Like it or not, Donald Trump in fits and starts has chosen not to accommodate the progressive vision. But in most unlikely fashion he leads the fight against it.
Those who found him too crude, who saw his tweets as too adolescent, and who vowed never to vote for such an antithesis of conservative and family values have all weighed in.
So have those who are embarrassed that Trump—as did Obama during the Henry Louis Gates fiasco, the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, and the Ferguson shooting and subsequent riots—quite inappropriately weighs in on current criminal investigations and trials.
And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.
The Age of Intolerance
We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.
There are few Berkeley-like free speech areas on college campuses any more. Students charged with particular crimes enjoy little due process. There is no Joan Baez-style acknowledgement of the tragedy of good Southern poor men fighting for an awful cause. No one acknowledges tragedy anywhere at all; it has all become melodrama. We may yet see Joan Baez’s version of The Band’s ballad or Shelby Foote’s commentaries in Ken Burn’s epic Civil War documentary Trotskyized.
The media is not disinterested. Networks such as CNN see their role actively on the barricades, devoted to the higher cause of destroying the Trump presidency, not as reporting its successes or failures. The danger to free expression and a free media is not even Trumpian bombast. It is the far more deliberate and insidious transformation (begun in full under Obama) of journalism into a progressive ministry of truth. Even if he wished, Trump could not take away what the professional press already surrendered voluntarily.
The Cultural Abyss
After the nocturnal effort to tear down historic statuary, the NFL player psychodramas, the therapeutic reactions to radical Islamic terror attacks inside the United States, and the often unhinged profanity and assassination chic of the anti-Trump “Resistance,” Trump almost alone seems to sound off in opposition.
On one side are traditionalists who believe the United States is the most exceptional nation of a uniquely self-critical West. They believe that we need not be perfect, past or present, to be good and certainly are and were always far better than the alternative. And while reform and protest may be innate to the American character, traditions and values of the past simply cannot be airbrushed away because a particular generation suddenly believes that the dead of a far more hazardous and impoverished age must meet their own transitory mores of the present. Oddly, few of the Republican establishment speak out for them.
The new progressive Left believes that America has always been defined by its collective sins, which outweigh those of other cultures. They identify the white heterosexual male as the font of most pathologies (cf. the Democratic National Committee’s unapologetic effort not to hire white males for some of its jobs). Like it or not, Trump is now a central figure in resisting a full-scale dismantling of the idea of the uniquely individual, free, and outspoken American.
Like it or not, Donald Trump is the unlikely savior of America.
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