Our values are not the values of the Middle East, or North Korea, or most of Central & South America. There's a reason far more people try to come here every year than leave. And yet if we leave it to the globalist elites, the values and qualities that make America unique would be dissolved so that we can become just another country in the world indistinguishable from other no-name countries. Screw that!
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Read the whole thing: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017 ... can-party/National Sovereignty, Not Populism
For several generations conservatives have thought that the domestic enemy was progressivism. Now they imagine they face a new problem: populism. True, what has happened in America in the last few years looks like a populist uprising against bicoastal global elites. Populism in America, however, historically has been a domestic matter, inscribed from the founding of our country in the alternative visions of Jefferson and Hamilton. When Hamilton gets the upper hand for a few decades, Jefferson protests. The recent uprising, while leveled against bicoastal elites, is not a protest in the name of a faction of America, but in the name of American sovereignty itself. The Washington and New York elites are not proxies for a faction of America, but proxies for globalism. To call what has happened “populism” is to miss the real issue.
What we are witnessing is less Jefferson versus Hamilton than Tocqueville versus the cosmopolitan idea that the French Revolution set in motion.
The proof, I think, is the description we are hearing of this so-called populism. If you listen to the consensus among the global elites, you would have to believe that America (and indeed, Britain and Europe) has been beset by irrationalism. The only available alternative, purportedly, is the rationalism that is globalism. We have been here before—during the French Revolution. Then, any parochial attachment, any interest that was not universal, had no place in the new cosmic order the revolutionaries were creating. The fate of these attachments and interests was the terror of the guillotine. To be rational was to be universal; to be universal was to be rational. That is the cosmopolitan, globalist frame of mind. Those who do not have this mindset—those who cling to their guns and their religion—are, by definition, irrational.
Tocqueville, as I indicated, was among the first to see this cosmopolitan mindset emerge. The whole of his Democracy in America can be seen as an attempt to show that, once the links that hold us fast in the aristocratic age have been broken, democratic man must be relinked, or he will hover over the world, without connection, and become cosmopolitan man. Tocqueville’s ideas about voluntary associations, about family, about religion, and about federalism, point to the need to bring the soul down to earth, to connect it to others. The embodied soul formed through these institutions is hardly irrational, as the cosmopolitan would insist; the embodied soul, on the contrary, is the healthy soul, whose interests are formed in and through relations with others.
It is the globalist, the cosmopolitan, then, who sees in the opposing party—the Party of Trump, it turns out—the irrationality of populism. Tocqueville saw this cosmopolitan—yes, diseased—way of thinking, and sought a cure: a liberal polity in which citizens love their towns, cities, states, and nation, because they have a hand in making them. That is what American citizens want back: their towns, counties, cities, states, and country. There is a big difference between irrationalism and “well-considered patriotism” (as Tocqueville called it). American citizens know the difference; the Left does not. That is why the Left so virulently opposes everything that stands against cosmopolitanism.
