Notes from the New Canaan

Americans since the Puritans have viewed America as a New Jerusalem. The more sober have recognized it’s just a new Canaan, capable of regeneration but still a fallen, heathen land.

Of course, the settlers viewed the Native Americans lurking in the forests as the dangerous heathens, but the real threat of idolatry, as Puritan ministers who delivered regular Jeremiads recognized, was the unrestrained egoism, self-seeking, and indifference to godly laws of their own kind and kindred.

Now, after a presidency featuring George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, and Ronald Reagan, the American people have elected—Donald Trump.

In the nineteenth century, the English writer Thomas Caryle wrote about “Heroes and Hero Worship.” America’s Ralph Waldo Emerson reformulated it as “Representative Men.” Subsequent historians have dissected General and President Andrew Jackson—a duelest, Indian fighter, and slave owner and far from a moral paragon—as “the symbol of the Age.”

But now Donald Trump: a poor little rich boy, unscrupulous self-promoter, tax delinquent, women abuser, world-class ignoramus, and citizen who wouldn’t know what the U.S. Constitution was if Mr. Khan, father of the martyred Iraq War hero, walked up to him and slapped him in the face with it.

The antithesis of a historically literate candidate, Donald Trump nevertheless echoed the venerable past when he invoked a promise to “the forgotten man,” a mantra of FDR’s 1932 presidential campaign during the Great Depression. This time, it was the rural and small town people of Western Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and even the Minnesota Iron Ranges that elected Trump. They felt their way of life and values mocked for decades by bicoastal multicultural elites, their patriotism disdained, and their economic interests ignored or even betrayed. I can sympathize with them to some extent, but more feel empathetic in that I too am like a displaced, disposable man in that the world I was born into—created by the 1944 Bretton Woods economic order, the postwar UN, NATO, and Pax Americana—is now fast being rendered obsolete.

Politically, the country has experienced “a change election” in the sense that we have elected a wild card who I fear will prove either a disaster or a catastrophe. But in partisan terms, the handwriting on the wall is largely unchanged. The GOP, despite a  Pyric victory, is headed for the shoals like the California GOP after Pete Wilson unless it solves its national Hispanic problem. The Democrats are hollowed out by the loss the their traditional heartland in the industrial Midwest. Short term solutions: Marco Rubio for the GOP, Elizabeth Warren—a Bernie Sanders in drag—for the Dems?

American Jews can now look forward to the prospect of a president who on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays—but not Tuesday and Thursdays—says he is pro-Israel, who surrounds himself with “alt right” apparatchiks like Steve Bannon, of Brietbart News turned his campaign manager, and whose last television campaign ad featured Jewish likenesses of Janet Yellen and George Soros as masterminds of a global anti-American, and Christian conspiracy to turn over this country  to illegals patrolled by black helicopters.

I was buoyed up at the end by the false reprieve that the last-minute relenting by FBI Director James Comey in abandoning his Javier-like obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails would save her the election. But now reality has sunk in.

Rather than enter upon our new Jerusalem, with the U.S. Embassy relocated, we begin on our second Babylonian Captivity. Back to Jerusalem in four years?

The trouble is we may not be able to get to the new Jerusalem unaccompanied by “a mixed multitude.” Are either the metropolitan Latinos or the left behind descendants of the Puritans willing and able to join us on the passage?

Let’s hope and pray—and embrace the Constitution!