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In the first of this week’s COMMENTARY podcasts, the COMMENTARY crew go through the series of bombshell revelations this weekend about the heretofore undisclosed 2016 meeting between Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager with a Russian lawyer that evidently began with promises of Kremlin information about Hillary Clinton. Noah Rothman thinks this could be curtains for Trump. John says wanting to collude and colluding are two different things. Abe Greenwald says we’re both right. Then we take up Trump’s Poland speech and its defense of Western Civ and the moral idiocy of those attacking him for doing so. Give a listen.
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Although Japan and India have been strongly Westernized by the explicit efforts of the British and Americans, I’m not sure I’d fully include them in “the West.” Their ties to Jerusalem and Athens are not as deep as France or England’s—AFAIK, their philosophers don’t expound after the manner of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Burke, or Jefferson, nor do their fundamental assumptions about the individual align with ours.
A country doesn’t have to be a paid-up member of “the West” to be an ally; they just need to be non-tyrannical.
I’m not a conservative so I try to avoid commenting though I listen almost religiously to this podcast but some things demand a response, even if it amounts to banging one’s head against a tree–
–here, for example, it is *preposterous* to claim as John does that Law & Justice won the 2015 election because of Obama’s reneging on missile defense. I think Radek Sikorski, among others, would be quick to debunk that claim. Unless the idea is that: people like Radek Sikorski found that decision to be acceptable and the election of PiS was a rejection of those elites.
A broader, unrelated question: how can the West’s legacy not be considered deeply ambivalent, given that Marx, Rousseau, Robespierre, de Maistre, Wagner (as political thinker), and, as John correctly points out, “the first modern dictator,” Napoleon, all figure importantly in that legacy?
Obviously, you can’t ignore the darker eras and tendencies that also arose in the West. Are these thinkers/actors aberrations or are they as endemic as the more nobler philosophers/actors?
Human society unfailingly produces people who crave absolute power, and history occasionally provides them with the opportunity to exercise it. A prime-divider society wherein a few hold all the power and wealth while the rest eat dirt is the default of human society.
What the West did differently was to explicitly reject the rule of man and replace it with the rule of law (whether legislated or written on stone tablets), which elevates individuals qua individuals instead of might making right.
To a large degree, you can identify all dictators and tyrants as throwbacks to the absolute monarchy traditions that would include everything from Pharaohs (god-kings) to more ordinary despots. Marx himself may not have ever wielded absolute power, but his formulations provided pretext enough for clever psychopaths such as Mao to behave as ruthlessly as Genghis Khan, whereas no tyrant murdered tens of millions of people with the blessing of the U.S. Constitution nor ever could.