With November 6 coming up fast, it’s important to remember why Americans elected Donald Trump in the first place. Putting Democrats back in power would serve to reverse all the progress that has been made. I wrote this on July 17, 2018 to remind Americans what they voted for.
Daniel McCarthy explains at The Spectator that Donald Trump is not worried about missing liberals’ goals on globalization or multiculturalism, because that is exactly what he was elected to fight against.
According to McCarthy, Trump likes the idea of cutting a deal with Russia, because Russia isn’t at the heart of any of the big problems Trump sees in America today, namely trade imbalances, and being taken advantage of by allies who free-ride on America’s military might. McCarthy writes:
In the 19th century, Russia was the last great autocracy, the final archaic survival of the ancien regime, or something even older, that impeded the fulfilment of the French Revolution’s ideals upon the Eurasian continent. The Bolshevik Revolution was supposed to be the triumph of Enlightenment in darkest Russia, but once the fruits of Lenin and Stalin became more than most liberals could defend, a new narrative was necessary. The U.S. fought the Cold War for solid Realpolitik reasons—a single power dominating the Eurasian continent was still unacceptable for U.S. security— but the realist Cold War was accompanied by an ideological liberal crusade. And when at last the Soviet Union collapsed, the Realpolitik of U.S. policy vanished, and the liberal crusading remained.
Donald Trump is not a liberal crusader. He does not think in terms of the advance of liberalism. On the contrary, he has consistently campaigned against economic globalisation and the cultural (or multicultural) left—those are his enemies, and to the extent he is fighting ideological battles, they are not for liberal internationalism, but against cultural and economic anti-nationalism. Putin and Russia are not responsible for any of the rip-offs (as he sees them) that incense Trump, terrible trade deals and selfish Nato allies. So Trump thinks he can cut a deal with Putin, and he’s eager to do so in order to turn his attention to the things that really matter to him politically, the things that got him elected. If the American electorate wanted an anti-Russian Republican, after all, they would have elected Mitt Romney. Instead they wanted an anti-liberal one, and they—not Putin—elected Donald Trump.
Read more here.
