President Trump actually made an excellent speech in Warsaw. The Left, predictably, is awash with claims that the speech was a dog whistle to Trump’s “white nationalist supporters.”
The Left is bonkers. Or benighted. Or both.
Trump’s speech was a Reaganesque (written by former Reagan speechwriter Tony Dolan) paean to Polish courage and to the shared values of “the West” – “a fellowship that exists only among people who have fought and bled and died for freedom.” He praised the “strong alliance of free nations in the West that defied tyranny.”
To the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, usually among the saner writers among the Left’s intelligentsia, the speech was full (as the headline put it) of “racial and religious paranoia.” He claims, against all history, that this non-geographic use of the term “the West” is not ideological or economic, but instead “racial and religious…. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.”
Beinart is spectacularly wrong. He and his ilk are the paranoid ones. “The West,” so called because of the European East-West divide against Soviet Communism in which Western Europe was backed by the even further geographically western United States, has long stood for all freedom-loving nations which, as Trump explicitly said, were and are opposed to tyranny.
Sure, before the Cold War, the term was used to distinguish “Western Civilization” from the civilizations of the Orient (Japan, China, etc.). Yet the term is clearly meant here as homage not to a race but to a civic culture of small-r republicanism backed by the protection of human rights, guaranteed by the neutrally enforced, predictable rule of law.
In this sense, Japan and Taiwan and increasingly even India (Margaret Thatcher used to refer to India in this way) are seen as part of “The West” in terms of civic culture if not other parts of culture, in a way that Russia, for example, never yet has. Race has nothing to do with it.
Beinart gets especially hysterical about one utterly unremarkable line in Trump’s speech about “whether the West has the will to survive” – as “perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime.” Beinart somehow assesses it as an assertion of “white, Christian hegemony” and writes that “the implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.”
Maybe Trump himself believes that (with Trump, who knows?), but that isn’t at all the meaning of what Trump said. Indeed, the very next sentence after the one to which Beinart so objected made plain the speech’s meaning: “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?”
One of Ronald Reagan’s most famous quotes was that “the West will not contain Communism; it will transcend Communism.” Was Reagan speaking on behalf of white hegemony? Of course not. He was talking about ideas, ideals, values. And he was right.
There is nothing wrong, and indeed everything right, with insisting that “Western” values in this sense are better than other value systems. Liberals clearly believe this with respect to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Or at least they have suddenly begun to believe it since November.
It is often said, largely if not entirely correctly, that the United States is “the only country founded on an idea.” The idea, or ideas plural, is/are outlined in our Declaration of Independence, and put into effect via our Constitution. They are ideas that were emulated throughout the world, and they are noble ones. Natural rights, limited government, the consent of the governed, protection of private property, and the rule of law.
Clearly that’s what Trump (or at least the Trump-Reagan speechwriter) meant. And yes, large swathes of the Islamic world fall into the category of opposing most or all of those ideals. That’s because most of the Islamic world, in terms of civics, is dangerously wrong, not because of racial characteristics, but because the ideas underlying Islamic religious law, as interpreted in many places, fundamentally deny essential human rights.
But Trump didn’t just focus on radical Islamists. He was in Poland, after all. He went through a litany of atrocities against the Polish people by their traditional Eastern nemesis, Russia. He referenced the Red Army’s calculated decision to let the Nazis crush the Warsaw Uprising in 1944; the post-war imposition of communism; the Katyn Massacre; and the 1920 Soviet invasion. He also specifically urged today’s Russia “to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes.”
Beinart and his ilk don’t have to defend Western values. Or they can defend them selectively, which is a more accurate way of describing it. But it is those very Western values that give them that freedom.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner.
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