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Viral Prerequisites and Nationalist Lessons in Time of Plague
[American Greatness] - President Donald Trump has courted endless controversies for promoting nonconventional policies and entertaining contrarian views. From the outset, he oddly seemed to have believed that having navigated the jungles of the Manhattan real estate market‐crooked politicians, mercurial unions, neighborhood social activists, the green lobby, leery banks, cutthroat rivals‐better prepared him for the job than did a 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate.

Certainly, candidate and then President Trump’s strident distrust of China was annoying to the American establishment. The Left saw China in rosy terms as the "Other" that just did things like airports, high-speed rail, and solar panels better than did America’s establishment of geriatric white male has-beens. Many on the Right saw China as a cash cow that was going to take over anyway, so why not milk it before the deluge?

...Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

Yet since the outbreak of the virus, Trump’s idiosyncratic sixth sense has come in handy. The country is united in its furor at China‐even if it is giving no credit to Trump for being years ahead of where it is now.

No longer is there a national debate over the evils of "protectionism" and "nationalism," but rather over how quickly and effectively can the U.S. return the manufacturing of key medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, strategically vital technologies, and rare earth metals to American shores.

...When Trump issued the key January 31 travel ban that suddenly stopped the arrival of 15,000 visitors per day to the United States from China, the Left was as outraged as it had been with the ban against Libya, North Korea, and Iran. Candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders saw an opening against their presumed 2020 opponent, and quickly sought to demagogue voters with "here-we-go-again" rhetoric that racist Trump is banning free travel of a marginalized people in his habitual "xenophobic" and "racist" fits.

That Trump shortly extended the ban to all of Europe‐and eventually was followed by almost all nations of the world‐did not mean he was not simultaneously caricatured as a nationalist rube. How odd that no prior critical major newspaper, network, or politician has now called for the end of such unnecessary and hurtful bans and the resumption of travel from China without further interruption‐especially now that we are told by CNN and MSNBC that the Communist Party apparat has all but ended the virus or at least is far more competent than the Trump Administration.

...When 150 million Americans were barricaded behind their doors, corporate lawyers did not deliver their food. Dropping Harvey Weinstein’s name to the guy shelving hand cleanser didn’t mean anything.

The chatterbox Rachel Maddows of the world were not growing fruits, beef, vegetables, and grains for those behind locked doors. Those pro-Chinese NBA stars were not needed to ensure toilet paper on the shelves, any more than loudmouths like Cher and Madonna were up all night in the emergency room or checking groceries at Costco. It was not the beautiful people, not the best and brightest, not the globetrotters and cognoscenti who were pulling the country through, but their antitheses, the rubes and assemblers who never learned to code.

We are learning, belatedly, that Trump was also rightly wary of transnationalism. The World Health Organization in the early weeks of the outbreak was mostly a paid-for Chinese megaphone. Its functionary director propagandized, on Chinese prompts, that the virus was likely not transmissible from human to human and that travel bans were ineffective and thus reflective of Trump’s repugnant views.

Americans were startled at how quickly the brotherhood of the European Union collapsed. Within days, individual countries were ignoring the Schengen open-borders rules and reinvented themselves as nations. None were eager to welcome in their neighbors. Few were willing to share medical supplies and key pharmaceuticals across ancient boundaries. And fewer still wished to allow even more illegal aliens from the Middle East and North Africa to continue to pour into their nations.

...In short, Trump’s prior initiatives eased the implementation of many of his most effective orders during this crisis. And his general suspicions about China and globalization, his distrust of bureaucratic regulations, his support for domestic production of key industries, his promotion of the interests of farmers and frackers, and his vehement opposition to increased gun control, all reflect a world view of national and self-independence, in which Americans can only count on themselves and their fellow citizens.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-03-31
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=567443