Counterpoint by Mark Nicol – Trump, and the fracturing of the West

Many commentators blame US President, Donald Trump, for fracturing the moral fabric of American society. The charge would be that, as executive chief, he has ignored humanitarian and environmental welfare, plus the press and polity, to push forward a marginalizing Capitalist agenda. In the context of slighting the CV-19 dilemma and surging ethnic tension, this Right-wing arrogance is conceived as the cause of near all that is now ill.

Actually, Trump is a vociferous conduit for a vast section of the US polity that has felt disenfranchised by Left-wing manipulation of the moral discourse. Moreover, the fabric of US, as of Western culture, has never been consciously cohesive. There are far more factors than the fact of one passing US President, which are cause of the current, perilous fracturing. Still, for histrionic moralists, it’s nice to have one ready source to blame. And Trump certainly provides that easy target.

21st Century Leftist ideologists avoid any reference to such an entity as Western civilization. The very terminology refers to a white, European-origin group of cultures, distinct from Asian, Middle-Eastern, African immigrants. Leftists are determined that, in the name of multicultural enforcement, no such distinction shall be made.

That sounds decidedly like a purposeful fracturing of moral identity to me. But, if this is done in the name of indiscriminate humanitarian extension, then by all means let’s open the doors permanently for all comers. And let’s not argue about who’s home it is. Isn’t your front door left open as such, all night, every night?

Ok, so Leftist ideologists have forsaken Western cultural identity, pride, solidarity, and defence – a trifling crime. But was there ever an historical time when Western culture was morally cohesive?

When people are all moving in the one direction, have some unanimous, determined goal, moral cohesion binds them.

When Muhammad’s devotees were ignited with the intent to conquer Mecca, were incited by subsequent caliphs to subjugate large portions of the globe, this was moral cohesion in action. (Mind you, certain historical revisionists will strike this brutal achievement from the record.)

One Ancient World henotheist religion still delivers utilitarian service to desperate cultures. A football team comprised of poorly skilled players possessed with cohesive ferocity can whip a skilled but disunited competition.

Contrastingly, the individual States of Western civilization progressed towards political, economic, and cultural modernization at different rates, in significantly different mindsets. And the cumulative movements of Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and Modernist Revolution, which generated the Modern Liberal State, were not as clearly defining as any blitzkrieg imperialistic conquest.

“I came, I conquered”, the standard Ancient World political credo, has rhetorical reverberation. But what student emerging from today’s Western school, academy, comes out with any coherent understanding of the phenomenal victory achieved via consolidation of the Modern Liberal State?

A more complex process than slashing with a sword, but a little more telling. This is “I won a footy match”, compared to “I changed the world”.

It is the fault of Western historians that we do not have a clear understanding of the constructive processes, which resolved our Modern Liberal State. Influenced by the successful discrete-focus method of the modern scientist, the modern historian does not appreciate what it takes to make sense of a highly complex phenomenon.

One has to take an intellectual scalpel to the subject matter, make brute dissections cutting to the fundamental agencies, actions, progressions. Resultantly, the explanative text of human cultural evolution tells a different story to the rote-read of human history.

Don’t look to one sneering Capitalist as the agent responsible for moral fracturing of Western society. Look, firstly, to that paper shuffling lineage which, via a century of studious work, has produced not one succinct, coherent account of Western cultural achievement – creation of the Modern Liberal State. The Australian Gratton Institute designs to do this. But the project was vehemently attacked in court, by Leftist academia, on account of its sacrilegious affront to multiculturalism.

How can a culture be cohesive, if it does not even comprehend those unique factors of origin, constructive achievement that bind it?

Nonetheless, when the Modern Liberal State was forged, it did not emerge from some egg as a perfectly formed organism. The dominant forming process was instinctively reactive, not, so much, intellectually rational, volitionally astute.

In the emphatic surge towards proclamation of that new politics which would emancipate the Commons from autocratic, theocratic subservience, moral reactivity molded our banner credos of liberty, equality. And all would be well in the new Liberal Egalitarian State. Oh, and fraternity?

When the integers of liberty and equality were inserted in the modernist economic equation, the untempered free enterprise system threw up the Industrial Revolution.

Ok, so we quietly acknowledge that all economic participants are not equal by birth, intelligence, industry. We institute Trade Unions, Labor Parties, and Commons legislative dominance to counterbalance this ill – inequality. Great.

But, with the integers of liberty and equality inserted in the modernist political system, via the egalitarian vote franchise, we soon find that all political participants are not equal by birth, intelligence, conscientiousness. We end up with a system where lowest common denominator thinking dominates electoral decisions, and, therein, executive decision making. The Internet has delivered full on this death-knell.

The core political and economic institutions of the Modern Liberal State work in counterveiling effect. Right-wing entrepreneurial prerogatives dominate the economic forum, Left/Green remonstrations against inevitable socio-economic, humanitarian, environmental abuses are heard in the political. Via this non-integrated structuring of core institutions, the Modern Western State is fractured, morally, already.

If we add to this the fact that Western parliaments are constructed as adversarial systems, i.e. government v. opposition, and that the party system inevitably promotes Left, Right, Green, religious divisions? What do we have here, but a methodically if unwittingly cultivated divide of moral thinking, prerogatives.

Modernist reactivity to theocratic politics, theological religion, engendered proclamation of secular politics, ambivalent adoption of the areligious, existentialist mindset. But we won’t find cultural cohesion invoked by a non-belief mindset.

Savvy souls amongst us daren’t re-embrace Ancient World religion. For subscription to wilful religious thinking underwrote theocratic institution, a founding instrument of despotic Ancient World order. Admittedly, the henotheist component of Ancient World religion works as a great rallying, or war cry, as per the Islamic example. But, best leave it to the US Bible Belt, Trump’s best friends, to thump on that dismal drum.

In the washup, failing resolution of any one moral vision that unites Western society, we cannot but be divided. It is disingenuous to say that Trump has fractured a solidarity that was never there. It would just as disingenuous to blame Leftists for the fundamental division. However cultural egalitarianist ideology, which invites Ancient World citizens into the Modern World home, concomitantly invites corrosion, fracturing of the more pedigreed culture.

Over the past few decades the Left has come to dominate Western moral discourse. That is because it is difficult for the Right-winger to morally justify absorbed self-interest. Admittedly, Trump has applied valiant effort to this task. The paradoxical attachment of ‘altruistic’ Christians to this Right lobby reinforces the historical association of theology with ideological egoism. So, for a while, Trump and an assortment of entrepreneurial, ‘white hick’, and Christian cultures have seized the moral, political narrative away from ‘enlightened’ Leftist dictation.

As a hard-core environmentalist I’ve seen Trump as a necessary evil. The Left are aborting Western identity, integrity. To the opposite, in economic, military terms Trump has consolidated US, Western power. There are four major geopolitical players today – the West, China, Russia, Islam.

The three latter contenders for world dominion are intent upon the expansionist anthropocentric process of empire building, death for any ecological rebirth of this planet. Therefor, despite that Trump represents a Right lobby dismissive of our critical geoecological problem, it is better the West is strong, at least. For only Western leadership might solve the geoecological problem.

Trump? Just a passing integer in the whole equation. He has invigorated a proud USA, a stronger economy, confronted China, disengaged from useless Islamic wars, rightfully told the Europeans to fully fund their own defences. But on humanitarian and environmental issues he is a total dud.

Dealing with the coronavirus? Well, the core pandemic is the human race. Viral pandemics thrive in super-monolithic, contiguous, and inter-mobile host populations. A regulator in a fragile, self-balancing ecosystem?

And the BLM issue? The American seizure of African slaves was, is a fait accompli. Formal abuses have been righted. It is time to get over it, stop playing the melodrama.

If we want to save the tenuous fabric of life on Earth?

The West must unite. In putting aside childish things, all citizens must stand solid, equal to confronting this one common challenge.