Conservative College Crusader On Moderate Democrats Versus Identity Politics

Charles Copeland is the former chairman of Delaware Republican Party and minority leader in the Delaware State Senate. He currently heads the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to bringing conservative thought to college campuses. The Resurgent caught up with Mr. Copeland this week to talk about Amy Klobuchar’s candidacy and whether a moderate Democrat could win against Donald Trump in 2020.

“From an intellectual perspective,” Copeland says, “I don’t think that the president really spent a lot of time during his life worried about conservative or even libertarian philosophy. I think he worried about what price the union cement contractor was giving him for whatever his next project was. He was somewhat of an unwritten page and I know a lot of people that were very, very worried, but I would submit that, from a policy perspective, what he’s implemented since being in office has been very conservative policy.”

Copeland doesn’t consider himself a Trump critic, saying, “I would not consider myself a Never Trumper nor would I consider myself an Always Trumper. On my board at ISI, I have both.”

“As a friend of mine once described it, it’s a bit like having a dull limo driver,” he adds. “He’s getting you where you want to go, but you just want to put the glass up.”

Despite the fact that Copeland seems pleased with much of the Trump Administration, he acknowledges that the president is in trouble with moderate voters. The Republican defeats in the House in the 2018 midterms were largely due to a loss of moderate voters in the suburbs.

“Where I live, it’s a suburb of Philadelphia, even though we’re in Delaware and that was one of the areas where Republicans got crushed in the 2018 elections,” he says. “Maybe it wasn’t a wave election in other places, but, in my area, it was a wave election and I consider this to be a fairly moderate area.”

“I think that a lot of moderates said, ‘We want somebody to put a brake on what is going on or, perhaps, on the president directly,” Copeland continues, adding, “I’m not expressing my own opinion, I’m just trying to call balls and strikes.”

“If you think back to the 2016 election,” he adds, “there were about 60,000 people in three states that called the election. If 11,000 people in a Pittsburgh suburb and 11,000 people in a Milwaukee suburb and 11,000 people in a Detroit suburb changed their votes, you change the outcome. Add to that the fact that the president’s approval rating has never in his entire administration broken 50 percent and normally sits around 40 percent. Meanwhile, there are some Never Trampers out there, 43 percent or so, who say they want to impeach the guy. He starts a little behind in a generic situation.”

“I think that if a moderate Democrat made it through their primary system, it would be a much more difficult race” for President Trump, he continues but adds that the Democrat primary system is stacked against moderates.

Copeland says that the large number of Democratic candidates will make it very difficult for any one of them to win a majority of delegates. If five or six prominent candidates such as Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Beta O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar each win about 15-20 percent of the delegates, it would conceivably be possible for a moderate like Klobuchar to emerge as a consensus candidate.

“From a structural perspective,” he adds, “they’ve got a real hard time getting a candidate who actually has crossover appeal, but, if they did, I think that would be a very, very challenging environment for the current administration.”

Copeland adds that he believes that President Trump will shift gears over the next two years to make himself more amenable to moderates, especially when compared with the radical left-wing Democratic candidates, and notes that the State of the Union may have been the beginning of such a shift in tone.

“I didn’t think the speech was huge as the speech goes,” he says, “but compared to how he’s framed by the media, he came across as a guy that likes people” such as immigrants, war heroes, childhood cancer victims, and Jews, contrary to allegations of anti-Semitism. “It’s kind of hard to frame the guy as a xenophobic hater if he stands in front of people and says, ‘Look at all the people I like.’’’

“I think he’s starting to change tacks,” Copeland says, but adds, “How long that stays, who knows?”

Indeed, a few days later, the kinder, gentler Trump fell by the wayside as the president proclaimed a national emergency in an attempt to bypass the congressional refusal to appropriate money for his signature border barrier.

When asked about the possibility that Joe Biden might enter the race, Copeland jokes, “Joe Biden lives about a mile from where I’m standing right now. Of course, the state is small.”

“I’ve known Joe for a long, long time and Joe loves the sharp elbows of politics,” he says. “If you could go and sit with God and make the perfect human for politics, it would look something like Joe Biden from a skill set. From a policy perspective, I disagree with him on almost everything, but he loves politics and is skilled at it.”

“The problem that he’s got on the Democrat side is he’s an old white guy,” he continues. “How do the Democrats that are dominated by identity politics today” nominate “an old white guy?”

“He’s hugely skilled, but I think that, at the end of the day, it’s going to be very tough to pull that off,” Copeland muses. “But, as I said, if you got to the convention and everybody had 15 percent, could he be somebody that they rallied around because he would be a holding cell for the future? Could be. That’s something that I think, that if I’m Amy Klobuchar, I would be thinking about.”

Copeland takes a swipe at Corey Booker and the identity politics of the Democratic Party, saying, “Corey Booker is now aiming to be the first vegan guy who shaves his head and it’s just an absurdity. I don’t understand the allure to somebody saying that I’m going to be the first vegan president. We’ve got serious issues to face in this country and whether you like McDonald’s hamburgers is not one of them.”

There are deep divisions between even moderate Democrats and conservative Republican voters. Two issues where the differences are most apparent are abortion and immigration. Of the two, Copeland believes that immigration would be the easier gap to bridge.

“The majority of Americans, and I think it’s a good-sized majority, maybe 60-65 percent, want some sort of immigration reform that takes people that are in the United States and gives them legal status or a pathway to legal citizenship,” he says. “They don’t want to uproot families and nobody wants to see the ICE agents coming into a house, pulling out mom and dad and leaving a crying kid standing there as their parents are taken away.”

“I think the majority of Americans want to see that, but they also want to see border security,” he says, adding that “the mainstream media has vilified border security in such a way that” many people don’t want to admit supporting a wall but see the value in adding security to “control the border and bring those people who we believe will be valuable citizens into the country and keep out the criminal element and MS-13.”

Copeland sees the possibility that a split government after the 2020 elections might act on immigration reform. Even if President Trump is re-elected, the two parties might find a middle ground on the issue. Copeland notes that several pieces of landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed with strong Republican support and signed by President Johnson, “a racist cad,” and welfare reform under Bill Clinton, were passed with government control split between the two parties rather than when one party controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.

“Abortion is a little different, “he says, “because the Supreme Court with Roe v. Wade jumped into the middle of it and put it on ice. Until that’s dealt with, I don’t believe that either side has any interest in doing anything except using it as a club.”

Even though Copeland is a fan of President Trump’s policy, he does acknowledge that the president’s behavior has made him somewhat unpopular among the college students that ISI works with. “I think that President Trump’s problems with aggressiveness in his tweets and in name-calling, some of those things are manifest. In kindergarten, we all learned how to be polite and hold doors for other people and speak in our inside voices and I do think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way,” he admits.

But that does not mean all is lost. He goes on, “I think that there is a large portion of the student body who like what the president has done because they have job opportunities when they graduate. They like what the president has done because they look around the world and it is a safer place.”

Copeland points out that 18 percent of college humanities professors are Marxists compared to only five percent who are conservative. “And Marxism is a political theory that has never worked. It’s 0-for-40…. Conservative policies that have worked almost every time and every place they’ve been tried, maybe they’re 37-and-three, and yet it is the minority opinion on campus.”

Many conservatives and moderates on campus are afraid to speak up because of the leftist practices of public shaming and doxing their opponents, posting personal contact information, including phone numbers and home addresses publicly. Conservatives and Trump supporters “are afraid to say anything because they don’t know if the student next to them is a rabid left-winger who is going to start shrieking at them like that woman did to Jeff Flake in the elevator. People don’t want that kind of stuff, they just want to go about their life and live their life the way they want and to go to their classes and believe in free markets and opportunity and limited government and property rights.”

ISI’s mission is help educate students in these conservative, small government principles. Copeland says that ISI is different from some organizations that preach the simplistic message that, “socialism is terrible and capitalism is great.”

“We talk about the fundamentals and let students make their own decision. We’ve had debates in which we’ve had open borders and closed borders people debate one another” with debaters from the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation, Copeland says. “Even in debates like that, we’ll have protesters because they don’t want to have an opinion other than their own talked about. I think that’s largely because they’re afraid that their own opinion lacks any deep intellectual underpinnings. They’ve just got an emotion.”

“I think that there is a vocal minority on campus that is led by an increasingly strident faculty that is driving this social justice, identity politics debate,” Copeland says, “Many students look at it and go, ‘Well, I’m just going to keep my head down and drive forward and get out.’ And that’s what they do. And it’s a shame.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Abuse Of Presidential Power Is The National Emergency

President Trump’s planned declaration of a national emergency on the southern border today is exactly the sort of thing that prompted many conservatives to oppose his presidency. In declaring a national emergency based on Congress’s failure to take action to the president’s liking, Trump sets a horrible precedent that will probably fail to get the wall built and will certainly come back to haunt Republicans.

To begin with, there is no national security emergency.  Illegal border crossings are near a 50-year low even though the arrests of families at the border have increased in recent months. Contrary to Trump Administration claims, there is also no wave of violent crime associated with immigrants, either legal or illegal. Statistically speaking, border counties are some of the safest counties in the country.

If illegal immigration didn’t constitute a national security emergency when the number of illegal border crossings was five times the number that we have today and it wasn’t an emergency in the wake of the September 11 attacks, it is difficult to see how it is an emergency today at much lower levels after 18 years in which no illegal immigrant has been connected to a terrorist attack and more than six times as many suspected terrorists were caught crossing the Canadian border than entering from Mexico.

In fact, illegal immigration wasn’t considered a national emergency for the first two years of President Trump’s presidency. In January 2018, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer offered $25 billion for a border barrier, much more than Trump hopes to get from his emergency declaration, but President Trump didn’t accept the deal. If illegal immigration was a national emergency all along, then why didn’t Trump jump at Schumer’s deal? For that matter, why didn’t Trump declare a national emergency two months ago prior to the government shutdown? What changed?

The answer is that Trump was beaten by the Democrats and needs to shore up his base. The crisis is not that illegals are threatening the security of the nation, but that Trump’s poor legislative abilities are threatening his approval rating among Republicans.

Unfortunately, Trump’s emergency declaration is an ill-conceived plan that is borne of desperation and is certain to blow up in his face. As with the shutdown, the president is attempting to use an unpopular strategy to enact an unpopular policy. By two-to-one margins, voters oppose an emergency declaration. With the beginning of the 2020 primary season only a year away, the move may spark enough division among Republicans to encourage a primary challenge against Trump. It may also kill Trump’s chances of winning enough moderates and independents to secure a second term.

The move is also unlikely to result in construction of the wall. The president isn’t allowed to declare a national emergency to bypass Congress when legislators choose not to act on longstanding problems. Trump’s decree will be challenged in court and is likely to be overturned.

The worst part of the national emergency declaration is the precedent that it sets. President Trump got his ideas on the use of executive powers from Barack Obama but Trump is pushing the envelope of the imperial presidency even further. The next Democrat is also likely to push the boundaries even more and dare Congress to stop him.

There are many “national emergencies” that Democrats could choose to act upon. They could use executive powers to tackle climate change, assault weapons, the national debt, racism, and who knows what. If the guiding principle is not the Constitution but the ability to rhetorically turn a problem into a crisis, the opportunities for executive action are limited only by Democratic imaginations.

As with President Obama, Donald Trump’s abuses of his executive authority are more of a crisis than the problems that he purports to address. It is past time for Congress to rein in the presidency and put limits on the power of the chief executive to act unilaterally. If Congress doesn’t limit President’s Trump’s abuses of power, it will be up to the voters to do so.

Originally published on the Resurgent

Republicans Not Happy With Border Deal But Have Few Options

Congressional negotiators announced a tentative agreement in the talks to fund the government to prevent another shutdown last night. The agreement reportedly reduces the amount of funding for President Trump’s pet wall project, which leaves open the possibility that the president will refuse to sign off on the agreement. Immigration hardliners have already begun to attack the deal.

The agreement reportedly includes no money for a wall, but $1.375 billion for enhancements such as steel slats for existing barriers and funding for 55 miles of new barriers, per NBC News. The new fencing would be subject to geographical restrictions on its placement. Republicans would also get $1.7 billion for other border security projects such as new technology for ports of entry, additional customs officers, humanitarian aid, and funding for more than 40,000 new beds in immigrant detention facilities. Democrats reportedly gave up their demand for a cap on the number of beds that can be used for detaining illegal immigrants.

Sean Hannity immediately attacked the agreement, calling it a “garbage compromise.”

“By the way, on this new so-called compromise,” Hannity said. “I’m getting details. $1.3 billion? That’s not even a wall, a barrier… We will get back into this tomorrow. Any Republican that supports this garbage compromise, you will have to explain—look at this crowd, look at the country.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, tweeted that Congress had created “a bad deal on immigration.”
https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1095169524972900353

Few other prominent Republicans have spoken out publicly on the deal so far.

Word of the deal came just as President Trump was about to take the stage at a rally in El Paso. The president said that he was aware of the deal but not the details.

"I could have stayed out there and listened or I could have come out there to the people of El Paso in Texas. I chose you," Trump said. "Maybe progress has been made, maybe not."

President Trump has not commented publicly on the deal, but the $1.3 billion currently being offered by Democrats is less than the $1.6 billion that was on the table in December prior to the shutdown. Just over a year ago, in January 2018, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had offered $25 billion for the wall. That was before the blue wave in the midterm elections gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives.

If the president sticks to his previous position, he may well reject the current offer and force another government shutdown. It isn’t clear how another shutdown would allow Republicans to increase funding for the wall. Democrats held firm for 35 days beginning in December. President Trump relented and reopened the government when his approval began to fall precipitously in January.

Another possible option is for the president to accept the deal and then proceed with his idea of using executive actions to fund the wall. CNN political analyst Eliana Johnson tweeted this morning that the White House is seriously considering this strategy.

https://twitter.com/elianayjohnson/status/1095301116647096320

Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said on “Meet the Press” Sunday that the president can shift money from various accounts into a fund to pay for the wall. Moving money from these accounts would not require congressional approval or a declaration of emergency, Mulvaney said.

“There are certain sums of money that are available to the president, to any president,” Mulvaney said. “So, you comb through the law at the president's request ... And there's pots of money where presidents, all presidents, have access to without a national emergency.”

If President Trump and Republicans reject the current compromise deal, it isn’t clear what the path forward would be. Executive actions to fund the wall, whether with or without an emergency declaration, would almost certainly face legal challenges that could delay construction until after President Trump’s term is over.

With Nancy Pelosi now in charge of the House of Representatives and public opinion divided on the wall, it is unlikely that Congress will be willing to allocate more funds. If he truly wanted a wall, the president’s best opportunity was last year, but that chance is gone forever. Republicans are now forced to choose between a bad deal or no deal at all.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Ilhan Omar Is Back With More Anti-Semitism – And A Democrat Fires Back

Ilhan Omar is back with more anti-Semitic comments. Over the weekend the freshman Democrat congresswoman from Minnesota got into hot water for a series of tweets that alleged that US foreign policy controlled by Israeli interests.

On Sunday night, Glenn Greenwald, a journalist at The Intercept, tweeted criticism of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s plans to discipline Rep. Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for anti-Semitic statements, saying, “It's stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.”

Rep. Omar retweeted Greenwald’s tweet with the added comment, “It's all about the Benjamins baby.” Omar’s tweet was appended with an emoji of musical notes.

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1094747501578633216

Rather than being a reference to the Biblical tribe of Benjamin, Omar’s tweet apparently refers to a 1997 single by Puff Daddy. In the song, the term “Benjamins” means $100 bills, which feature the portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

Omar was quickly called out on her response by Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor at The Forward, who asked who Omar “thinks is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, though I think I can guess” and noted that the tweet was the “second anti-Semitic trope you've tweeted.”

Apparently not willing to let any doubt about her anti-Semitic conspiracy beliefs remain, Omar tweeted back, “AIPAC!”

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1094761790595088384

AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a bipartisan lobbying group. AIPAC is the largest pro-Israel group, but it is not a political action committee and does not give donations to political candidates. Of the pro-Israel groups that do donate to candidates, more money goes to Democrats than Republicans.

Rep. Omar’s tweets hearken back to the tired old conspiracy theory that Jews are puppet masters that control the world from behind the scenes. This same claim has been made by generations of anti-Semites for hundreds of years.

The truth is that Jewish-Americans, as well as pro-Israel gentiles, have the right to petition the government just as anyone else does. If the US has a close relationship with Israel, it is because we share cultural and political similarities as well as a literal kinship between many Americans and their relatives in the Jewish state. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, also shares common enemies with the United States.

One of those enemies is Hamas, a terrorist group that is responsible for killing Americans as well as Israelis. In 2012, Omar tweeted support for Hamas and has apparently never recanted.  

Rep. Omar’s most recent anti-Semitic tweets have been denounced by both sides of the aisle. One of the most vocal critics on the left has been Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Chelsea wrote several disapproving tweets including one that responded directly to Omar’s “AIPAC” tweet, saying, “We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.”

https://twitter.com/ChelseaClinton/status/1094773371823366145

In another tweet, Clinton said that she would confront Omar directly on Monday.

https://twitter.com/ChelseaClinton/status/1094786748352208896

In recent history, there has been bad behavior on both sides of the political aisle and all too often partisans look past their own side’s failings because it is politically inconvenient to speak out. While the fact that there are so many bad actors on both sides is discouraging, it is refreshing when bipartisan voices can say, “This is not acceptable.” The only thing better would be for parties to stop nominating racists and bigots.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Where Are The Democrat Moderates?

The 2020 presidential campaign has officially kicked off and there are already at least nine Democrats, about half of whom you may have heard of, who have tossed their hats in the ring to compete for a chance to unseat Donald Trump. So far, the Democratic primary is shaping up to be a veritable freak show with one candidate who falsely claimed to be an American Indian, another who was endorsed by Klansman David Duke for her anti-Israeli politics, and a third who has advocated eliminating the entire private health insurance industry. The burning question for many Americans is, “Where is all the moderate Democrats?”

Even though the public face of the Democratic Party leans sharply left, that isn’t necessarily true of Democratic voters. CNN exit polls show that in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats not only won nine of ten liberal voters, they also won almost two-thirds of moderate voters, the largest share of the electorate. If that weren’t enough, in what might be described as the Trump effect, Democrats won 16 percent of the conservative vote. Other polling supports the idea that Democratic voters are not as liberal as their party leadership. FiveThirtyEight notes that almost half of the Democratic Party (47 percent) identify as moderate or conservative. In 2016, at least a quarter of Democratic primary voters said that they were moderate or conservative. Despite their success with other ideological groups – or more likely because of it – liberal Democrats now feel that the time is right to put forth a radical agenda of tax increases, government expansion and attacks on farting cows.

What this means is that the Democrats on the verge of repeating the same mistake that President Trump made. This also happens to be the mistake that Barack Obama made that led to Trump’s election.

The misconception made by both parties is that a rejection of the other party does not constitute an embrace of your party’s most radical ideas. The rejection of Hillary Clinton’s continuation of the Obama Administration was not a blank check for the Trump Administration to enact an unfettered right-wing populist agenda. By the same token, when voters fired the Republicans in 2008, they did not intend for Democrats to enact a far-left wish list. This is especially true considering that Barack Obama campaigned as a post-partisan moderate.

If Democrats want to build on their success in 2018, the smart bet would be to back a candidate who would have broad appeal. Instead, the candidates who have generated the most interest so far are all fire-breathing champions of far-left ideas. These ideas may be popular in the liberal enclaves along the West Coast and in the Northeast, but they are unlikely to gain much traction with voters who are representative of flyover country.

The good news for those who don’t want to see Democrats nominate a far-left candidate in 2020 is that it is unlikely that the current crop of nine hopefuls will be the only Democrats running. Joe Biden, the potential candidate who consistently leads preference polls of Democratic voters, has not declared his candidacy yet but seems likely to do so.

Biden has run for president twice before in 1988 and 2008 but stepped aside for Hillary Clinton in 2016, a decision that he almost certainly regrets. Hillary was eventually shown to be such a weak candidate that Biden could probably have won both the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Since 2016, he has engaged in a war of words with President Trump that kept him in the news. In addition to being one of the more moderate voices in the Democratic Party, Biden is a proven quantity with elder statesman status. After two presidential campaigns and two vice-presidential campaigns, there are unlikely to be any hidden skeletons in Biden’s closet. It is also worth noting that Biden performs best in head-to-head polling with President Trump.

If Biden decides against running, there are other possibilities for a moderate Democratic nominee as well. In fact, there are already moderates in the race, you just probably haven’t heard about them. One is Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a former naval reserve officer who served in Afghanistan. Buttigieg attracted the attention of David Axelrod when he campaigned for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in 2017. A second moderate already in the race is John Delaney, who was a congressman from Maryland until he retired this year.

Another moderate generating buzz is Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota. Klobuchar has a reputation for reaching across the aisle and is one of the most conservative Democratic senators. Klobuchar apparently has other candidates concerned. A preemptive attack on her candidacy was launched this week with allegations that she was verbally abusive to her staffers.

The “other” Democratic hopefuls from 2016 may also return for another try. Lincoln Chafee, a former governor of Rhode Island, Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator and Secretary of the Navy, and another Marylander, former Governor Martin O’Malley, would also appeal to moderates. Chafee, Webb and O’Malley may be waiting to see what Biden decides for launching their own campaigns.

It will be tempting for liberal activists to look at Donald Trump and think that the time is ripe to push forward with a radical candidate and agenda. Given the president’s weakness in the polls, a radical candidate might be successful at defeating Mr. Trump, but the safe bet would be to nominate a candidate with broad appeal. It would be easier to expand the Democratic voter base with a positive pitch than to win an election with the message that our candidate isn’t great but Trump is worse.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Just Say ‘No’ To Hitler References

There are certain things that politicians and pundits should not have to be told. The problem is that some of these very basic rules of behavior are ignored by people to their own detriment. That was the case today when Candace Owens told a crowd of people that Hitler wouldn’t have been such a bad guy if he had stayed within his own country and not been a globalist.

Lest you think that Owens was set up by the fake news media, she wasn’t asked about Hitler at all. It was her own choice to invoke Hitler in answer to a question about nationalism. Owen’s entire statement can be seen in context in a video posted to Twitter:

https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1093923658446323712

I think the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about at least in America is Hitler. You know he was a national socialist but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism. So, in thinking about how we could go back down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t. I think it’s okay. I think it’s important to retain your country’s identity and to make sure that what’s happening here, which I think is incredibly worrisome in terms of the decrease in the birth rate that we’re seeing in the UK is what we’re trying to avoid. I don’t have any problems with nationalism. It’s globalism that I try to avoid.

As I listen to Owens, I’m reminded of the principle’s assessment of Adam Sandler’s answer in Billy Madison. “At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought,” he said. “Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

I haven’t followed Owens commentary before, but this answer is astounding for wrongness. She employs both multiple logical fallacies and historical ignorance. Owens packs a great many errors into two minutes of extemporaneous speaking, but there are three main problems with her logic.

First, Owens launches into her answer with a straw man argument against critics of nationalism with the claim that what anti-nationalists really want is globalism. Globalism and nationalism are both vague terms that mean different things to different people, but it is not true that everyone concerned about nationalism is a secret proponent of globalism. Owens purposefully ignores the facts that Hitler was a German nationalist and that he and other nationalists have caused enormous bloodshed around the world.

Nationalism is not evil in and of itself but it can be used for nefarious purposes. It also is not the same thing as patriotism. As George Orwell pointed out in 1945, nationalism is distinct from patriotism, the “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”

“Nationalism,” Orwell wrote, “is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Orwell also identified both good and bad examples of nationalism. He cites neo-Toryism (British nationalism) and Zionism as examples of positive nationalism. Anglophobia and anti-Semitism are examples of negative nationalism while communism, racism, and class warfare are among his examples of nationalism being “transferred” to “other units.” If nationalism is understood to be a neutral force that can either be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances and the people involved, then it becomes more difficult for Owens to discard concerns about nationalism on the grounds that anyone who opposes nationalism is a globalist.

What is more alarming is Owens’ willingness to look past Hitler’s actions inside Germany. In the view of Hitler and the Nazis, making Germany great and running things involved locking up and killing a lot of Germans at home, even before he got interested in other countries. Hitler’s vision for Germany was to turn the country into a police state where his word was law. People who were considered a burden to German greatness were dealt with harshly in ways that make full-term abortion laws seem humane by comparison.

Owens also seems to confuse globalism with imperialism. Hitler’s strategy for globalizing and making everybody German was to invade neighboring countries and kill large segments of their populations. This is a far cry from international alliances and corporate trade deals that are entirely voluntary.

Owens makes a third point that retaining national identity is an important part of nationalism. But America doesn’t have a static national identity the way some countries do. Our culture was never monolithic the way Britain and France were. Like the climate, American culture has been constantly changing for our entire history.

The United States began as British colonies but quickly expanded to become a melting pot of cultures with the annexation of Spanish Florida and French Louisiana. Millions of immigrants, including waves from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Central America, have become Americans and with each one American culture has changed a little more. Although often looked down upon as new immigrants, Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish and other immigrants blended into American culture and are now considered native Americans. More modern Americans are descended from German immigrants than are of British stock. American culture has always been a moving target.

Earlier, I alluded to basic rules for politicians and pundits. The first is that if no one else brings up Hitler, you shouldn’t either. In a similar vein, the second rule is that if you are asked about Hitler, just say he was an evil man and leave it at that. It is never a good idea to defend Hitler, much less to invoke him to defend your political beliefs.

Originally published on The Resurgent

SOTU: How Trump's Foreign Policy Is Obama-esque

President Trump’s State of the Union message last night certainly had its moments. There were the obligatory calls for unity, horn tooting about the strong economy, recognition of outstanding Americans, and even a few chants of “USA! USA!” Amid the boilerplate, however, the most disturbing aspect of the State of the Union was a return to Donald Trump’s isolationist tendencies and advocacy of a foreign policy that would not seem out of place in the Obama Administration.

In a speech that led off by saying, “Victory is winning for our country,” the president quickly turned to his plans to extricate the United States from Syria and Afghanistan without ensuring victory.  

“When I took office, ISIS controlled more than 20,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria, just two years ago,” Trump said. “Today, we have liberated virtually all of that territory from the grip of these bloodthirsty monsters. Now, as we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home.”

“In Afghanistan, my Administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban,” Trump added. “As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism.”

While he referenced victory over ISIS in Syria, there seems to be no question that there will be no victory in Afghanistan under President Trump. Even in Syria, the prospect of bringing troops home goes against the advice of President Trump’s military leaders and national security advisors.

In fact, the reason that the United State is in Syria in the first place is because President Obama ignored similar strategic advice and ordered a precipitous and unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. As American soldiers left, Iranian militias and ISIS guerillas filled the void. In a matter of years, ISIS had gained control of a large chunk of Iraq and Syria and the US was forced to redeploy troops to slow the refugee crisis as well as prevent the terrorist group from having both a sanctuary and a source of income from captured oil wells.

In Afghanistan, the proposed surrender is even more blatant. Five years ago, Republicans blasted Obama for negotiating with the Taliban, the very organization that had given Osama bin Laden protection after the September 11 attacks. Obama’s talk of withdrawal dates was said to encourage the enemy to bide his time and wait until America’s abandonment of its allies in the Afghan government was complete. Last night, President Trump proposed exactly the same policy that Republicans criticized Obama for advocating.

The main argument against keeping troops in Afghanistan and Syria is that the War On Terror has gone on for a long time and people are tired of it. Those points are true, but it is also true that America has fought a number of other long wars, most of them forgotten. America was in Vietnam for 20 years, the Philippine insurrection following the Spanish-American War lasted 14 years, and there were numerous actions in Central America and the Caribbean that required US troops to be deployed for decades. Insurgencies can be defeated, but doing so takes a long time.

Critics also point to the cost of the wars, but spending in Afghanistan and Syria pales in comparison to entitlement spending and military spending seems to be money well spent. There has not been a significant terror attack in the US since 9/11/2001 even though Europe has suffered a number of serious attacks in that time. The cost of occupation, in terms of both blood and treasure, is almost certainly less than the cost of giving Osama bin Laden’s proteges room to plot against America.

In one of the most ironic moments of the speech, shortly after calling for withdrawal from the Middle East, President Trump recognized several American WWII veterans who had liberated Jewish prisoners of the Nazis. This recognition that America military might is a force for good in the world that prevents far more innocent deaths than it causes contrasted sharply with the defeatist strategy that could once again unleash genocidal killing and spark another refugee crisis in the Middle East. Incidentally, the US still has soldiers in Germany 74 years after the end of WWII.

As with Obama’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, there are other countries who are willing to fill the vacuum that would be left by Trump’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran borders Afghanistan and has client groups in Iraq and Syria. The removal of US influence in Iraq and Syria would leave Iran with unimpeded lines of supply and communication all the way to the Israeli border. This is a disturbing possibility given Iran’s stated goal of destroying the Jewish state.

Russia has also expanded its role in Syria and the Middle East. Beginning with forces to help stabilize the Assad regime in Syria, Vladimir Putin is regaining the Soviet Union’s old footholds in the Arab countries of the Middle East, positioning himself as a more dependable partner than the United States.

China is also seeking a broader role in the Middle East as American influence there wanes. Although China doesn’t have a military role in the region so far, they are interested in the area for its resources and as a market for their products.

Along similar lines, President Trump’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty is another retreat from American world leadership that plays into Vladimir Putin’s hands. The 1986 treaty negotiated by President Reagan eliminated medium-range nuclear missiles. The Trump Administration complains that Russia has violated the treaty, but junking the agreement entirely means that Russia is not constrained at all in developing new medium-range weapons. The United States will be forced to develop its own weapons as a result and a new arms race will ensue.  

The worst part about President Trump’s isolationist turn is that foreign policy is the area where Congress has the least oversight of the president. If the president advocates bad domestic legislation, it is a simple matter for Congress to block it or amend it to make it better. However, there is little that Congress can do stop the commander-in-chief from ignoring his generals and ordering the troops home. The president can also easily end many treaties and there is very little that Congress can do to repair the damage. Congress’ only real tool to rein in the president is impeachment.

George Orwell famously said, “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” President Trump seems to be taking a page from President Obama’s strategy in deciding that it is better to lose in Afghanistan and Syria than spend time on ensuring a lasting victory. Overall, President Trump, like President Obama, seems to think that the world is a better place if America stays home. I’m not sure how that makes either America or the rest of the world great again.

Originally published on The Resurgent