Trump Has Strengthened, Not Undermined, Democracy in the U.S.

Again, Conrad Black nails it — Trump has strengthened democracy:

He has set about rescuing a system that had broken down.

It is distasteful to return to my exchange with my esteemed NRO colleague Jonah Goldberg about the column he wrote several weeks ago likening President Trump’s reference to the implantation of FBI informers in his campaign as “Spygate” to McCarthyism. He replied on June 6, citing some of what I had written, and putting me in the category of those who had criticized his column because he “should have endorsed ‘Spygate’ in toto.” I neither wrote nor implied anything of the kind. My objection was that any likening of Donald Trump to Joseph R. McCarthy is utterly spurious and Jonah knows that perfectly well. I won’t dwell further on the point and welcome his emphatic assurance that the comparison was as circumscribed as he defined it in his June 6 revision. It was still nonsense but much less objectionable nonsense and Jonah Goldberg has a right to an unvexed retreat, like Kutuzov after Borodino or Lee after Gettysburg (contrary to Lincoln’s orders).

The reason I raise this is that Jonah’s recent book The Suicide of the West, something of a sequel to the famous book of the same name by James Burnham, (a founding editor of National Review), decries Trumpian nationalism and the president’s methods of rousing mass opinion against the governing elites as indicative of the destruction, self-destruction in fact, of a society born of democratic enlightenment. If the author advises that I misread his book (as he alleges I did his McCarthy piece), then I will defer to him, of course. But that is how I read it, and this really is our issue; we all take polemical liberties sometimes and the reference to McCarthy was really not important. But I think the victory of Trump and his gradual success in the principal areas he has focused on — economic growth, deregulation, tax reduction and reform, regularization of immigration, nuclear non-proliferation, equitable burden-sharing in the Western alliance, reduction of the trade deficit and oil imports, and withdrawal from ecological measures based on fear of global warming — are strong evidence of the strength of enlightened democracy in the United States.

Read more: National Review

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