“An Epic Struggle Over the Definition of America”

Sec. of Agriculture Sonny Perdue presents the findings of the Interagency Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity to President Donald J. Trump in Nashville, Tennessee, January 8, 2018. USDA Photo

UPDATE 9.8.22: Recently Joe Biden took aim at the same “declining white majority” mentioned by Robert W. Merry below, euphemistically calling them, MAGA Republicans. Biden said recently of “MAGA Republicans,” that they “embrace political violence.” Where was Biden’s outrage against political violence in 2020 when he was hiding in his basement while BLM and ANTIFA burned America’s cities? Pat Buchanan explains Biden’s new offensive against so-called “MAGA Republicans,” writing on his blog:

This is the place at which Biden has arrived, 19 months into a presidency that began with his commitment to bring America together:

“Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation. I ask every American to join me in this cause.”

After 19 months in office, Biden has given up on that cause, for a new cause. The name of the game now is an old one: divide et impera, divide and conquer. Biden hopes to split “mainstream Republicans” off from “MAGA Republicans” and demonize the latter as intolerable allies or partners in our democracy.

Indeed, the catalogue of sins and crimes Biden attributes to MAGA Republicans — extremism, violence, mendacity, authoritarianism — not only raises a question as to the state of the soul of the nation; it raises a question of its continuance as a democratic republic.

At his first rally following the Biden diatribe, Trump called the president “an enemy of the state” and Biden’s speech, “the most vicious, hateful and divisive … ever delivered by an American president.”

In an earlier time, this exchange between the two presidents might have been settled with pistols at dawn.

A house divided against itself cannot stand, said Abraham Lincoln, invoking a biblical truth. While the attributes and conduct Biden attributes to MAGA Republicans may not be such as to make a civil war inevitable, they surely do raise the question of whether our republic ought to endure or to be dissolved.

Indeed, Biden should be asked what differentiates MAGA Republicans who back Trump, given the crimes Biden listed, from the Black Shirts who accompanied Benito Mussolini on the March on Rome?

Does Biden believe MAGA Republicans are as sincere in their beliefs and the methods they espouse to advance those beliefs, as Biden himself, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris are in theirs?

And if so, what do we have left in common?

Originally posted August 30, 2018.

Robert W. Merry explains at The American Conservative that Donald Trump’s political emergence interrupted “the coalition of the ascendant,” which had intended to “overwhelm the declining white majority and usher in a new era of globalism, open borders, identity politics, free trade, cultural individualism, foreign policy interventionism, and gun control.” Merry writes (abridged):

There’s an underlying reality lurking in the remarkable poll numbers released Monday by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. They showed that Donald Trump’s approval rating declined by only two percentage points. That despite the fact that the president suffered what was by any measure a devastating week.

As the Journal added, “The results are a testament to the durable loyalty of Mr. Trump’s core supporters, who have throughout his presidency remained largely unmoved by the controversies that have swirled around him.

Why?

Because this isn’t about the fate of Trump so much as the future of America.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism.

Before Trump’s 2016 emergence onto the political scene, many liberals believed the American future belonged to what political analyst Ron Brownstein called the “coalition of the ascendant”—including racial minorities, immigrants, Millennials, and highly educated whites residing primarily along the nation’s two coasts. They were convinced this ascendant force would eventually overwhelm the declining white majority and usher in a new era of globalism, open borders, identity politics, free trade, cultural individualism, foreign policy interventionism, and gun control.

Trump interrupted the coalition of the ascendant on its way to U.S. political hegemony. In the process, he touched off an epic struggle over the definition of America.

Read more here.