Walter Russell Mead on “The Meaning of Mr. Trump”

According to a remarkable essay by Walter Russell Mead  in The American Interest, Donald Trump is our “Dr. No” and nemesis of “the boomer progressive synthesis” that has failed to preserve and improve the legacy of “the greatest generation” forged in the crucible of the Great Depression and WWII:

“Trump looks like a vulnerable candidate—one with so many flaws that his candidacy must inevitably implode once he comes under serious scrutiny. . . . But this apparent weakness and vulnerability conceals a strength: Trump is an unconventional candidate whose proposition to the electorate isn’t about particular policy stands, experience, credentials or even personal and political honesty. Trump is the purest expression of the politics of ‘NO!’ that I personally can recall. He’s the candidate for people who think the conventional wisdom of the American establishment is hopelessly out of touch with the real world. He’s the little boy saying that the emperor, or in this case, the aspiring empress, has no clothes. What energizes the Trump phenomenon is the very power of rejection: people who think the train is about to head off a cliff want to pull the emergency cord that stops the train even if they don’t know what happens next. . . . What makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem unusually clueless these days. What makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem unusually clueless these days. The great American post-Cold War project of seeking peace and security through the construction of a New World Order based on liberal internationalism and American power doesn’t seem to be working very well, and it’s not hard to conclude that neither the neoconservatives nor the Obama-ites really know what they are doing. . . . With the PC crowd and the Obama administration hammering away at transgender bathroom rights as if this was the great moral cause of our time, and with campus Pure Thought advocates collapsing into self parody even as an epidemic of drug abuse and family breakdown relentlessly corrodes the foundations of American social cohesion, it’s hard to believe that the establishment has a solid grip on the moral principles and priorities a society like ours needs. Trump appeals to all those who think that the American Establishment, the Great and the Good of both parties, has worked its way into a dead end of ideas that don’t work and values that can’t save us. He is the candidate of Control-Alt-Delete. His election would sweep away the smug generational certainties that Clinton embodies, the Boomer Progressive Synthesis that hasn’t solved the problems of the world or of the United States, but which nevertheless persists in regarding itself as the highest and only form of truth.”

Mead here is extending intellectual and political empathy to the Trump movement. What’s wrong with this? Nothing except the uncomfortable echo of those intellectuals, post-WWI, who explained that the breakup of the liberal world order of that day made fascism inevitable when, in fact, their explanations—and apologetics—actually greased fascism’s way to power.

Empathy is a fine trait philosophically. But it is extremely dangerous when the barbarians are at the gates, and it’s necessary to defend the ramparts of civilization against them. Jews in particular can ill afford to follow the counsels of those who advise us to sit back and criticize our own failings rather than defend those civilizational ramparts that are still worth saving. Highfalutin criticism posing as sage advice is merely a disguised voiced of nihilism under current circumstances.