It is not often in my reading that I come across a truly ah-ha moment. Something so profound, yet obvious, that I am compelled to read it again and again. Just such a thing happened to me recently in reading an article from John Fonte, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center of American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute. The subject? It covered several different things, but the portion that most caught my attention was his explanation for what I see as a schism in conservative republican circles.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, he postulates that are three different generations of conservatives:
- 1st Generation: America is a force for goodness in the world, a counter to the evil represented by communism.
- 2nd Generation: Believing communism had been defeated, American conservatives turned their attention to fostering unfettered global trade believing it to be the path to greater worldwide prosperity and peace. To make it work, at least in the Western world, requires more liberal immigration policies, and a willingness to enforce something called a “global order.”
- 3rd Generation: This generation or strain of conservatism believes globalism has overplayed its hand to the detriment of the American middle class and sovereignty.
The above generational take helped me see the distaste many conservatives have with Trump goes well beyond the personal to include legitimate policy differences.
And it is on these policy differences that Trump’s detractors – people that one might think should be on his side – are dead wrong! Take tariffs. Second generation conservatives see them as a drag on global trade, not to mention potentially contributing to higher inflation. Fair concerns. But is there not a cost associated with lost American jobs, middle class jobs? Is there not a cost to unreliable supply lines for critical consumer goods and materials in times of national emergencies?
Aristotle in his book Politics revealed another cost and that is a weakened middle class exposes democracies everywhere to the excesses of the extremes steeped in envy and contempt. Following that logic, free trade policies that are revealed to be not-so-free and damaging to America’s middle class are in fact harming our precious democracy. Is this not a cost as well?
“If there was ever a moment for ‘recalculating route,’ as my GPS likes to say, it should be now.”
Our middle class is seething. I know, I am one of them. As I hammer away on my keyboard today, I sit closer to a corn field than I do any executive board room or country club. A member of the ruling or intellectual elite I am not. Common sense is my luxury, and it informs me it is time to get back to fundamentals, and I cannot think of anything more fundamental than putting America first.
Some will invariably claim that an America first strategy risks turning us into an economic and military recluse. I disagree. What it does mean is setting priorities and having the discipline to see them through. Thirty-five trillion dollars in debt leaves us with no other choice.