It surprises me that anyone on the Right (or for that matter, anyone of middle years or older who grew up in the former United States, and feels that he or she has had a pretty good life) would have any hesitation at all about supporting Donald Trump — not only in the upcoming election, but also in the day-to-day grind of this terrible culture war. (I should make an exception for accelerationists, but I am not an accelerationist.)
Many seem to have given up in despair. But there is never any upside to despair; there’s a reason that Hope is one of the cardinal virtues. Despair is not only useless, but it destroys the soul, and as such it is rightly considered a sin.
Is Mr. Trump deeply flawed? Of course. Is he petulant, unstatesmanlike, vain, unlettered, and at times childish and vulgar? Yes, all of those things. But listen to how he speaks of America, of its goodness, of its greatness, and of its greatness still to be. Look at the way he honors our Founders, our traditions, our veterans, and the ordinary people who build and sustain American life. Say what you want about the man, his eye is on what’s good in America — all the things that over the centuries have made people from all over the world yearn to come here, all the things that I, as a boy, was taught that we must give thanks for to our forefathers, cherish for ourselves and our families, and preserve for generations yet unborn. He understands that we are links in a great chain — with a debt to our ancestors, and a duty to our children. Break that chain, sever that link to past and future, and men will be, as Edmund Burke said, little more than “the flies of a summer”.
All civilization depends on this continuity, this extension in time — and the belief that what we build today will be there when we are gone; that the tree we plant in our lifetime will give shade and fruit to our children’s children. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link: if we allow it to be broken in our time, it is broken for all time.
Donald Trump understands all of this: if not intellectually, then in his heart. And he is, in this moment, all we have. He is Gandalf against the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. As Lincoln once said of Grant: “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
Remember always: we are in an existential conflict with a fearsome global Enemy. This foe has limitless financial resources, and it has already conquered, in a long march spanning half a century or more, all the great strategic strongholds of our civilization — education, popular media, corporate boardrooms, the upper echelons of the military, the political leadership of almost all of our major cities, and the malleable minds of scores of millions of voters, in particular women and coastal city-dwelllers. As we can see all around us every day, they have fought us almost to a standstill even without controlling the White House and the Senate. Can you imagine what would happen if they were to consolidate their power by seizing those last defenses?
Perhaps you imagine that much of their current anger is due to their loss to Mr. Trump in 2016, and that a victory this November would settle them back down; that if they can reclaim the presidency they will be placated and magnanimous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Seething with four years of pent-up resentment, if they retake the commanding heights of political power they will, in their exultation and their fury, burn us all to ashes, and grind the remaining embers of the traditional American nation into powder.
At this point there is no longer any room for error, nor any place for faintness of heart. We hold, for now, the One Ring, and the malignant mind of Sauron thinks of nothing else; his lidless Eye searches for it day and night, without sleep, without rest. If he reclaims it, a much of great value will be lost, quite possibly forever. And the great sorrow of our time is that we have no Orodruin, no Mount Doom, with which to destroy this thing; we must simply keep it, and defend it, until beyond all hope this darkness shall one day pass from the Earth.
24 Comments
Every recent election has been (as Sean Hannity likes to say) the most momentous, important election in our lifetimes. So, what if Trump squeaks by one more election? Then, 2024 awaits. And if someone sane miraculously wins that election, then there’s 2028 (not including the Congressional elections in 2022 and 2026). We cannot keep the storm at bay forever. The problem isn’t elections — it’s that we have the population that we now have — with values incompatible with our traditional political norms and which empowers wicked and perverse leaders. What is the cure for that? A great awakening? A great culling? An end to our constitutional system in order to save our constitutional system? Of course, we have to take one step at a time, but the long-term view isn’t promising. We have a republic full of idiocrats, and I don’t see that changing painlessly.
Joseph,
Yes, the problem doesn’t go away after 2020. (That was my point about having no Mt. Doom.)
That’s just the way it is. But each election buys time: time to prepare, to build coalitions, to explore what’s possible, to awaken others. To do any of that we must live another day.
Well said. I finaly find someone the understands what we are up against.
Every day the demographic situation gets worse. Better for collapse to come before we’re behind an even bigger 8-ball.
You just nailed why the CPUSA hates him so much.
It will be the global Soviet hell on earth after Trump.
Prepare.
Novak,
I understand the accelerationist position, but I do not share it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZQolZvTyKk
The map is not the territory. The name is not the object. Whatever you name a thing, that is the one thing it is not.
We do not hold the One Ring. The One Ring is a fictional object, in a work of fiction, whose outcome and the means of that outcome were fictional and predetermined by its author according to that author’s ideology. The example may be entertaining, it may be inspiring, but it is NOT educational.
“We” do not hold anything. Donald Trump holds the Presidency. Donald Trump is a good man, who has not effectively used the powers available to him. Treating the presence of Trump in the Presidency as though it were the One Ring is crazy, and false. Founding all your hopes on getting good results out of a situation that has thus far failed to produce any such is unwise.
For a good articulation of the accelerationist position (and thus a worthwhile counter point) I recommend Hunter Wallace and occidental dissent: http://www.occidentaldissent.com
Rollory,
What pretentious argle-bargle. (And thanks for explaining that the One Ring is not just a “fictional object”, which of course is bad enough, but that it also came from an actual “work of fiction”, with an author and everything. I had no idea. I’m sure we all know how pointless fiction is.)
My mention of the Ring is what’s called a “metaphor”. The point — which seems to have been the last thing on your mind as you wrote your condescending comment — is simply that for the Democrats, and their partners and puppeteers in the international Left, to retake the White House (and God forbid, the Senate), would be an enormous amplification of their power, and they would wield that consolidated power without mercy. It may well become impossible, if that should happen, ever to unseat them again.
If anyone is going to deny them this prize in the coming elections, it can only be Trump. This is not, as you seem to imagine, about hoping for good results; after four years we know what to expect from this man. It is about the importance of staving off a catastrophic one.
This is so silly. The way a genuine nationalist party emerges is only through the destruction of the republican party and their conservative liberal cohort. There is one way toward supporting European civilizational standards and that is through supporting and defending people of European descent. No anracho-indiviualism will save you. In fact the classical liberalism of the Republican party is the comorbidity of the nation. Trump not only has done nothing, but he has made it worse. He has spent his time worshipping blacks, gays and Israel. What has Trump and the republican party given us? Let’s take a look: 1) increase in illegal immigration; 2) an increase in legal immigration; 3) sending trillions of American dollars to Israel while middle america burns; 4) a new free trade agreement with India waiting in the wings to take tech jobs from Americans; 5) Increasing Transexual and homosexual rights; 6) increasing censorship; 7) the freeing of felons; 8) the jailing of nationalists by the FBI and the demonization of people of European descent; we could go on all day. Is there any doubt that in 5 years the ‘conservatives’ will be talking about pedophiles as anything less that a new victimized group to be protected. What exactly are they planning to conserve?
The political system is irreparably damaged and any defense of it at this point is ridiculous. Be sure, Trump will go full ‘white nationalist’ in his rhetoric as his pandering to blacks has fizzled, and he knows this is the only way forward. But don’t be fooled. The Republicans intend to loot America to the same degree as Democrats and no amounts of classical liberalism or libertarianism is going to save you.
A fine little tantrum, Leroy. (Trillions for Israel!) Feel better now?
I agree that the nation is broken beyond repair, and that it has made itself ungovernable. I’ve been saying this for years and years and years. I’ve also said for ages that I do not expect the United States to last much longer as currently constituted. And anyone who has been paying attention knows that the people who make up the Republican Party establishment are the same sort of rent-seeking grifters as everyone else in Washington, and in the long run will “conserve” nothing. The U.S. is tottering, falling.
So: having had your rant, what exactly are you going to do, besides spluttering like a frustrated adolescent on my obscure little blog? You call for “the destruction of the Republican party”. Impressive! What’s your plan for that, exactly? Are you and your pals going to start a third-party white-nationalist movement, and take over the U.S. government by political means? Are you going to do that by November? Or perhaps you are planning a violent overthrow? Going to go out in a blaze of glory? Very helpful. Thanks.
Whatever you want to build, making anything that isn’t just chaos and civil war is going to take some time and preparation. (Only a fool would want to live through a civil war.) If Trump wins this election, we will have a little more time. If he loses, everything is going to become a hell of a lot more difficult — especially the kind of organizing and networking that are necessary to build some sort of ark, some kind of plan, for the coming flood. Wrecking things is easy (and fun!). Any jackass can kick down a barn. Building things, though, is hard.
The U.S. is like a fine old car, but it has reached the end of its mechanical lifespan, and as we drive along it is now making ominous noises. Clearly it is about to break down. We need to be looking for someplace safe to pull off the road, but where we are right now is a howling wilderness, full of dangerous animals. Should we try to limp along to someplace safer, someplace where we can meet up with some friends to work out what to do next, or just plow straight into the jungle and see what happens?
You’re pissed off. I get it. (We all are.) The situation is very bad, and getting worse all the time. So what are you going to do?
I understand the lust for revolution, but you need to be smarter than this.
With respect, I am absolutely through, I have had it up to HERE, with any person who defends Trump or the things at stake in this election who makes any time for stipulating nonsense like this.
I no longer think of this as a balanced or even-handed assessment of the man’s character or accomplishments. It looks too much like allowing an opening in your defenses, and we can’t afford that.
The idea that the president is unique in any of these respects is ridiculous and insulting, and all of us here know this. He doesn’t put his feet on the desk, he isn’t diddling interns, he’s not having a press conference while taking a dump, he doesn’t talk about bringing a gun to a knife fight, he’s not nationalizing industries, and he’s not making a nonsensical hash of the idea of American exceptionalism.
My advice to anyone defending the president tempted to concede crudity, inartfulness, or crass talk is DON’T. Remind whoever you are talking to of the hatred the last president had for this country, the utter cowardice with which 43 defended it, Johnson picking up beagles by the ears, Jimmy Carter lecturing us about the thermostat while wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater, or the fact that FDR was already a walking (rolling) corpse in 1944 when the party foisted him upon us again.
No Quarter.
Brother John,
Well! This has certainly turned out to be a provocative post.
I stipulated those things because for some people they do constitute grounds for indecision, and I wanted to emphasize that the stakes are far too high for anyone on our side to waver in the slightest because of them.
My point here is to persuade people that supporting Trump in this election is critically important — and if you don’t acknowledge and answer peoples’ objections, you’ll never persuade them of anything. (It’s rare enough even when you do.)
Brother John said:
“I am absolutely through, I have had it up to HERE, with any person who… makes any time for stipulating nonsense like this.”
This is absolutely right.
Even if Trump really had such flaws, compared to who? A typical politician? Yeah, they’re paragons of virtue. It’s like critiquing Trump because he can’t invent a perpetual motion machine. Neither can any of the available alternatives, so why even mention it?
Even if it were all true, we are at war with people who want to genocide us, for God’s sake! Shake yourself awake and look around. Antifa is writing “Kill all white people” on walls… and you’re whining that Trump is “petulant.”
When people on the right say things like “Trump is deeply flawed, but nevertheless…” *no one* perceives them as principled angels who are above it all. The left senses weakness, which encourages them to attack with increased vigor, and the right sees it as what it is, sniping at our commanding officer in a desperate time of war.
Joe,
Good grief. Did you not read my reply to “Brother John”, just above? (For that matter, did you even read this post?) I’m not whining about Trump’s petulance, etc. I’m scolding people who are.
It’s amusing that you’re telling me to “shake myself awake”, when I am one of the relatively few who have been sounding the alarm on all of this for long years now.
It wasn’t a tantrum Malcolm, it was the truth about the Republican Party. ‘Destroying’ the republican party means not supporting it and supporting other political projects and parties. There are some. What is it exactly that trump is going to do to give us more time? DACA amnesty is certain to happen regardless of who wins. Illegal immigration will increase regardless of who wins. Legal immigration will increase regardless of who wins. Crackdowns on dissidents will increase regardless of who wins. Censorship will increase regardless of who wins. All societal ills, regardless of who wins, are going to be blamed on whites and the media will relentlessly tell us this. What I agree with in your post is that we need to time to build coalitions, to find new paths to defend our communities, to chart out new political possibilities. However, I think Trump has proven himself incapable and, more importantly, uninterested in providing a safe haven for people to do these things. In fact, I think he provides a safe haven for the Republican party to continue to fool the American people into thinking there is a genuine opposition to the screeching in the streets. I think accelerationism as it relates to the collapse of the system is stupid – these are our institutions made by us, that should be working for us, and we should fight for them. However, I do think that accelerating our abandonment of the republican party is a good thing because it wakes people up to the necessity of doing all the things that most of us realize is necessary going forward instead of foolishly believing republican party candidates, at any level of government, are interested in anything other than getting access to insider trading. Nobody is going to be organising or doing anything at all if they still believe this system semi-functions on their behalf. The system was able to recuperate after the 60’s because American was still an 80% white, christian country. There was a direction and trust in institutions and a level of social cohesion and togetherness that simply doesn’t exist anymore. There is nothing keeping it together and the sooner we realise that, the better off we’ll be.
Malcolm,
Thank you for your response. Just so I’m clear, my issue isn’t with you or this post personally. Far from it.
But it was even before the election that I begin to lose patience with people on “our“ side (and I’m using this in the broadest possible context) who would soften their defense in these ways.
That being the case, it’s been my instinct to zero in on lines like this and fire back at them.
The last guy is still getting away with claiming he had a “scandal-free presidency.“ We live in an age of unrelenting lies and madness. We have enough of those like Jonah Goldberg or Bill Kristol for whom a republican who fights back as a bridge too far.
Leroy,
I don’t want to get into the weeds here — life is short — but I’m not certain about any of that, nor should you be. What we can be sure of is that it will all come true if Trump loses.
That’s not the point here. The question is a simple and binary one: under which administration — Biden or Trump — will these necessary things be more difficult? Keep in mind that a Joe Biden administration will quickly become a Kamala Harris administration, or a Stacy Abrams administration. Keep in mind also that Biden has already said he wouldn’t seek a second term, so the puppet-masters animating his living corpse will have all the reckless liberty that presidents always enjoy when they aren’t looking at re-election. With Trump, that freedom would be an asset; with a zombie Biden administration it would be a terrifying liability.
Good. We agree on this.
That’s fine, but the election is just over four months away! If you want to work at developing a third party, that’s fine, but you haven’t got one now. These things take enormous investments of time and money. By all means give it your best shot; there are scores of millions of traditionally minded Americans who see very clearly, as you do and I do, the incurable rot in the Republican Party. But every vote you get in 2020 from any of those people is a vote taken from Trump, and is effectively a vote for Biden. Unlike the parliamentary systems of Europe, where governments are ruled by party coalitions, and new parties can work their way up gradually, the American system makes it very difficult to mount such an an assault.
I agree. It may be that by the time you get your third party up and running, there won’t be anything left for it to run for.
Brother John,
Good. Thank you.
I understand. But in my experience it is counterproductive, when dealing with those who are wavering in their support, simply to deny that Trump has these unhelpful foibles. You’ll win more hearts by acknowledging that the man isn’t perfect — as you say, who is? — but that he has indeed a great many positive qualities that far outweigh his lack of social grace, and that are essential for this critical moment in America’s history. Make them understand that the risk of a Trump loss should be the cardinal fact here, and that patriots must rally to his support, or risk losing all. (We may well lose it all anyway, but if we lose this election it is all but guaranteed.)
It is not enough in these matters simply to dig in one’s heels and stick angrily and stubbornly to a single narrow principle. We have to be more supple, more subtle than that. We must understand a little psychology, and do what’s necessary, not just what makes us feel best.
I agree with this, although, without belaboring the point, I think your praise for Trump as a “fighter,” and comparing him to Gen. Grant, is, to be delicate about it, on the generous side.
My question, however, is: to whom is this addressed? At this point, anybody advocating against voting for Trump (either by sitting out the election or voting for Biden) has long since ceased to be part of the conservative conversation. The cranks at the Bulwark or of the so-called “Lincoln Project” are not influencing any actual conservatives, much less people likely to follow this website. Nobody of any intelligence to the right of center (even if they think less of Trump than you do) takes Mitt Romney or Bill Kristol or John Bolton or Jonah Goldberg seriously anymore. So, to repeat myself, to whom is this intended as a response?
In your post you wrote,
This is… not optimal. If you MUST go down this path, being brief is better. In your response to Brother John you wrote something much better:
(BTW, calling Trump “vain” when some recent high-profile politicians have included Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama is mind-boggling. Trump is Plato’s Form of humility compared to e.g. that clinical narcissist from 2016 who plainly thinks she is personally entitled to the Presidency.)
djf,
Why, to anyone who comes along to read it, of course. While this is a relatively obscure blog, I have, in the course of a longish and not uninteresting life, established a broad and variegated network of personal connections — and I never know whose attention these little scribblings of mine might attract.
More than that, I write here simply to say things that I think ought to be said, no matter who may or may not read them.
Joe C.
Well, thanks for that. You’ll be surprised to hear I did in fact know that previous presidents, and aspirants to the office, have also been besotted with vanity.
In 2014, for example, I referred to to Barack Obama (whom I had previously described as “Narcissist-in-Chief”) as “this awful man — this grotesque incompetent, this subversive fraud, this preening and malevolent narcissist, this despiser of American tradition and implacable enemy of everything the U.S.A. was built upon and once stood for…”. That year also I mentioned him as a “vainglorious man of low character, full of seething resentment and base ambition”. Somewhat later I noted that he was a “Machiavellian left-wing ideologue and preening, unshameable narcissist”. Etc.
So while I understand the attraction of this sort of “whataboutism”, it really wasn’t the point here. For those who dislike Trump for his style, perhaps to the point of not voting for him, it does no good to point out the (glaringly obvious) character flaws of his predecessors. If you are to win over those wavering hearts, you must acknowledge their objections and show them that the stakes are too high to fuss about such things.
We have now had essentially the same comment from three different people. I have replied at length. I think I’ve said all I have to say about this.
I may sit this election out. Why?
1. Trump signing bump stock ban. Read the text of that law – it can be construed to include a ‘fast trigger finger’ by certain courts. All he had to do was not sign it. The howls of the marxist would have been delightful.
2. Pardon Julian Assange. All he did was reveal the truth. Trump even gave him kudos during his campaign. When asked about Assange after he was elected he pretended he had never heard of him. With the stroke of a pen he could pardon him. Hardly any effort involved and couldn’t be overruled.
3. Kushner and Ivanka. Really?
I could go on – but I won’t. We all know what is coming. Why put it off when with every passing year we grow weaker?