Conservatives in the mist | Blaze Media

If you checked out Foreign Policy magazine on Thursday, you might have caught a piece by Thomas Carothers, who directs the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It’s a lofty title, and he’s got a lofty thesis that’s sure to tick off a good number of FP’s similarly pedigreed readers: “
Actually, Trump Has a Coherent Vision.”

The subhead reads, “What seems like chaos is in fact a unified plan to reshape the United States.” Carothers lays out the basics of Donald Trump’s policy in four parts.

By the end of World War II, American progressivism, from Walt Whitman to John Dewey to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was so established as to be the sole respectable and American intellectual tradition.

First, a more conservative society with law and order, a greater role for religion, and “so-called traditional social values.”

Second, “a remade economy,” featuring normal conservative deregulatory and low-tax policies coupled with rebuilding American industry.

Third, “a new political system,” characterized by reasserting executive control over the executive branch and jealously battling the legislative and judicial branches for authority.

Fourth, “a changed role in the world,” wherein he predictably gripes about a foreign policy that serves the just interests of the United States over “broader international values” and the system those values and their proponents promoted.

It’s not a bad piece or wrong, really, even if its author is reliably disturbed by some excellent and intelligent White House policies. What really stands out is the overarching feeling throughout the essay that its author has cracked some sort of code, unlocking secret knowledge for his readers.

The more thoughtful American Democrats and global liberals have a tendency to observe conservatives as Jane Goodall carefully watched chimpanzees in Tanzania, recording our daily habits and social structures and writing theories about what we’re doing and thinking.

It’s deeply bizarre, but also fairly human. If you didn’t know any actual conservatives in college, at work, and in your social circles, it’s easy to “other” us. And knowing Paul Ryan or the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal doesn’t change that isolation.

The tendency reminds me of an incredible tale in American history: The oral history of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

While the basic look and timeline of “Custer’s Last Stand” is well known to Americans today, for 60 years after the last bullet echoed over that lonely Montana river, we really didn’t know how any of it happened. After all, there were no survivors!

Of course, well over 1,000 men survived, but it wasn’t until the 1930s when someone thought to ask the elderly American Indian warriors what they’d seen that day. And it took a teenage artist, David Humphreys Miller, to haul out to the reservation and do the work.

It’s fun to chuckle at the absurdity of this story now, but it’s not too unlike how so many Democrats and liberals think of their president, his personnel, and their vision for the world. You don’t need to divine their intentions by distant observation of how our family units are organized or what those pointy white buildings we go to Sunday morning are. You can ask! You can enter! Moreover, it’s all written down.

If you struggle to understand a conservative foreign policy that doesn’t rest on the notion that Islam craves democracy and American GIs can deliver it, you might try reading a little history, for example. Trump and his advisers’ basic doctrine can be found all over, and if you want a quick and easy summary of it, try reading the Sharon Statement – a succinct
65-year-old document that declared the basic beliefs of the wildly successful Young Americans for Freedom activist group.

This stuff is all out there if you’re willing to look for it, and you don’t even need the ancient Rosetta stone to translate it.

Or you could be like Hal Brands. Ol’ Hal is
the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg columnist. (If you said that without clearing your throat first, you did it wrong.)

Our man put all those titles to work and
figured it out: “Trump’s True Foreign Policy: Chaos.”

So long and thanks for all the degrees!

James Bosworth, a global fellow for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin America Program, agrees. “Trump’s foreign policy is chaotic,” he
writes in the World Politics Review. “This may be by accident or else the result of stupidity.”

That take reflects the laziest instinct of the Democratic establishment: dismiss what they don’t understand as dumb. “They’re just stupid!” “They’re just stupid!” is the rallying cry of people who can’t fathom why 77 million Americans rejected their vision. Even their smarter compatriots like Carothers step over the key to figuring it all out when they don’t read the primary texts or refuse to take them seriously.

By the end of World War II, American progressivism, from Walt Whitman to John Dewey to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was so established as to be the sole respectable and American intellectual tradition. Conservatism was a foreign thing, more European and very Hitler-y. Here in the United States, they believed, it manifested less as a philosophy and more as an irritable reaction against the certainty of progress and, you guessed it, global order.

It took men like Russell Kirk tracing the conservative intellectual tradition back to the Founding Fathers to slowly change that perception, but from the comfort of a post-NAFTA, post-WTO, Davos-studded, WHO-sprinkled world, it can be easy for our self-styled elites to forget. What a shock it must be to see it in action.

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