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Ulysses S … Trump?
General George McClellan was beloved by his troops. McClellan returned the affection, earning a reputation as a well organized and meticulous commander. Giving credit where due, McClellan turned the Army of the Potomac into a cohesive unit and kept it together, even in the face of defeat. He is also credited with fortifying Washington, DC and securing the Union frontier, all through his skills in logistics. But after some early victories, defeats became all too common. It is a common theme of biographies of McClellan that, when it came to actual battle, the general was overly cautious, unable (or unwilling) to gamble, and failed to take advantage of Confederate mistakes that might have turned stalemates into victories, or victories into routs. According to some, McClellan consistently overestimated his opponents’ strength and, thus, refused to advance or attack for fear of losing. Lincoln came to distrust the general and, when sufficiently frustrated with McClellan’s hesitations and caution, fired him.
The Army of the Potomac then went through a series of generals (Burnside, Meade, Hooker), all of whom were blamed for similar failures of leadership, chiefly the inability or unwillingness to advance against the Confederacy. Then came Ulysses Grant. In the western states, Grant had fought hard against the Confederacy. Unlike the other generals, he was willing to risk casualties to achieve strategic advantages and would try unproven tactics if he thought some advantage could be gained. With the full aid of superior Union industry and a far larger Union population — advantages his predecessors shared but failed to exploit — he was relentless in his advances, racking up casualty numbers that earned him criticism as a butcher of his own troops. But he won battles.
The years since 2008 have reminded me greatly of our Civil War. The Obama administration has effectively declared a cultural war on middle America through an expanded regulatory state, lawsuits in retribution of political appointments, collaboration with far-left activist groups, the stirring-up of racial animosities, attacks on religious institutions, the opening of borders, assaults on the Second Amendment and the attempts to gut the First Amendment, and scores of petty and vindictive skirmishes against small businesses, churches, and private citizens. Our president has pitted half of America against the rest, claiming — like some restless dictator — that his advances and occupations are really defensive in nature, while wielding powers no prior president would have dared try.
We scored a few victories in return, regaining first the House and, later, the Senate as well. We won many lower court victories, but the battles that counted at the Supreme Court have frequently been lost. As for our generals in the cultural war, John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell deserve more credit than they are generally given. They returned the House and Senate to our side and Regular Order. They stopped the relentless legislative push to enshrine and secure the regulatory victories claimed by Obama. They built a defensive works that, while not impenetrable, have held true against many of the worst excesses of Obama’s agenda.
Yet — like McClellan before them — they’ve held party unity and discipline remarkably solid, but have secured few offensive victories and rarely exploited the enemies’ vulnerabilities. “We need more troops! We need more Congressmen and Senators!” they’ve pled, without ever breaking camp.
Mitt Romney, too, failed to make a solid case for himself or to sufficiently attack Obama; such, it seemed, would have involved getting his hands too dirty. He waved the flag and paraded the troops, but led a tepid campaign that seemed more hopeful of victory through Obama’s mistakes than his own aggression.
So now we come to the campaign season again, and we have a general (for those who would follow him) who could well cause enormous casualties for our side. “And yet he fights,” as Lincoln said of Grant. His principles are uncertain, and his tactics are unconventional, hearkening back to an America well-nigh forgotten. And yet he fights. He won the Republican primaries, out-maneuvering the party princelings and upstarts, turning them against each other. Those within his party who were most dismissive of his abilities when this began are now those most opposed to his victories and, unsurprisingly, most convinced of his inevitable failure. Many — like McClellan running for president after his termination — are now threatening to oppose the one who succeeded where they all failed.
The worst damage Obama has done to this republic has been to our national unity and, though it, support for the rule of law. No president since Lincoln has been so utterly divisive, and no president has ever so actively pursued division. No previous president has so openly sought to curtail the First Amendment without even attempting to disguise the attacks as “temporary” or “expedient.” Obama has launched and led a cultural war on America, the likes of which has only been seen writ in larger scale in major revolutions in France, Russia, or China. Hillary shows every indication that she will continue this war. Love him or hate him, only Trump is openly fighting them.
Yes, the man is morally distasteful. Yes, the man is corrupt. Yes, he may well butcher the down-ticket races in this election. And yet he fights, and for the sake of wrenching the presidency from the cultural Marxists, we should not fear a bloody battle. With the head of this cultural war firmly entrenched in Washington, with an uncertain and timid Congress unable or unwilling to attack the executive overreach, and with the courts having deferred the very law of the land to the whims of the cultural warlords, we must remove the Democrats from their power base. We must remove their hands from the levers of control. We must break their stranglehold on the media and the dissemination of information. After four or eight more years, the damage may be insurmountable, and the losses unrecoverable.
Trump may be the most reprehensible and amoral candidate the GOP has ever fielded, yet he is the general we have. And at least he is fighting.
Published in Politics
Where is the projection in what I wrote? Like the New Deal wasn’t fully accepted as part of the constitution until Eisenhower declined to work for its repeal, Obamaism will become bipartisan if the first post-BHO Republican lets it stand. Is there any evidence that Trump would reverse the policy of governance through executive orders, or of using the IRS to settle scores? Just today he threatened Amazon with an IRS audit when Bezos’s Washington Post started publishing negative stories on him. Once a Republican president behaves like Obama, it becomes the bipartisan New Normal.
You must mean the War To Perpetuate Chattel Slavery.
I’m not on the Grant bandwagon. He was a butcher and willing to kill any number of his men without attempting anything remotely approaching maneuver or sound tactics.
In contrast, the north’s best general was by birth a southerner, Gen George Thomas, the Rock of Chicamauga. He never lost a single battle and destroyed more than one southern army, and had the lowest casualties of any commander engaged in large battles. This wasn’t a fluke, it was a consequence of his brilliant tactics and planning.
McClellan’s hesitancy in war is at least partly explained by his politics. He was a democrat, and he probably didn’t want to prop up Lincoln. But it’s not incorrect to say that his strategy was wrong. Preserving lives was not wrong. A war of attrition could have worked and in fact did, in a more barbarous way under Grant.
Trump is not Grant. Grant was a callous butcher, but had manners. Trump is unparalleled, and not in a good way. There is no historical American figure like him and his trashy ways.
If we must search for a parallel, it is Scott Walker is like George Thomas. Largely forgotten, but with a string of brilliant victories. What a pity both men were ignored.
Lincoln, though, a highly moral man, was kind of on Grant’s side. He deplored the death and destruction, but readily admitted that numbers were in their favor and they should take advantage of that.
I’ll never agree with that statement.
One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read was Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 2007).
A lot has been written on this subject, but Shlaes chose FDR’s political-ambitions lens through which to describe events. It yielded a different interpretation of events than other historians have had.
In fact, the parallel timelines Shlaes constructs with her chapter titles is revealing in and of itself.
FDR was a very popular candidate running against Hoover in the fall of 1932. Unemployment was at 22.9 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was at 93. FDR, like Trump is now, ran an effective I-feel-your-pain campaign. FDR was elected that fall and then started his first term in 1933. In July 1933, unemployment stood stubbornly at 21.3 percent. In November 1934, unemployment was 23.2 percent, and the DJIA was at 93. And in July 1935, three years after his hope-galvanizing presidential campaign, unemployment was still high, at 21.3 percent, and the DJIA had risen only to 119.
The American people were waiting patiently but growing anxious. Losing something is harder than never having had it, and this prolonged Depression falling so soon after the prosperous 1920s was taking an emotional on America.
[continued to note 128]
And FDR was facing his first reelection campaign:
Historians break up the New Deal into the first New Deal passed between 1933 and 1934 and the second New Deal passed between 1935 and 1938. The impetus for the second New Deal was FDR’s reelection and the lackluster response in the economy to the first New Deal.
When FDR conceived of massive federal spending as a cure for the nationwide Depression, the government had accrued little if any debt, so his solution was doable.
[continued]
[continued from comment 128]
I am in agreement with our own David Sussman that this is an “It’s the economy, Stupid” election.
My concern with Trump mania is that Trump, like FDR, doesn’t have an answer. And he has fewer button to push than FDR had. In fact, because of the debt, the buttons he may have to push, such as allowing inflation to run its course, are going to make things worse before they get better. Furthermore, there’s no “next big thing” like new cars, new trains, new airplanes, or new computers out there on the visible economic horizon.
It seems as though people are projecting their hopes onto Donald Trump, and I fear that that confidence in him may be misplaced. That said, the phenomenon of faith that William James articulated may sustain Trump’s new followers and it may, in and of itself, bring improvement to our faith-based economy.
But it is just as likely that Trump will simply create new problems in desperation to meet the expectations of his followers and repudiate the concerns of his critics.
It is a good thing that Mitt Romney is remaining active in the Republican Party. Trump needs to be opposed intellectually on everything by one of his peers. Without opposition and criticism, he could conceivably make matters worse due to his inexperience and impulsive personality.
I don’t think I missed the point at all. Trump runs his mouth. You define that a fighting, but I don’t. Grant was a fighter. He got into the midst of it and plugged away without relenting. All Trump does is run his mouth continuously. He risks nothing. He is surrounded by bodyguard who he knows will keep him from ever paying a price for his rude stupidity. Cruz is a fighter. He has put everything on the line over and over, for all the good it did him.
I suppose that if you have never been in combat you wouldn’t understand the difference between talk and action,
He does have one big button to push, the US Economy. If a slew of regulations and the threat of more are lifted, if taxes for doing business get cut, if the DOJ is reined in on insane diversity rules, the NLRB is unpacked and we do a few commonsense things to stimulate manufacturing, the economy will leap from it’s shackles like we have seen before. Couple that with a defense buildup for domestic manufacturers and it will take off. It has been held down for ten years. So much cash is on the sidelines investment is readily available.
FDR would have killed for that button.
I’m curious about your argument here. I guess you could say that getting into the war at all was immoral, but he certainly read, pondered, and experienced great anguish in making decisions about the war. His second inaugural is deeply moving and shows a man who longed to heal and forgive the wounds of the war. Some of the things he said about race were what you’d expect from a man of his time, but I have always thought of him as a moral person, and a man of great intellectual and spiritual depth.
Lincoln was a callow, petty man, much like Clinton, who abused words to benefit himself and his cronies, the left overs from the Whig party. He was reviled for many reasons by his contemporaries.
I do not see a value in “preserving the union,” which was nothing more than his desire to control other people. There were many ways to end slavery, which was never his goal, and he chose to intentionally start the war by enflaming the hotheads in South Carolina, knowing that they would over react to his resupply of Fort Sumter. His blood thirsty actions convinced the remaining states to secede.
The moderate southern states were content to remain with the union, knowing that slavery would probably end, until they realized that Lincoln would expand his power unchecked.
A statesman would have found a way to keep the moderate southern states and leverage their support to bring the seceded states back into the union. Instead, killing 600,000 men would do, I suppose.
The McClellan analogy is excellent. Our leaders have tended to overestimate the strength of the enemy and were especially vulnerable to Obama’s shutdown threats. The Democrats aren’t 10 feet tall or unbeatable, but they are good at convincing us they are.
So does Trump = Grant? I’m still in a “show me” mood here.
That said, his phrase “Crooked Hillary” is a good start.
Let’s hope that Trump’s tax returns (which will be released one way or the other) don’t enable the Democrats to call him “Millionaire Donald.”
This meme of “he fights” is ridiculous beyond words. Trump has never fought for anything. I do not want anyone picking my generals who can’t tell the difference between fighting and bloviating. Thank God that Grant didn’t think that he could win the war by staying behind the lines and calling Jefferson Davis “Little Jeff.”
Hmmm, I don’t think this really captures the complexity of the situation nor the enormity of the division in the country. Here’s a very good examination of it. I maintain that Lincoln was a very moral man and deserves his place as one of the greatest presidents.
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-secession/
I’ve been mulling over a response to this (did not want to reply in haste, then repent at leisure). You are correct that if Trump does not dismantle Obamaism, then it will be baked in henceforth. And I just do not know if he would actually reverse the policy of governance by exec orders. But I also do not know that he would not. So much of what he says on the campaign seems (to me) to be nothing more than posturing. Say something outrageous to get attention, then pull back once the point has been made. With Bezos, I suspect the remarks were calculated to cheer the base (“Look, I stood up again to the press!”), and most of his other inanities seem designed the same way. It’s a campaign of soundbites that avoids any specifics that would pin him down.
Well, in politics there usually is little other than words with which to fight, though settling the election by duel would be interesting.
Jerry Miculek for President!
Skip, you got a nice nod from Peter on the Main Feed. Congrats!
He’d be better than the lot we’re all stuck with, though I’d prefer Julie Golob.
Really? Cool. Will check it out.
I would count it as fighting for something if one were to stake out a principled position and consistently make the case for it, rather than flip-flopping all over the place and just calling everyone (including your own side) a lot of nasty names. I would count it as fighting for something if you had a record of pushing your cause in the political process, instead of donating a lot of money to the other side. If you want to see what fighting for something looks like, take a look at Paul Ryan’s efforts to reform entitlements. Trump’s answer on entitlements has been, “the voters don’t want to hear about them going bankrupt, so let them go bankrupt.” What a fighter he is.
Point taken.
As I said in the OP too, I think Congress has actually gotten too little credit for what it has done.
And I still think settling some things by dueling would be better. Grass for breakfast.
Only in the general, because the Dems are afraid to touch the guns.
I fall somewhere between Pro Trump and Never Trump.
Skip this was one of the most thoughtful articles I’ve read. Thank you. #Sharing