Mr. Trump Goes to Washington

After Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected and Simple Patriotism Trumps Ideology, yet another must read by Peggy Noonan, the great speech writer for Ronald Reagan and now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal: Mr. Trump Goes to Washington. Here are a couple of excerpts:

But almost every conservative and Republican in Washington—in politics, think tanks and journalism—backed a candidate other than Mr. Trump. Every one of those candidates lost, and Mr. Trump won. After November, think tanks and journals will begin holding symposia in which smart people explain How We Lost The Base.
Mr. Trump’s victory was an endorsement of Mr. Trump but also a rebuke to professional Republicans in Washington. It was a rebuke to comprehensive immigration plans that somehow, mysteriously, are never quite intended to stop illegal immigration; a rebuke to the kind of thinking that goes, “I know, we’ll pass laws that leave Americans without work, which means they’ll be deprived of the financial and spiritual benefits of honest labor, then we’ll cut their entitlements, because if we don’t our country will go broke.” The voters backed Mr. Trump’s stands on these issues and more.
A political question for November: Does Mr. Trump pick up more Democrats than he loses Republicans? Is that how he plans to win? Does he draw in enough new or non-Republican voters to make up for the millions of Republican voters he will surely lose?
In an act of determined denial, Washington Republicans and conservatives continue to see and describe Mr. Trump’s nomination as the triumph of a celebrity in a culture that worships celebrity, the victory of a vulgarian in a vulgar age, the living excrescence of our shallow values and lowered standards. Also, he’s tapped into the public’s rage.
He is all of those things. But he is more, and Washington is determined to ignore the more. He understood, either intuitively or after study, that the Republican base was changing or open to change, and would expand if the party changed some policies. He declared those policies changed. And he won.
As to the matter of rage, it’s more like disrespect for those who’ve been calling the shots. If you know Trump people in real life as opposed to through social media, if they are your friends and family members, you understand that “rage” doesn’t do them justice. They dislike the Republican Party, which they believe has consistently betrayed them, but Trump people in person are just about the only cheerful people in politics this year. They actually have hope—the system needs a hard electric shock, he’s just the man to do it, and if it doesn’t work they’ll fire him.
[...]
Those who oppose Mr. Trump should do it seriously and with respect for his supporters. If he is not conservative, make your case and explain what conservatism is. No one at this point needs your snotty potshots or your supposedly withering one-liners. I confess I have lost patience with many of those declaring they cannot in good conscience support him, not because reasons of conscience are not crucial—they are, and if they apply they should be declared. But some making these declarations managed in good conscience, indeed with the highest degree of self-regard, to back the immigration proposals of George W. Bush that contributed so much to the crisis that produced Mr. Trump. They invented Sarah Palin. They managed to support the global attitudes and structures that left the working class jobless. They dreamed up the Iraq war.
Sometimes I think their consciences are really not so delicate.
As for the political consultants who insult Mr. Trump so vigorously, they are the ones who did most to invent him. What do they ever do in good conscience?

By the way, I'm currently reading—with great pleasure!—Peggy Noonan's new book, The Time of Our Lives (hence the picture at the top of this post). Needless to say, strongly recommended! Here is a great review by Dana Perino.

Political Correctness As 'War By Other Means'

Angelo Codevilla in The Federalist (definitely a must read):

Led by Barack Obama’s Democrats, echoed by the media, backed by big corporations’ muscle, and trailed by Republicans with tail tucked between legs, our rulers demand no less than the paradigm of totalitarianism in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

Recall that Big Brother’s agent berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, then finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five. Our rulers, like Big Brother, hector us to accept their rewritten history and to superimpose their scales of value on ours. [...]

Our Progressive ruling class’s war on our scale of values climaxed in 2016 with a campaign in favor of “transgender rights”: a demand that Americans accept that someone with a penis can be a “woman” while another with a vagina can be a “man.” Object to that mandate to take leave of your senses, insist that sex-specific public bathrooms be used exclusively by persons with the requisite personal plumbing, and be expelled from polite society. Next to this, Big Brother’s demand to call four fingers five is small, mild stuff.

Read the rest.

Angelo M. Codevilla is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace: Among Ourselves and with All Nations, Hoover Institution Press, 2014 (click here for a review by David P. Goldman in The Federalist). He served in the US Navy, the US Foreign Service, and on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Also very interesting by Angelo M. Codevilla: "America’s Ruling Class — and the Perils of Revolution," published in The American Spectator in 2010. Codevilla enlarged this article into a small book, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.

The Silent Life

Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting.



~ Thomas Merton, The Silent Life.

Thomas Merton, or Father Louis by his monastic name, knew that only the true contemplative experience teaches the discipline of silence, which needs to exclude any noises and unnecessary chats, because they would profane those spaces of silence. But all true wise men—as a Camaldolese monk, Father Franco, once told me—speak few words and their words are often “silence” at the same time. Their words spring from a deep meditation. True silence keeps us away from narrow mindness. The word is a great thing, but it is not what is greatest: if word is silver, as the old proverb goes, silence is gold. Hi who aims at the higher levels of spiritual life needs silence as much as he needs his daily bread and rest for his body.