Sworn Enemies: Liberty and the Modern Left

In Poland last week, Trump warned of many threats facing Western civilization. Islamic terrorism, unrestrained immigration, rogue states with nuclear arsenals, and so forth. But he made it clear that while those threats were real and serious, there was one threat more dangerous than all of them. And it was the one threat Western nations were themselves responsible for and capable of putting a stop to.

“Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control,” Trump said. “This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

“Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty,” he continued. “We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.  If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.”

This was a beautiful segment of a beautiful speech, and it did something that many of Trump’s critics think is impossible: It combined the “Trumpish” aspects of his philosophy seamlessly with traditional conservative ideals and proved that the two ideologies were never that far away from each other to begin with. Yes, there is still room for Trump supporters to criticize the conservative intelligentsia and vice versa, but there isn’t as much of a gap there as many would have us believe. Trump is a rebuke to the Republican Party’s mushy path, for certain, but he is not a rebuke to conservatism. He REPRESENTS conservatism and he REPRESENTS what the U.S. has always and (God willing) will always stand for.

And that is enough to make him a sworn enemy of the left, which regards his presidency as a dangerous throwback to the days of slavery, Jim Crow, Indian genocide, and whatever other horrors they can dredge up from America’s past. They see him as a figure to be feared above all others because he is NOT ashamed to be the leader of the United States and he is NOT ashamed of that thing the U.S. and Western civilization is best at: Winning. He is certainly not ashamed of liberty.

And if the left is against all of that today, then theirs is a poisonous ideology that deserves to be left on the scrap heap of history.