Sign me up with Jacob Levy here: by publishing Francis Buckley, Cato is not providing a forum for but rather assisting in an attack on reasonable public discourse and discussion, along the lines of Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier's arguments about Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy: Jacob T. Levy: "Make America Free Again" Isn't Trump's Agenda: "I cannot, however, let Francis Buckley’s apology for Donald Trump, for whom he has previously worked as a speechwriter, pass without comment, as it is marked by grave falsehoods. It is false in its particulars, for example, that, 'on average immigrants are less educated than they were in the past'... And it is false in its larger central claims. Among these are that the Trump presidency stands for the rejection of the privilege of inherited wealth; a return to respect for the rule of law; and equal opportunity to prosper rather than 'the old boy network', deal-making, and cronyism. I hardly know where to begin...
...The more crucial falsehood... is this:
They don’t really understand us, the Europeans.... The Trump movement... is a liberal nationalism based on the sacred texts of our founding... that we have a special mission to promote liberty, as promised by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.... Our constitutional liberties are the icon of American nationhood and constitutive of our identities as Americans. For Americans, as Americans, illiberalism is self-defeating, and if some Americans (including Trump) have been illiberal, in time they’ve been seen to be un-American...
American nationalism is a complicated mixture of the creedal and the ethnonational, sometimes coexisting quite comfortably and sometimes in tension with each other, but neither ever simply disappearing.... Self-conscious American nationalism has been white nationalism for a great deal of American history. One can wish it were otherwise—I certainly do—but that’s very different from asserting that it has always been otherwise... And Donald Trump is very far from emphasizing the creedal side of American nationalism.... He rode to office on racialized demagoguery about Mexican and Muslim threats, and those remain centerpieces of his rhetoric in office: the travel ban, the wall, invading caravans of Central American refugees that are somehow both filled with radical Islamist terrorists and funded by globalist Jews. He has tilted toward Viktor Orban, praising him as “strong and brave” for walling out Muslim refugees; attacked Angela Merkel for failing to do so; and recurrently endorsed the European far right’s narrative about the decline of white Christian European civilization. He sees kindred spirits in European politicians like Marine Le Pen. He embraces what Buckley says he has nothing to do with....
Buckley closes his essay with a paean to the 2016 election and what has happened since, and in an overlapping essay elsewhere he claims that “Trump has triumphed over a tone-deaf Republican Establishment, killed off the old party and created a new one called the Republican Workers Party. No mean feat. So whatever happens to him, the causes he identified will continue to dominate American politics and his effect on that will be indelible.” I think it’s fair to say that he thinks he’s defending the real Donald Trump, his real campaign, administration, and presidency. And that defense rests on claims that simply are not true...
#shouldread #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere #journmalism
