HIGH NOON: CARSON VERSUS TRUMP

HIGH NOON: CARSON VERSUS TRUMP:

As Roger Simon writes, “indeed, it’s not difficult to envision Ben Carson as a kind of Gary Cooper-type for our time, come to clean up America and return her to her former greatness.  The more humble he is in the process, the better, the more likely to succeed in the deepest sense:”

Of all candidates, Carson’s qualifications to handle the first of these disasters is unparalleled.  We know less of his qualifications for the second, but he says he has been boning up on foreign policy and (hello, Hugh Hewitt) he should be tested on that at the debate Wednesday.  My guess is that, unlike Donald Trump, Carson will know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah.

This is not to say I bear any enmity toward Trump.  On the contrary, his influence on the electoral season has been hugely positive on balance.  He has brought attention to a process that is often largely ignored.  But more than that, his focus on the immigration crisis has proven prescient, not just because of the murderous domestic behavior of illegal aliens (Fisherman’s Wharf, etc.) but because of the escalating migrant crisis in Europe and the Middle East that is bound to hit our shores.  He has also spoken out definitively against the Iran deal.  Bravo, Donald!

I just think, however, that the time is ripe for Gary Cooper.  The bigger question is whether America is ready for him. Do we deserve Ben Carson if he is as moral a person as he appears to be?  Or will his political inexperience prove to be more important than some of us think? Is a decent man unfit to be president in the modern world?

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A Timely Reminder from Eisenhower and Reagan

2:35 PM, SEP 14, 2015 • BY JOHN FONTE AND MIKE GONZALEZ  

“I am in complete agreement about dropping the hyphens that presently divide us into minority groups,” Reagan continued, “I’m convinced this ‘hyphenating’ was done by our opponents to create voting blocks for political expediency. Our party should strive to change this – one is not an Irish-American for example but is instead an American of Irish descent.”

At the time of the Eisenhower-Reagan exchange, today’s noxious mix of identity politics, adversarial multiculturalism, and political correctness was only in its infancy. It was just then coming into fashion on campuses and in the circles of the New Left run by cultural Marxists like Herbert Marcuse.

Building on the theories of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, the New Left argued that─even more than class─America was divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines into a dominant group (white males) and “marginalized” groups (ethnic, racial, linguistic, and sexual minorities). The goal of politics should be first to “de-legitimize” the ideas of the American system and second, to transfer power from the dominant group to the “oppressed” groups, they argued. 

Today, this perverse form of Balkanization, which places Americans into various identity group boxes in employment, education, law, and culture pervades the academy, government, media, and political life. It is even codified in the official U.S. Census.

Yet almost 50 years ago, Eisenhower and Reagan immediately and instinctively knew that this embryonic identity politics was a direct challenge to the universalism that America stands for. Beneath their smiles and Midwestern amiability, Ike and the Gipper revealed a deep understanding and sophistication of what political philosophers would call “regime maintenance.” That is, the ideas and values are necessary to sustain the American way of life. 

Without using sociological terminology, Eisenhower and Reagan knew that an emphasis on one’s race, ethnicity, and gender group highlighted his “ascribed status,” i.e. what a person was born into, rather than the “achieved status” that an American earns as an individual. They knew that there was something “old world” and frankly un-American about emphasizing birth status and dividing our citizens into competing ethnic, racial, and gender groups.

In other words, five decades ago, they understood identity politics for it was: an attempt to de-legitimize American constitutional democracy. 

We have taken no surveys, but we suspect there is a deep unease in our country with the identity politics/political correctness regime. There is a profound hunger for a presidential candidate to face this issue explicitly; to speak for Americans as a whole, and renounce group-based appeals. It would be wonderful to hear either a Republican presidential candidate at the Reagan Library, or a Democratic presidential candidate at another event, present the arguments of Eisenhower and Reagan, or paraphrase the language of George Washington in his Farewell Address when told his fellow countrymen that—before any other political identity─ they should consider themselves first and foremost as Americans. 

Mr. Fonte and Mr. Gonzalez are senior fellows, respectively, at the Hudson Institute and the Heritage Foundation