young people deserve to study in a systematic way the role the American military has played in thwarting the dreams of conquest of totalitarian dictators of both the left and the right.
It is hard to imagine that even the blame-America-first professors would want to defend in public the idea that the world would have been a better place if Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese militarists had been given a free hand to shape the world in the manner they intended.
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