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There Is An Active, Energetic and Clear-Eyed Populist Patriotism That Rejects Exploitative Elites Of Both Parties.

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Populist patriots reject the elites of both parties. They believe President Trump defends their cultural beliefs from the left and their economic interests from the right. They see open borders, illegal immigration and multiculturalism threatening to redefine what it means to be an American, while unfair trade and a rigged tax code endanger their jobs.

The rejection runs both ways. Elite liberals too often talk about patriotism as if it’s a set of blinders preventing Americans from recognizing their country’s flaws. Likewise, conservative elites can be too concerned with boosting gross domestic product, dismissing patriotism as a trifle to be set aside when there are higher investment returns to chase or markets to open.

The divide between these patriots and the left, in particular, is growing. Barack Obama called himself a “citizen of the world” and noted he only believed in American exceptionalism to the extent that the “Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Even more telling was Michelle Obama’s comment that her husband’s campaign made her “proud of my country” for the “first time in my adult life.” One need not perceive the hand of Providence in America’s Founding and ascendance to reject the Obamas’ tepid faith in this country. Yet even Mr. Obama’s arm’s-length embrace of American exceptionalism would prove too close, too warm for today’s progressive Democrats.

They look at America and see only its failure to live up to its highest ideals. In their eyes, this isn’t a country that has provided more freedom and opportunity to a greater number of people than any other; it’s a society hopelessly riddled with social injustices like racism, sexism and classism. Their prescription is radical restructuring rather than incremental reforms.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad” seem to think their criticisms prove their love of country. But even the most fervent patriots allow for improvement. Progressives might be more convincing if they were more evenhanded—spending some time extolling America’s virtues rather than hammering away at its shortcomings. Populists have grown frustrated with liberal celebrities, journalists and politicians they see as insufficiently thankful for the opportunities America has provided them—one reason Mr. Trump’s defense of the American flag and condemnation of Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem have resonated with these voters.

Populist patriots are equally disappointed with the results of decades of Republican economic orthodoxy. Freely flowing American capital builds factories around the globe, raising many people’s quality of life. But this arrangement fails to deliver clear benefits to America’s working class. These voters went along with lower taxes, free trade and other conservative economic positions because they believed, for a time, that these policies would generate more jobs for Americans.

Eventually, many Americans saw enough real-world evidence to doubt that economic vision. Automation and foreign competition led to layoffs, and while some new higher-paying domestic jobs were created in value-added advanced manufacturing, they weren’t distributed evenly by geography or skill level. Cheaper products at Walmart weren’t sufficient compensation for lower wages and fewer hours. Only in the past few years have jobs become plentiful enough to support healthy wage growth, especially for the least skilled.

America’s “forgotten men and women” see Mr. Trump fighting back against Chinese intellectual-property theft, currency manipulation and limits on foreign ownership after years of bipartisan capitulation to Beijing’s perfidy. Rebalancing trade is one of the few policy solutions Mr. Trump has articulated consistently and passionately for decades. He views trade wars the way conservative elites view entitlement reform—as a salutary exchange of short-term costs for greater long-term benefits. And, it should be noted, so far he’s been more effective than more-doctrinaire economic conservatives in advocating long-term thinking. Witness the farmers who patiently affirm their trust in Mr. Trump even as they take a big financial hit from tariffs.

The world-wide movement of millions of people out of poverty has been a remarkable achievement of market liberalization. Meanwhile, for far too long working people’s wages here in America remained flat. And when radical Islamist terrorists threaten the U.S., it isn’t the globalists or glitzy multilateral institutions that defend American families—it’s our fellow Americans, mostly the sons and daughters of the working and middle classes. They’re the ones deployed to neutralize terrorist threats and protect the world’s trade routes.

Populist patriots hear President Trump say “America First,” and think: “It’s about time.” For them, it’s common sense that the U.S. government should value American lives more than the lives of foreigners and U.S. companies should deploy more capital domestically than internationally. Patriots cheered former Rep. John Delaney’s debate line, “There is no reason why people who invest for a living should pay less [in taxes] than people who work for a living.”

Democrats alienate populist patriots with their cultural liberalism and attacks on American identity and symbols; Republicans drive them away with their embrace of free trade and rhetorical emphasis on corporate earnings. Mr. Trump has won their allegiance by pioneering a populist message that melds cultural and economic components. It is the reason he has been able to attract former Sanders and Obama supporters—a feat conventional Republicans would struggle to achieve.

Who after Mr. Trump can win over populist patriots? The answer depends on whether it will be easier for Democrats to slay the Nemean lion of cultural snobbery or for Republicans to muck the Augean stables of economic orthodoxy. But one thing is certain—somewhere out there, a young Hercules is up to the task.

Mr. Jindal served as governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and was a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

Is Democracy Doomed To Die? Unfortunately, That’s Just Wishful Thinking.

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Although I generally agree with Pat Buchanan in his observations about the world, lately I’ve been a bit confused about his comments on “democracy.” Whether Buchanan is telling us, as in April, that democracy is in a “death spiral” or more recently, that it’s “a dying species,” I’m not sure that he’s providing a consistent concept of his key term. In April, Buchanan lamented that “in Washington our two-party system in in gridlock. Comity and collegiality are vanishing.” Meanwhile “across Europe splinter parties arise and ‘illiberal democracies’ take power.”  Buchanan is right that moral and social consensus is breaking down in Western countries; and to whatever extent it is still present, it is being increasingly imposed from above. The ones who typically take a lead here are social engineers working for public administration and the educational and media establishments. Moreover, citizens have become increasingly disempowered as the permanent governing class takes over society, and at least sporadic reactions have set in with the rise of a populist Right.

If this is indeed what is now happening, then present trends toward intrusive bureaucratic government providing “democratic” socialization and diversity-training will not likely be reversed in the near future. This form of rule continues to elicit electoral approval, and those who vote for governments favoring multiculturalism and the enforcement of PC are more numerous than those who oppose it. In the recently concluded national election in Canada, more people voted for parties of the Left, which favor all the policies that Buchanan and I deplore, than supported the bland conservative opposition. (Populist alternatives hardly exist and have no purchase north of our border.) In Germany the admission of a million and a half Third World migrants, which initially caused cries of outrage against Merkel’s leadership, failed to produce a stampede toward the Right. Quite the contrary! Although the immigration-critical AfD gained about two to three points in most of Germany as a result of Merkel’s immigration policy, far bigger gains have accrued to the leftist, antinational, and pro-immigration Greens. In our presidential race in 2016, more votes went to the candidate of the left, Hillary Clinton, than to Trump.

Although the populace has been conditioned by key social and cultural institutions to vote as they do, those who exercise this right do have other electoral choices. Once in the voting booth, they could throw their support to the non-establishment Right. That they generally prefer a socially leftist, immigration-friendly establishment may indicate something about “the people.” No one put a gun to the heads of French voters when over 66% of them voted against the nationalist Marine Le Pen for the candidate of the Left and the globalists Emmanuel Macron. And the majority of those votes came from the indigenous French, not from Third World immigrants, who make up less than ten percent of the French voting population.

Buchanan’s more recent column about democracy’s “death spiral” brings up another question: Is Buchanan speaking about the disintegration of our current managerial democracies or about something else? His column cites Chilean workers in Santiago rioting over a 5% rise in subway tolls, Hong Kong residents protesting the removal of their freedoms by the mainland Chinese government, the sometimes violent demonstration of the Yellow Vests in Paris and other French cities over the government-imposed rise in fuel coasts, and the efforts of the Catalan independence movement to make their territory independent of the rest of Spain. Although these are all newsworthy events, it’s not clear that they show that our current version of democracy is collapsing. What they prove is the presence of other developments: e.g., the weakening of historic nation-states, the limits of Chinese authoritarian rule, and/or popular impatience with public administration.

Mind you, I am not writing as a “democracy-booster” or as a fan of the present understanding of democratic government, which is certainly open to criticism.  I’ve my own idea about what a democracy should be; and it’s much closer to the nineteenth-century Swiss model or Jefferson’s society of yeoman farmers than it is to what the U.S., France, Canada, or Germany have become. But Buchanan leaves me unconvinced about the direction in which we’re headed politically when he observes:

If the beneficiaries of freedoms and democratic rights come to regard them as insufficient to produce the political, economic and social results they demand, what does that portend for democracy’s future?

Perhaps a reasonable answer to this question at least in Western countries is that we can expect “more of the same.” A majority of the French, for example, are not about to vote for the Rassemblement National because the yellow vests protested, any more than these voters threw their support to the populist Right when Third-World immigrants rioted in the Paris suburbs a few years ago. Canada is not about to go populist, and our own non-establishment president can’t bring his poll numbers above water.  Perhaps western populations are too complacent in the face of an establishment that they should oust. But that doesn’t mean (far from it) that the “system” is in danger.

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