The Conservative Case Against Trump. By Ross Douthat.

The Conservative Case Against Trump. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 7, 2016.

Douthat:

THERE are many lessons that conservatives need to learn from the rise of Donald Trump. There are elements of his message that the party should embrace. There are grievances among his voters that the Republican Party must address.

But for conservatives to support Trump himself, to assist in his election as president of the United States, would be a terrible mistake.

It would be a particularly stark mistake for conservatives who feel that the basic Reaganite vision that’s dominated their party for decades — a fusion of social conservatism, free-market economics, and a hawkish internationalism — still gets things mostly right.

In large ways and small, Trump has consistently arrayed himself against this vision. True, he paid lip service to certain Reaganite ideas during the primaries — claiming to be pro-life, promising a supply-side tax cut, pledging to appoint conservative judges. But the core of his message was protectionist and nativist, comfortable with an expansive welfare state, bored with religious conservatism, and dismissive of the commitments that constitute the post-Cold War Pax Americana. And Trump’s policy forays since clinching the nomination have only confirmed his post-Reagan orientation.

Reaganite conservatives who help elevate Trump to the presidency, then, would be sleepwalking toward a kind of ideological suicide. Successful party leaders often transform parties in their image. William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson between them turned a conservative Democratic Party progressive. Dwight Eisenhower all but extinguished G.O.P. isolationism. Reagan himself set liberal Republicanism on the path to extinction.

A successful President Trump (and to support him is to hope for such a thing) could easily do the same to Reaganism. In a fully-Trumpized G.O.P., Reagan’s ideological coalition would crack up, with hawks drifting toward the Democrats, supply-siders fading into crankery, religious conservatives entering semi-permanent exile. And in its place a Trumpized Republican intelligentsia would arise, with as little interest in Reaganism as today’s conservatives have in the ideas of Nelson Rockefeller or Jacob Javits.

The things conservatives are telling themselves to justify supporting him — at least he might appoint good judges — miss this long-term point. The Reagan coalition might — might! — get an acceptable Supreme Court appointment out of the Trump presidency. But that could easily be the last thing it ever got.

But what if you’re a conservative who isn’t a Reaganite, or you believe that Reaganite ideas have long passed their sell-by dates? What if you agree with Trump about the folly of the Iraq War, the perils of open immigration policies, or the need for a different right-wing economic agenda? What if you think his populism might bring about some necessary creative destruction to a backward-looking G.O.P.?

Then supporting Trump for president could make ideological sense, and the crackup I’ve just described might seem like an advertisement for doing so.

But there still remains the problem of Trump himself. Even if you find things to appreciate in Trumpism — as I have, and still do — the man who has raised those issues is still unfit for an office as awesomely powerful as the presidency of the United States.

His unfitness starts with basic issues of temperament. It encompasses the race-baiting, the conspiracy theorizing, the flirtations with violence, and the pathological lying that have been his campaign-trail stock in trade.

But above all it is Trump’s authoritarianism that makes him unfit for the presidency — his stated admiration for Putin and the Chinese Politburo, his promise to use the power of the presidency against private enterprises, the casual threats he and his surrogates toss off against party donors, military officers, the press, the speaker of the House, and more.

All presidents are tempted by the powers of the office, and congressional abdication has only increased that temptation’s pull. President Obama’s power grabs are part of a bipartisan pattern of Caesarism, one that will likely continue apace under Hillary Clinton.

But far more than Obama or Hillary or George W. Bush, Trump is actively campaigning as a Caesarist, making his contempt for constitutional norms and political niceties a selling point. And given his mix of proud ignorance and immense self-regard, there is no reason to believe that any of this is just an act.

Trump would not be an American Mussolini; even our sclerotic institutions would resist him more effectively than that. But he could test them as no modern president has tested them before — and with them, the health of our economy, the civil peace of our society and the stability of an increasingly perilous world.

In sum: It would be possible to justify support for Trump if he merely promised a period of chaos for conservatism. But to support Trump for the presidency is to invite chaos upon the republic and the world. No policy goal, no court appointment, can justify such recklessness.

To Trumpism’s appeal, to Trump’s constituents, conservatives should listen and answer “yes,” or “maybe,” or “not that, but how about…”

But to Trump himself, there is no patriotic answer except “no.”

The Defeat of True Conservatism. By Ross Douthat.

The Defeat of True Conservatism. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 3, 2016.

True True Conservatism. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, May 4, 2016.


Douthat:

When Donald Trump knocked first Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio out of the Republican primary campaign, he defeated not only the candidates themselves but their common theory of what the G.O.P. should be — the idea that the party could essentially recreate George W. Bush’s political program with slightly different domestic policy ideas and recreate Bush’s political majority as well.

Now, after knocking Ted Cruz out of the race with a sweeping win in Indiana, Trump has beaten a second theory of where the G.O.P. needs to go from here: a theory you might call True Conservatism.

True Conservatism likes to portray itself as part of an unbroken tradition running back through Ronald Reagan to Barry Goldwater and the Founding Fathers. It has roots in that past, but it’s also a much more recent phenomenon, conceived in the same spirit as Bushism 2.0 but with the opposite intent.

If Bushism 2.0 looked at George W. Bush’s peaks — his post-Sept. 11 popularity, his 2004 majority — and saw a model worth recovering, True Conservatism looked at his administration’s collapse and argued that it proved that he had been far too liberal, and that all his “compassionate conservative” heresies had led the Republican Party into a ditch.

Thus True Conservatism’s determination to avoid both anything that savored of big government and anything that smacked of compromise. Where Bush had been softhearted, True Conservatism would be sternly Ayn Randian; where Bush had been free-spending, True Conservatism would be austere; where Bush had taken working-class Americans off the tax rolls, True Conservatism would put them back on — for their own good. And above all, where Bush had sometimes reached for the center, True Conservatism would stand on principle, fight hard, and win.

This philosophy found champions on talk radio, it shaped the Tea Party’s zeal, it influenced Paul Ryan’s budgets, it infused Mitt Romney’s “You built that” rhetoric. But it was only in the government shutdown of 2013 that it found its real standard-bearer: Ted Cruz.

And Cruz ended up running with it further than most people thought possible. His 2016 campaign strategy was simple: Wherever the party’s most ideological voters were, there he would be. If Obama was for it, he would be against it. Where conservatives were angry, he would channel their anger. Where they wanted a fighter; he would be a fighter. Wherever the party’s activists were gathered, on whatever issue — social or economic, immigration or the flat tax — he would be standing by their side. He would win Iowa, the South, his native Texas, the Mountain West. They wanted Reagan, or at least a fantasy version of Reagan? He would give it to them.

It didn’t work — but the truth is it almost did. In the days before and after the Wisconsin primary, with delegate accumulation going his way and the polling looking plausible once the Northeastern primaries were over, it seemed like Cruz could reasonably hope for a nomination on the second or third ballot.

So give the Texas senator some credit. He took evangelical votes from Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson and Rick Santorum; he took libertarian votes from Rand Paul; he outlasted and outplayed Marco Rubio; he earned support from Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham, who once joked about his murder. Nobody worked harder; no campaign ran a tighter ship; no candidate was more disciplined.

But it turned out that Republican voters didn’t want True Conservatism any more than they wanted Bushism 2.0. Maybe they would have wanted it from a candidate with more charisma and charm and less dogged unlikability. But the entire Trump phenomenon suggests otherwise, and Trump as the presumptive nominee is basically a long proof against the True Conservative theory of the Republican Party.

Trump proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past. No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough of them to make Cruz the nominee.

Trump proved that many evangelical voters, supposedly the heart of a True Conservative coalition, are actually not really values voters or religious conservatives after all, and that the less frequently evangelicals go to church, the more likely they are to vote for a philandering sybarite instead of a pastor’s son. Cruz would probably be on his way to the Republican nomination if he had simply carried the Deep South. But unless voters were in church every Sunday, Trump’s identity politics had more appeal than Cruz’s theological-political correctness.

Trump proved that many of the party’s moderates and establishmentarians hate the thought of a True Conservative nominee even more than they fear handing the nomination to a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control. That goes for the prominent politicians who refused to endorse Cruz, the prominent donors who sat on their hands once the field narrowed and all the moderate-Republican voters in blue states who turned out to be #NeverCruz first and #NeverTrump less so or even not at all.

Finally, Trump proved that many professional True Conservatives, many of the same people who flayed RINOs and demanded purity throughout the Obama era, were actually just playing a convenient part. From Fox News’ 10 p.m. hour to talk radio to the ranks of lesser pundits, a long list of people who should have been all-in for Cruz on ideological grounds either flirted with Trump, affected neutrality or threw down their cloaks for the Donald to stomp over to the nomination. Cruz thought he would have a movement behind him, but part of that movement was actually a racket, and Trumpistas were simply better marks.

Cruz will be back, no doubt. He’s young, he’s indefatigable, and he can claim — and will claim, on the 2020 hustings — that True Conservatism has as yet been left untried. But that will be a half-truth; it isn’t being tried this year because the Republican Party’s voters have rejected him and it, as they rejected another tour for Bushism when they declined to back Rubio and Jeb.

What remains, then, is Trumpism. Which is also, in its lurching, sometimes insightful, often wicked way, a theory of what kind of party the Republicans should become, and one that a plurality of Republicans have now actually voted to embrace.

Whatever reckoning awaits the G.O.P. and conservatism after 2016 will have to begin with that brute fact. Where the reckoning goes from there — well, now is a time for pundit humility, so your guess is probably as good as mine.

The Problem with Trump as CEO of America: Government Is Not a Business. By Fareed Zakaria.

A display of Donald Trump-branded products at a press conference after his March 8 Florida Primary victory. Reuters/Joe Skipper.

The problem with Trump as CEO of America: Government is not a business. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, May 5, 2016.

Zakaria:

At the heart of Donald Trump’s appeal is his fame as a successful businessman. It’s why most of his supporters don’t worry about his political views or his crude rhetoric and behavior. He’s a great chief executive and will get things done. No one believes this more than Trump himself, who argues that his prowess in the commercial world amply prepares him for the presidency. “In fact I think in many ways building a great business is actually harder,” he told GQ last year.

There is some debate about Trump’s record as a businessman. He inherited a considerable fortune from his father and, by someaccounts, would be wealthier today if he had simply invested in a stock index fund. His greatest skill has been to play a successful businessman on his television show “The Apprentice.”

Regardless, it is fair to say that Trump has formidable skills in marketing. He has been able to create a brand around his name like few others. The real problem is that these talents might prove largely irrelevant because commerce is quite different from government. The modern presidents who achieved the most — Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan — had virtually no commercial background. Some who did, George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover, fared worse in the White House. There is no clear pattern. One of the few successful CEOs who did well in Washington is Robert Rubin. A former head of Goldman Sachs, he served as the chief White House aide on economics and then treasury secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration. When he left Washington, he reflected inhis memoirs that he had developed “a deep respect for the differences between the public and private sectors.”

“In business, the single, overriding purpose is to make a profit,” he wrote. “Government, on the other hand, deals with a vast number of legitimate and often potentially competing objectives — for example, energy production versus environmental protection, or safety regulations versus productivity. This complexity of goals brings a corresponding complexity of process.”

He then noted that a big difference between the two realms is that no political leader, not even the president, has the kind of authority every corporate chief does. CEOs can hire and fire based on performance, pay bonuses to incentivize their subordinates, and promote capable people aggressively. By contrast, Rubin pointed out that he had the authority to hire and fire fewer than 100 of the 160,000 people who worked under him at the Treasury Department. Even the president has limited authority and mostly has to persuade rather than command.

This is a feature, not a flaw, of American democracy. Power is checked, balanced and counterbalanced to ensure that no one branch is too powerful and that individual liberty can flourish. It is no accident that Trump admires Vladimir Putin, who doesn’t have to deal with the complications of modern democratic government and can simply get things done.

In interviews with the New York Times, Trump imagined his first 100 days in office: He would summon congressional leaders to lobster dinners at Mar-a-Lago, threaten CEOs in negotiations at the White House (“The Oval Office would be an amazing place [from which] to negotiate”) and make great deals. When talking about the positions he would fill, Trump explained, “I want people in those jobs who care about winning. The U.N. isn’t doing anything to end the big conflicts in the world, so you need an ambassador who would win by really shaking up the U.N.”

This displays an astonishing lack of understanding about the world. The United Nations can’t end conflicts because it has no power. That rests with sovereign governments (unless Trump wants to cede U.S. authority to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon). The notion that all it would take is a strong U.S. ambassador to shake up the U.N., end conflicts and “win” is utterly removed from reality. Yet it is a perfect example of business thinking applied in a completely alien context.

Success in business is important, honorable and deeply admirable. But it requires a particular set of skills that are often very different from those that produce success in government. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1930 about Herbert Hoover, possibly the most admired business leader of his age, “It is true, of course, that a politician who is ignorant of business, law, and engineering will move in a closed circle of jobs and unrealities. . . . [But the] popular notion that administering a government is like administering a private corporation, that it is just business, or housekeeping, or engineering, is a misunderstanding. The political art deals with matters peculiar to politics, with a complex of material circumstances, of historic deposit, of human passion, for which the problems of business or engineering as such do not provide an analogy.”

General James Mattis: The Middle East at an Inflection Point.

The Middle East at an Inflection Point with Gen. Mattis. Video. CSIS, April 22, 2016. YouTube.

Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016. By Robert W. Merry.

Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, May 4, 2016.

Merry:

The election’s real political fault line.

The pundits and commentators and pols and prognosticators will all identify multifarious political fault lines to explain the looming epic American battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – women vs. Trump; evangelicals vs. Hillary; Hispanics vs. white, working-class Americans with no college; the LBGT community vs. traditionalists; old vs. young. It’s all important, but not very. Any true understanding of this election requires an appreciation of the one huge political fault line that is driving America into a period of serious political tremors, certain to jolt the political Richter scale. It is nationalists vs. globalists.

Globalists captured much of American society long ago by capturing the bulk of the nation’s elite institutions—the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations. So powerful are these institutions—in themselves and, even more so, collectively—that the elites running them thought that their political victories were complete and final. That’s why we have witnessed in recent years a quantum expansion of social and political arrogance on the part of these high-flyers.

Then along comes Donald Trump and upends the whole thing. Just about every major issue that this super-rich political neophyte has thrown at the elites turns out to be anti-globalist and pro-nationalist. And that is the single most significant factor in his unprecedented and totally unanticipated rise. Consider some examples:

Immigration: Nationalists believe that any true nation must have clearly delineated and protected borders, otherwise it isn’t really a nation. They also believe that their nation’s cultural heritage is sacred and needs to be protected, whereas mass immigration from far-flung lands could undermine the national commitment to that heritage. Globalists don’t care about borders. They believe the nation-state is obsolete, a relic of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which codified the recognition of co-existing nation states. Globalists reject Westphalia in favor of an integrated world with information, money, goods and people traversing the globe at accelerating speeds without much regard to traditional concepts of nationhood or borders.

Foreign Policy: Globalists are motivated by humanitarian impulses. For them, the rights and well-being of the world’s people supersede the rights and well-being of the American populace. Indeed, as writer Robert D. Kaplan has observed, the liberal embrace of universal principles as foreign-policy guidance “leads to a pacifist strain…when it comes to defending our hard-core national interest, and an aggressive strain when it comes to defending human rights.” Globalists, in advocating foreign policy adventurism, are quick to conflate events in the Baltics, say, or Georgia or Ukraine with U.S. national interest, but it’s really about the globalist impulse of dominating world events. Nationalists don’t care about dominating world events. Being nationalists, they want their country to be powerful, with plenty of military reach, but mostly to protect American national interests. They usually ask a fundamental question when foreign adventures are proposed—whether the national interest justifies the expenditure of American blood and treasure on behalf of this or that military initiative. The fate of other people struggling around the globe, however heartrending, doesn’t usually figure large in nationalist considerations. The fate of America is the key.

Trade: The history of trade in America admits of no straight-line analysis. Andrew Jackson was a supreme nationalist, and a free-trader. William McKinley made America a global power, but was a protectionist. In our own time, though, the fault line is clear. Globalists salute the free flow of goods across national borders on the theory that this will foster ever greater global commerce, to the benefit of all peoples of all nations. Writer and commentator Thomas L. Friedman, a leading globalist of his generation, once extolled America as the world’s role model for “globally integrated free-market capitalism.” That was before the Great Recession and the subsequent anemic recovery throughout most of the Obama years. Today’s American nationalists look at the results of the kind of “globalization” extolled by Friedman and conclude that it has hollowed out America’s industrial core. Whether they are right or not, their focus is on the American citizens whose lives and livelihoods have been also hollowed out in many instances. Thus has a powerful new wave of protectionism washed over the body politic, leaving globalist elites running to get out of the way. Globalists were too focused on global trade and commerce to notice the horrendous plight of America’s internal refugees from the industrial nation of old.

Political Correctness: Given that globalists dominate the nation’s elite institutions and often exploit their position of power to ridicule and marginalize the so-called “Middle America” of ordinary citizens, who also happen to be nationalists, these people often feel on the defensive politically and culturally. And we are beginning to understand, courtesy of the Trump candidacy, just how angry they were at the emergence of the political correctness cadres who tell them what to think, how to regard the political issues of the day, and how they themselves will be regarded if they don’t toe the line (racist, homophobe and xenophobe are frequent threatened epithets). Globalists don’t care much about this phenomenon because it is employed largely in behalf of their views and philosophical outlook, including their globalist sensibilities. But nationalists care about it a lot. They send their kids to college in pursuit of betterment, and discover that political correctness is hammering away at the views and values they tried to teach their children as they were growing up. And their views and values aren’t allowed to compete in any free marketplace of ideas on campus but instead are declared inappropriate and intolerable before they are even uttered.

Cultural Heritage: Nationalists care about their national heritage, which they view as a repository of wisdom and lessons handed down by our forebears in this grand experiment that is both mystifying and inspiring. Globalists, not so much. Nationalists seethe at the assault under way against so many giants of our heritage, flawed though they were (as are we today). Globalists are the ones leading the assault.

On all of these fault lines, we see just how much pressure has been building up in recent years while the globalist elites concluded the issues involved were either settled or under control. Immigration—much talk about the need for reform but nothing done while the influx continued. Foreign policy—polls showing many Americans wary of interventionist adventurism while interventionist adventurism remained the prevailing attitude of governmental elites. Trade—a solid consensus among elites that free trade had no serious opposition, while industrial America crumbled. Political correctness—a blithe disregard for the sensibilities of non-globalist citizens. Cultural heritage—the power of the influence class brought to bear against those who cherish their country’s history. It isn’t surprising that the globalist class concluded that it really didn’t have to worry about any serious opposition out in the country.

But they did, and Donald Trump was the messenger. He not only attacked out-of-control immigration but did it in such a way as to signal that this was one politician who truly intended to do something about it. Despite some of his boorish rhetoric, or perhaps even because of it, nationalist Americans perked up and rallied around. On foreign policy, he posed questions that nobody else was willing to raise: Why do we need NATO as currently constituted when the Soviet Union no longer exists to threaten Europe? Why should Americans pay for the defense of rich Europeans when they can easily afford to protect themselves? Why should America continue to pursue a policy of promiscuous regime change when recent history tells us it usually produces disaster and chaos? Why can’t the elites recognize and acknowledge the regional mess wrought by their ill-considered Iraq War? Trump answers these questions in ways that set the teeth of the elites on edge, but it turns out many Americans are asking the same questions and buying the Trump answers.

On trade, Trump isn’t exactly original in his protectionist leanings. Such thinking has played a significant role at various times in American history—in good times and bad. And as recently as 1988, Democrat Richard Gephardt ran on the issue of “economic nationalism.” But once again Trump has upended the old politics and opened up a new fault line. On political correctness, he offers a counter-assault that is breathtaking in its political distinctiveness and force. And on cultural heritage, he said it all when he said, “We’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.”

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is the personification of the globalist elite—generally open borders, humanitarian interventionist, traditionally a free trader (though hedging in recent months), totally in sync with the underlying sensibilities of political correctness, a practitioner of identity politics, which lies at the heart of the assault on the national heritage. Nothing reflects this Clinton identity more starkly than the Clinton Foundation, a brilliant program to chase masses of money from across borders to fund the underpinnings of an ongoing political machine.

It’s impossible to say at this early stage in the political season whether Trump, the candidate of the New Nationalism, actually has a chance to win the presidency. But, win or lose, he has shaken up the political system, introduced powerful new rhetoric and opened up a new political fault line between nationalism and globalism that isn’t going away anytime soon. For the globalist elites of America, it’s an entirely new era.

Alexis Bloomer Apologizes for Millennials.

Dear Elders, I’m Sorry. By Alexis Bloomer. Video. Alexis Bloomer, April 22, 2016. YouTube.

Mona Chalabi: Correcting Grammar Is Racist and Classist.

Grammar snobs are patronising, pretentious and just plain wrong. By Mona Chalabi. Video. The Guardian, April 20, 2016. YouTube.

Commentary at NewsBusters, The Daily Wire, Truth Revolt.

Donald Trump’s Speech on Foreign Policy at the Center for the National Interest.

Donald Trump’s Speech on Foreign Policy at the Center for the National Interest. Video. Right Side Broadcasting, April 27, 2016. YouTube. Transcript at The National Interest, DonaldJTrump.com.

Fareed Zakaria on Trump’s Speech: “It Was Sort of Rambling to the Point of Being Incoherent.” Video. Real Clear World, April 27, 2016.

Trump’s “Foreign Policy”: Incoherent and Shallow. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, April 27, 2016.

We Can Celebrate Harriet Tubman Without Disparaging Andrew Jackson. By Jim Webb.

We can celebrate Harriet Tubman without disparaging Andrew Jackson. By Jim Webb. Washington Post, April 24, 2016.

Webb:

One would think we could celebrate the recognition that Harriet Tubman will be given on future $20 bills without demeaning former president Andrew Jackson as a “monster,” as a recent Huffington Post headline did. And summarizing his legendary tenure as being “known primarily for a brutal genocidal campaign against native Americans,” as reported in The Post, offers an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.

This dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in a vacuum. Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades.

Far too many of our most important discussions are being debated emotionally, without full regard for historical facts. The myth of universal white privilege and universal disadvantage among racial minorities has become a mantra, even though white and minority cultures alike vary greatly in their ethnic and geographic origins, in their experiences in the United States and in their educational and financial well-being.

Into this uninformed debate come the libels of “Old Hickory.” Not unlike the recently lionized Alexander Hamilton, Jackson was himself a “brilliant orphan.” A product of the Scots-Irish migration from war-torn Ulster into the Appalachian Mountains, his father died before he was born. His mother and both brothers died in the Revolutionary War, where he himself became a wounded combat veteran by age 13. Self-made and aggressive, he found wealth in the wilds of Tennessee and, like other plantation owners such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, owned slaves. He was a transformational president, hated by the reigning English American elites as he brought populist, frontier-style democracy to our political system.

Jackson became the very face of the New America, focusing on intense patriotism and the dignity of the common man.

On the battlefield he was unbeatable, not only in the Indian Wars, which were brutally fought with heavy casualties on both sides, but also in his classic defense of New Orleans during the War of 1812. His defense of the city (in which he welcomed free blacks as soldiers in his army) dealt the British army its most lopsided defeat until the fall of Singapore in 1942.

As president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of presidents, including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal? Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population. Indeed, it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.

Today’s schoolchildren should know and appreciate that Jackson’s July 1832 veto of legislation renewing the charter of the monopolistic Second National Bank prevented the creation of a permanent aristocracy in our country. Jackson was virulently opposed in this decision, openly threatened by America’s elites. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Vernon Louis Parrington called this veto “perhaps the most courageous act in our political history.”

Just as significantly, in November 1832, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. Jackson put a strong military force in position, letting it be known that if it attempted secession he would have 50,000 soldiers inside the state within 40 days, with another 50,000 to follow shortly after. Wisely, South Carolina did not call Jackson’s bluff, and civil war was averted for another 28 years.

Jackson was a rough-hewn brawler, a dueler and a fighter. For eight years he dominated American politics, bringing a coarse but refreshing openness to the country’s governing process. Jefferson called him “a dangerous man.” Quincy Adams termed him a “barbarian.” But as Parrington put it, “he was our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. . . . one of our few Presidents whose heart and sympathy . . . clung to the simple faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the rich.”

Mark Twain once commented that “to arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.” By any standard we should respect both Jackson’s and Tubman’s contributions. And our national leaders should put aside their deliberate divisiveness and encourage that we do so.

Jim Webb, a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from 2007 to 2013, is the author of Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.

Czar Putin Is Getting the Better of America Again and Again. By Ralph Peters

Obama and Putin. Getty Images (2).

Obama dismisses Putin, but Czar is getting the better of us again and again. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, April 23, 2016.

Peters:

To pinched-nostril commentators in the West, Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias, is a boorish clown destined for ultimate failure. To me, he’s a genius.

I don’t like the guy one bit. But I have to respect his abilities.

The last time a minor power played its hand as well as Putin has played Russia’s was in 1203. Venice hijacked the Fourth Crusade to sack Christian Constantinople, leaving Venice wealthy and empowered. It also wrecked Europe’s bulwark against Islam, leading to seven centuries of jihad (resuming now, after a brief timeout).

Putin’s power plays won’t end well for Europe, either. But, like medieval Venice, he’s good at what he does.

The Czar on his throne. Putin by Platon for Time Magazine, 2007.

Taking over when Russia was flat on its back, Putin restored Russian pride, recreating the trappings of a great power. One of his key advantages has been precisely what effete Western commentators see as a weakness: He lacks credentials. He didn’t go to the right schools and doesn’t behave properly. He was a “lowly” KGB lieutenant-colonel. He’s crude.

So our prissy elites spent the last decade and a half mocking Putin. He spent those years enriching his country, reviving its military, expanding its territory, extending its influence abroad — and humiliating the United States of America.

Our diplomats play contract bridge while nibbling delicate sandwiches. Putin plays pistoled-up five-card stud. And he cheats.

Putin punished Georgia, reclaimed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine and — just this month — he rekindled the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia to bludgeon oil-rich Azerbaijan away from its flirtation with the West.

Putin has backed Iran and is arming it with late-model air-defense missiles that will make any US or Israeli strike painfully costly.

He intervened successfully in Syria, smashing America’s feeble clients, generating another wave of refugees to further disrupt the European Union and leaving “President” Bashar al-Assad more securely in power than he’s been since the uprising started.

He’s punching way above his weight when it comes to NATO, too. With one dangerous provocation hard on the heels of another, he shows no sign of backing off. Rather, he’s having a high old time embarrassing the United States and its president.

On Thursday, his representative to the first NATO-Russia council in two years cynically turned the situation on its head, claiming that the US was the aggressor in every encounter — including that danger-close fly-by of a US destroyer in the Baltic. Putin’s man chastised our Navy for its recklessness.

Those incidents at sea, and many more in the skies, bewilder Western think-tank apparatchiks, who view them as counterproductive acts of folly and plain bad manners. But look at the situation through Putin’s eyes. Here’s what he gets when his jets scour our Navy’s decks with their exhaust:

He sends a message to NATO (especially, to its new, easternmost members) that, “Hey, the Americans won’t even defend themselves. You really think they’ll defend you?”

He sends a message to Russians that it’s the American military, not Russia’s, that’s hollow and rotten. It’s great propaganda that titillates Ivan and Olga (the latter almost as much as his bare-chested selfies).

His intelligence collectors study our electronic systems as they track the older jets that he sends out (he won’t reveal the signatures of his latest aircraft).

He accustoms us to aggressive behavior, conditioning us not to “overreact.” Were it to come to a sudden war in the 21st century, the side that pulled the trigger first would win. He’s training us to hesitate.

The Russians are well aware of the low morale in our scandal-plagued Navy. On top of that, they watched, enthralled, as the Iranians grabbed and tormented our sailors — only to be thanked by our secretary of state for resolving the crisis they created. Now the Russians believe that they can get away with anything, as long as Obama’s in office.

And in those famous words from the 1968 Democratic convention, “The whole world’s watching!” Putin doesn’t care what our elites think of him. He plays to a global audience. And that audience sees him as bold and successful, while it sees us as afraid and ineffective.

Of course, the DC establishment’s last-ditch defense of the “wisdom” of our feckless response to Putin is to conjure the spirits of economic disaster, the insistence that, while Putin’s a pain, the Russian economy’s tanking and he won’t be able to sustain his mischief much longer.

Well, Putin’s economy took a body blow, thanks largely to the drop in oil prices and partly because of (now wobbling) Western sanctions. But the ruble and Russia’s foreign reserves have stabilized. Import substitution is progressing. The oil price is inching back up.

Russians are much better off financially than they were before Putin appeared, and — most important of all — Russians expect life to stink. Deprivations that would shock Americans don’t even register. And Putin’s stage management of the economic downturn has been masterful. His popularity rating remains higher than Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s combined.

Unlike our leaders, Putin knows his people. He came from the streets, not from Harvard. And Russians have, for centuries, cherished the “myth of the good czar,” expressed, in the face of perfidy and corruption, by the peasant’s sigh of, “If the czar only knew . . .”

Putin put that myth on TV and online. His four-hour “audiences” are brilliant theater. He takes calls and e-mails complaining of Russia’s immemorial problems: bad roads here, corrupt bosses there, unpaid wages in a cannery. With barely a hand wave, the people’s woes go away.

When will we stop underestimating Putin? Western leaders have come and gone, but Putin’s still there. Barring acts of God, he’ll remain on his throne after the next two or three US presidents have left the Oval Office.

And now he’s accustomed to winning. To repeat myself from past columns, Putin has no reverse gear. He keeps going forward until he hits a wall.

There’s no wall.

A Guide to Survival In the Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar.

A guide to survival in the Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar. Elder of Ziyon, April 20, 2016. Hebrew original here.

Kedar:

To my brethren and friends, the Jews who live in Israel and abroad.

It saddens me to let you know that those attacks from which we have been suffering today, yesterday, a week, a month, a year, a decade and a century ago, are indeed the same war that our neighbors have been waging against us for over 100 years. Sometimes they fight with a great fire, with tanks and ships and airplanes, and sometimes they fight with a simmering fire, “Terror” they call it, with explosions, stabbings and shootings. This war is called “Jihad” in Arabic, and it is directed at Jews wherever they may be.

It saddens me to remind you that this war began a long, long time before Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. The pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39 were not caused by the creation of Israel, nor by the “occupation of 1948”, as our enemies refer to it. This war is most certainly NOT waging because of the “1967 occupation”. The Hebron Jews who got massacred were not a part of the Zionist movement. The Organization for liberation of Palestine (the Fatah) was established in 1959, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the PLO), in 1964, years before the “1967 occupation”.

It saddens me to remind you that the calls we heard during our war of independence were “Itbah al-Yahud” - “Slaughter the Jews” - Not the Israelis or the Zionists. This is because their problem is with Jews (and for that matter, Christians as well) refusing to live under the mercies of Islam as “Ahel D’ima” or “Proteges”, as obliged by their religion. To this day, in various Arab countries around the world children sing: “Palestine Baladna wa’al-Yahud Kalabna” - “Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs”. The dog, according to Muslim tradition, is an impure animal, and according to Sharia law if a Muslim is praying and a dog, a pig, a donkey, a woman, a Jew or a Christian passes before him, his prayer becomes impure and he has to start over.

It saddens me to tell you that a common chant with Israel’s enemies is: “Khybar, Khybar ya yahud, Jish Muhammad siaud” - Khybar is an oasis in the Arab peninsula in which Jews used to live until Muhammad slaughtered them in 626 AD. The chant is to remind people of what happened and says “Khybar, Khybar oh Jews, Muhammad’s army will return” - to do it again. According to the Koran, Surah 5:82, Jews are “Muslims’ fiercest enemies”, and in verse 60 it states that Allah’s curse and wrath are on the Jews and he turned them into monkeys and pigs. So, who gave them the right to own a country? Since when do they have the right to sovereignty?

The Language of Power

Despite what you may think, the peace with Egypt came about only after Sadat realized that despite the Arab’s efforts to eliminate Israel in 1948’s was of independence, in 1956’s Sinai war, in 1967’s six day war, in 1970’s war of attrition and in 1973’s Yom Kippur war which started as a complete surprise, Israel not only survived but managed to move the war into enemy grounds. Realizing that Israel is unbeatable, Sadat begrudgingly turned to peace, even if the peace will be temporary and based on the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah from 628 AD, in which Muhammad gave the Mecca infidels temporary peace for 10 years, only to retract it two years later.

The Oslo accords with Arafat did not stem from his belief in peace either. They were a con, a trojan horse which Arafat himself called “Treaty of Hudaybiyyah”. The entire purpose of the Oslo accords was to create a Palestinian entity with an army and weapons, one which will eliminate Israel when the time is ripe. He said it day in and day out, and our policy makers said that it was for “internal consumption only”, and when suicide bombers exploded in our streets, they called them “victims of peace”. Since when does peace require victims? And how long before the guns we gave them are turned on us?

It saddens me to tell you that all of Israel’s efforts to appease Hamas in Gaza were for naught, and that Hamas has turned from a terrorist organization to a terrorist state. Deadly rockets, attack tunnels, suicide bombers - those are all viewed as legitimate instruments by Gaza’s Jihad government. They do not give a single hoot about the lives, health, property or prosperity of the people, the women and children in the strip. The residents of Gaza are pawns in the hands of Hamas, the Jihadists and the Salafis, who make their current lives hell while “allowing” them to be sent to heaven.

It saddens me to tell the gentle peace lovers in Israel and around the world that the concrete and iron we were forced to provide Gaza’s Jihadists with to rebuild the destruction, were used to build tunnels of death - death to Israelis and death to the sons of Gaza. Instead of rebuilding their hospitals, schools and infrastructure, the Jihad people have built the infrastructure for death, suffering and disaster. You made the mistake, again, of basing your policy on hopes, dreams and delusions instead of on data and facts. And even the commentators (myself included) share the blame: We all said with one voice that when Hamas will assume responsibility over food, electricity and the livelihood of Gazan population, they will moderate, and become realistic and pragmatic. Well, we were wrong: The Hamas movement, despite its evolution from an opposition organization to a governing body, has left Jihad against Israel at the top of its priority list, and did not moderate its absolute negation of “The Zionist Entity” one bit.

The Blinding Peace Vision

It saddens me to spoil the “Two peoples, two states” party. What happens today in Gaza will, with absolute accuracy, happen in the Palestinian state you are trying to create in Judea and Samaria. Hamas will win the elections to the legislative assembly in the same way they did in January of 2006, and they will win the presidential elections. If not, they will simply enact a violent revolution just like they did in Gaza in June of 2007. And when that happens, what will you say? “Oops… We didn’t realize… we didn’t think…?” So, now you know and you don’t have to think. This should be your working assumption. And if today Gaza’s Hamas digs tunnels in the sand, the tunnels in Judea and Samaria will be dug in rock, making them that much harder to find and destroy.

And for those with a particularly short memory: In July of 2014 Hamas managed to close the Ben Gurion airport for a day with rockets they sent from Gaza. If and when they control Judea and Samaria, they will be able to close the airport with even a slingshot - they will have direct view of it from Bet Arieh hills. If you don’t believe me, just take a short drive to the hills just east of the airport, those that are in the “occupied territories” (occupied from whom, exactly?). Because of the wind patterns, most planes approach the runways from the east, passing exactly above those hills. Will Hamasland allow Israeli airplanes to approach and land from above its territory? And what price will Israel have to pay after a plane was taken down with a machine gun or an RPG? Shall we give them Jerusalem to keep them quiet?

Speaking of Jerusalem, what will you do when Hamasland serves you with an ultimatum: Jerusalem or war? Temple mount, or we close Ben Gurion Airport? And when the world shows their support of those demands, appeasing extremist Islam with Israeli payments, what will you say? And when the sharpshooters are again dropping pedestrians in Jerusalem over the walls of the Old City, just like their Jordanian brethren did in 1967, where will you hide? Behind concrete walls? Or a safety fence? Will you transfer Israel’s capital to Tel Aviv?

It saddens me to inform you that the worst thing to ever happen for hope and peace is the various peace movements, those who call upon Israel to let a terror state rise in Judea and Samaria and to give east Jerusalem up. In the Middle East, those who ask for peace, those who sing about their passion for peace and those who offer their land and their country in exchange for a piece of paper which says “peace”, are perceived as those who were defeated in war and are now begging for their lives. The peace movements have painted Israel as soft, weak and defeatist - an image which, in the middle east, does NOT get you peace. In this extremist, violent corner of the world in which Israel is trying to survive, being perceived as weak will earn you a swift kick in the you know what, and get you thrown out harshly on a good day, or beheaded on a normal one. In the middle east, “Peace” means that your enemies leave you alone because you are too strong, too aggressive and too dangerous to mess with. In the middle east, peace is only for the invincible.

Those who refuse to accept these facts, those who are not ready for blood, sweat and tears, those who are anxious for “peace now”, should not be in the middle east. It is a place for the strong, the brave, the determined, who firmly believe in their way. For all others, they should probably find a different place to live. Somewhere quiet and prosperous, like Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Boston or San Bernadino.

(h/t Miki for translation)