There are as many Donald Trumps as there are journalists writing about him.
Bill Buckley, appearing in Danbury shortly after President
Richard Nixon had returned from China, where he had “clinked glasses with
Chairman Mao,” was asked what his final opinion on Nixon was.
Buckley: “Which Nixon? There are at least four.”
Journalism, it is said, is “the first snapshot of history.”
Not to compare Trump with Ben Johnson, which would be high-comedy, perhaps I
may be understood if I should say that Trump still awaits a Boswell.
Former President Trump is an irritating fellow who relishes
irritating nearly everyone unwilling to bend the knee to his sometimes needless
confrontational, sloppy and solipsistic view of politics. Politics must be
about the polis first and always --
other considerations, personal vindication for instance, following in its train.
Trump’s problem at the moment is that self-vindication in
politics has rarely been possible. The vindicator must be someone who has no
political axe to grind, preferably an historian or a prominent intellectual –
certainly not a journalist in service of the antagonist of the political figure
seeking vindication.
Thus far, our age of confusion has produced very few
competent retrospectives of Trump’s single term in office. The
Case For Trump, written by historian and polemist Victor Davis
Hanson, is one of these. Given the inflamed temperaments of a majority of
journalists set afire by Trump, Hanson should be awarded a red badge of courage
for even attempting such a venture.
Politicians are always engaged in self-presentations that
they perceive might help them in their reelection efforts. Politicians, we all
know, are not on their oaths when campaigning, and the majority of them have as
many faces as Nixon, if not more.
It is the business of journalism to hold a mirror up to
these faces. But to do so, the journalist must first shuck off a disabling political
partisanship – difficult in Trump’s case – so that the mirror will not be
clouded by personal or, worse, group passions. Hanson’s book, largely unread by
journalists who live and write in “the moment,” is a fair attempt to both
present and analyze Trump’s various personas.
It is a rare politician who does not become in time a
prisoner of his past successes. Time is a turbulent, deceptive, forward-flowing
river. No one can stand in the same spot in an ever-changing current. Swollen
rivers are particularly dangerous. Present times are swollen with ambiguity and
what French philosopher Julian Benda perceived was the coming wreckage of the Western
experiment in rational self-governance.
Surveying the intellectual moment in 1920, Julian Benda
remarked in his book, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs),
“And History will smile to think that this is the species for which
Socrates and Jesus Christ died.”
It was in the 1920s, according to Benda, that intellectuals
in Europe began to abandon a lifelong, practical and serviceable attachment to
traditional scholarly ideals, elevating instead odd particularisms and moral
relativism. Benda, pretty much a party of one, belabored the intellectuals of
his day for having exchanged Europe’s patrimony for a mess of modernist pottage.
Europe’s intellectuals had traitorously allowed political commitments to worm their
way into their various vocations, leading a befuddled Europe towards a coming age
of, Benda’s words, “the intellectual organization of political hatreds."
Benda’s charge against French intellectuals at the dawn of
fascism and totalitarian communism, some have insisted, has special relevance
today when the pillars of Western culture are under unremitting attack by
quasi-socialists whose understanding of both the West’s experiment in representative
government and recent history is laughably primitive, when it is not overtly a
partly successful post-Marxist attempt to overthrow the foundations of liberty.
One of our own social commentators and philosophers, Dwight MacDonald, an ex-Trotskyite, took up the cudgels where
Benda left off. Both were anti-totalitarians and irritating moralists, a
discipline in considerable disrepute among America’s mostly tedious postmodern
revolutionary pedagogues.
Buckley -- like Macdonald a moralist, a journalist and a
Yalie-- recalled Macdonald asking in one of his essays: How would modernity
know if it had entered a new Dark Age?
The Trump soap opera is far from finished. But at this point
in the drama, Trump appears to a slight majority of possible voters a man more
sinned against than sinning.
Responsible journalists among us might do well to consider Macdonald’s
tantalizing query, say, every Tuesday, before they sit down to compose their political
briefs.
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