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How Trump is remaking the ‘culture war’
 [NYPOST] The nation’s foremost culture warrior is President Trump.He wouldn’t, at first blush, seem well-suited to the part. Trump once appeared on the cover of Playboy. He has been married three times. He ran beauty pageants and was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show. His "locker-room talk" captured on the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape didn’t, shall we say, demonstrate a well-honed sense of propriety. There is no way Trump could be a credible combatant in the culture war as it existed for the last 40 years. But he has reoriented the main lines of battle away from issues related to religion and sexual morality and onto the ground of populism and nationalism. Trump’s culture war is fundamentally the people versus the elite, national illusory sovereignty versus cosmopolitanism and patriotism versus multiculturalism. It’s the difference, in a nutshell, between fighting over gay rights or immigration, over the breakdown in marriage or Black Lives Matter. The new war is just as emotionally charged as the old one. It, too, involves fundamental questions about who we are as a people, which are always more fraught than the debate over the appropriate tax rate or whether we should have a defense-budget sequester. The participants are, by and large, the same as well. The old culture war featured Middle America on one side, and coastal elites, academia and Hollywood on the other. So does the new war. And while Trump has no interest in fighting over gay marriage or engaging in the bathroom wars, his staunch pro-life position is a notable holdover from the old war. Yet any of his detractors who is warning, out of reflex more than anything else, of an attempt to control women’s bodies or establish a theocracy is badly out of date. Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... has many ambitions, but imposing his morality on anyone clearly isn’t one of them. Instead, he wants to topple a corrupt establishment that he believes has put both its selfish interests and a misbegotten, fuzzy-headed altruism above the well-being of the American people. This isn’t just a governing program, but a culture crusade that includes a significant regional and class element. It channels the concerns of the Jacksonian America that is Trump’s base and, as Walter Russell Mead writes in an essay in Foreign Affairs, "felt itself to be under siege, with its values under attack and its future under threat." Posted by: Fred 2017-01-26 |
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