OPINION:
There can be no better rallying cry for President Trump’s model of national governance than the words he delivered to world leaders on Tuesday.
“If you want freedom, take pride in your country,” Mr. Trump said. “If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. If you want peace, love your nation.”
Then came an assertion so bold that it’s hard to imagine any previous president uttering anything like it to such an assemblage of the self-important.
“The future does not belong to globalists — the future belongs to patriots,” the president told the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
It’s a bit early for the president or anyone else to know to whom the future actually will belong. But not too early to know to whom it should belong.
At least it’s not too early for people who want the ethnic-religious-racial cohesion that nationalism/patriotism promotes.
Once upon a time, most Democrats and plenty of liberals loved individualism and looked down on politically correct groupthink.
Such liberals cherished the uniqueness of every nation’s culture and subcultures.
Libs and Democratic presidential fantasizers now give such cultural uniqueness a cold shoulder at best or more often their most condescending sneer.
The Dems and libs sneered at Mr. Trump telling his U.N. audience this:
“The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors, and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.”
They sneered not because of what he said but because it was Donald Trump who said it. They’ve labeled him a demagogue. No self-respecting demagogue means what he says. So it’s OK to sneer at him and what he says.
If you’re not following this sneer rationale, you’re probably not a Democrat and certainly not a perfect model of a modern liberal.
Actually, the president’s words stirred the hearts of regular people everywhere.
Well, at least of regular people who fear that authoritarianism is inevitable any time you create a culturally puréed amalgam of what were independent nations.
The globalist wants you and the rest of the 7.7 billion people in the world to live in a fanciful, one-world, kumbaya utopia.
Conservatives and some classical liberals fear that globalist arcadia would, in reality, be a Big Brother, Newspeak, surveillance state.
The more nations that globalists are able to entice into their common culture with its common dictatorship, the harder it will be for democracy seekers to overthrow the dictatorship.
It’s why 52 percent of the U.K. vote in 2016 went to citizens who want to leave the European Union.
The leavers can’t abide by the bureaucrats in Brussels or the high court in Luxembourg telling the England, France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, Poland and the rest what they can make and sell, how much they can tax, who can enter their respective countries at will and who’s guilty of what.
Mr. Trump’s point is that there is built into the centralization of power an authoritarianism that the left either ignores or welcomes and that conservatives abhor.
“Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first,” he said in what should be the motto of the movement Mr. Trump’s presidency represents in the U.S. and elsewhere.
We can only imagine how many of the foreign leaders whose chins remained motionless were nodding “yes” in their hearts to Mr. Trump’s exegesis on nationalism.
“Like my beloved country, each nation represented in this hall has a cherished history, culture and heritage that is worth defending and celebrating, and which gives us our singular potential and strength,” he said. “The free world must embrace its national foundations. It must not attempt to erase them or replace them.”
It’s divinely perfect, figuratively speaking, that he delivered this exceptional speech to a body that aspires to global governance.
Fifty-one nations founded the U.N. just after World War II. They included Iran (not remotely resembling today’s iteration) and the Republic of China (now a province of the People’s Republic of China).
They wrestled with concerns about nationalism’s perceived warlike hegemonic tendencies. They came up with a global confederacy of unintentional dystopians.
Imagine, an American president telling a gathering of the U.N. that it’s actually a good thing for any nation’s people and leaders to strive to uphold their national interest.
Mr. Trump did that and added that globalism had “exerted a religious pull over past leaders causing them to ignore their own national interests.”
He didn’t say it, but that religious pull was like the one that caused free-market purists to ignore generational damage that unfair trade did to American workers.
America’s politicians and intentional corporate chieftains inflicted the damage by their self-serving insistence that free trade is the same thing as fair trade, no matter how unfair it is to real people in the country.
“But as far as America is concerned,” Mr. Trump told the U.N., “those days are over.”
That’s the rhetorical clenched-fist firmness so many Americans have waited so long to hear from a president.
Internationalists think nationalism makes inevitable adversarial collisions with other nations. Too often true, but not inevitably.
There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary and to which globalists are intentionally blind. And Mr. Trump does not shrink from prying open their eyes on the subject.
“Many of America’s greatest friends today were once its greatest foes,” Mr. Trump said. “We want partners, not adversaries. … America knows that while anyone can make war, only the most courageous can choose peace.”
Mr. Trump didn’t say it in his U.N. speech, but the Declaration of Independence itself is a call to civic nationalism. As Abraham Lincoln said before becoming president, the Declaration unites people of different ethnic heritages in the incredibly diverse USA.
Citing the lines “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Mr. Lincoln said what Mr. Trump knows:
“That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together — that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
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