- Hanson, Victor Davis.
The Case for Trump.
New York: Basic Books, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-5416-7354-0.
-
The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November 2016
was a singular event in the history of the country. Never
before had anybody been elected to that office without any prior
experience in either public office or the military. Trump,
although running as a Republican, had no long-term affiliation
with the party and had cultivated no support within its
establishment, elected officials, or the traditional donors who
support its candidates. He turned his back on the insider
consultants and “experts” who had advised GOP
candidate after candidate in their “defeat with
dignity” at the hands of a ruthless Democrat party willing
to burn any bridge to win. From well before he declared his
candidacy he established a direct channel to a mass audience,
bypassing media gatekeepers via Twitter and frequent
appearances in all forms of media, who found him a reliable
boost to their audience and clicks. He was willing to jettison
the mumbling points of the cultured Beltway club and grab
“third rail” issues of which they dared not speak such as
mass immigration, predatory trade practices, futile foreign
wars, and the exporting of jobs from the U.S. heartland to
low-wage sweatshops overseas.
He entered a free-for-all primary campaign as one of seventeen
major candidates, including present and former governors, senators,
and other well-spoken and distinguished rivals and, one by one,
knocked them out, despite resolute and sometimes dishonest
bias by the media hosting debates, often through “verbal
kill shots” which made his opponents the target of mockery
and pinned sobriquets on them (“low energy Jeb”, “little
Marco”, “lyin' Ted”) they couldn't shake. His
campaign organisation, if one can dignify it with the term, was
completely chaotic and his fund raising nothing like the finely-honed
machines of establishment favourites like Jeb Bush, and yet his
antics resulted in his getting billions of dollars worth of free
media coverage even on outlets who detested and mocked him.
One by one, he picked off his primary opponents and handily won
the Republican presidential nomination. This unleashed a
phenomenon the likes of which had not been seen since the
Goldwater insurgency of 1964, but far more virulent. Pillars of
the Republican establishment and Conservatism, Inc. were on
the verge of cardiac arrest, advancing fantasy scenarios to deny
the nomination to its winner, publishing issues of their money-losing
and subscription-shedding little magazines dedicated to opposing
the choice of the party's voters, and promoting insurgencies such
as the candidacy of
Egg McMuffin, whose
bona fides as a man of the
people were evidenced by his earlier stints with the CIA and
Goldman Sachs.
Predictions that post-nomination, Trump would become “more
presidential” were quickly falsified as the chaos compounded,
the tweets came faster and funnier, and the mass rallies became
ever more frequent and raucous. One thing that was obvious to
anybody looking dispassionately at what was going on, without the
boiling blood of hatred and disdain of the New York-Washington
establishment, was that the candidate was having the time of his
life and so were the people who attended the rallies. But still,
all of the wise men of the coastal corridor knew what must happen.
On the eve of the general election, polls put the probability of a
Trump victory somewhere between 1 and 15 percent. The outlier
was Nate Silver, who went out on a limb and went all the way up
to 29% chance of Trump's winning to the scorn of his fellow
“progressives” and pollsters.
And yet, Trump won, and handily. Yes, he lost the popular vote,
but that was simply due to the urban coastal vote for which
he could not contend and wisely made no attempt to
attract, knowing such an effort would be futile and a waste of
his scarce resources (estimates are his campaign spent around
half that of Clinton's). This book by classicist, military
historian, professor, and fifth-generation California farmer
Victor Davis Hanson is an in-depth examination of, in the
words of the defeated candidate, “what happened”.
There is a great deal of wisdom here.
First of all, a warning to the prospective reader. If you read
Dr Hanson's columns regularly, you probably won't find a lot
here that's new. This book is not one of those that's obviously
Frankenstitched together from previously published columns, but
in assembling their content into chapters focussing on various
themes, there's been a lot of cut and paste, if not literally at
the level of words, at least in terms of ideas. There is value
in seeing it all presented in one package, but be prepared to
say, from time to time, “Haven't I've read this
before?”
That caveat lector aside, this
is a brilliant analysis of the Trump phenomenon. Hanson argues
persuasively that it is very unlikely any of the other
Republican contenders for the nomination could have won the
general election. None of them were talking about the issues
which resonated with the erstwhile “Reagan Democrat”
voters who put Trump over the top in the so-called “blue
wall” states, and it is doubtful any of them would have
ignored their Beltway consultants and campaigned vigorously
in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania which
were key to Trump's victory. Given that the Republican defeat
which would likely have been the result of a Bush (again?),
Rubio, or Cruz candidacy would have put the Clinton crime family
back in power and likely tipped the Supreme Court toward the
slaver agenda for a generation, that alone should give pause to
“never Trump” Republicans.
How will it all end? Nobody knows, but Hanson provides a variety
of perspectives drawn from everything from the Byzantine emperor
Justinian's battle against the deep state to the archetype of
the rough-edged outsider brought in to do what the more
civilised can't or won't—the tragic hero from Greek drama
to Hollywood westerns. What is certain is that none of what
Trump is attempting, whether it ends in success or failure, would
be happening if any of his primary opponents or the Democrat
in the general election had prevailed.
I believe that Victor Davis Hanson is one of those rare people who
have what I call the “Orwell gift”. Like George Orwell,
he has the ability to look at the facts, evaluate them, and draw
conclusions without any preconceived notions or filtering through
an ideology. What is certain is that with the election of Donald Trump
in 2016 the U.S. dodged a bullet. Whether that election will be seen
as a turning point which reversed the decades-long slide toward
tyranny by the administrative state, destruction of the middle class,
replacement of the electorate by imported voters dependent upon
the state, erosion of political and economic sovereignty in
favour of undemocratic global governance, and the eventual financial
and moral bankruptcy which are the inevitable result of all of these, or
just a pause before the deluge, is yet to be seen. Hanson's book is
an excellent, dispassionate, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented
view of where things stand today.
June 2019 