Some Optimism About Trump's Election

Some Optimism About Trump’s Election

Believe it or not!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Many people in my circle and all their liberal friends are feeling wounded, afraid, and appalled by the election of Donald Trump because they feel he is such a bad person.  Some of these young people are rioting in the streets, burning flags and other property, and physically attacking some individuals who voted for Trump.

One of my liberal friends expressed her deep sadness that Secretary Clinton, this wonderful person, this superbly capable, credible, and brilliant woman of such great experience would now be denied the presidency for which she is so admirably well qualified.

Well, yes, I do see Secretary Clinton’s long experience, but I see it as long experience of political log-rolling, packaging, pay-for-play deal-making, and of the kind of reprehensible lying that is so vividly captured by her abandonment of our hapless Ambassador Stevens in Libya.  Ambassador Stevens died at the hands of attackers whom Hillary called peaceful civilians who were spontaneously aroused into an angry protest because of a movie made by a man in Los Angeles who said bad things about Muhammed.  The film maker was subsequently jailed for this offense!  What?  Brazen, bald-faced lies, all of it.  For weeks, Ambassador Stevens had pleaded for help, help which was readily available but was denied nonetheless.  The truth was that the mob consisted of organized militants intent on doing what they did, namely murdering those several brave Americans who were abandoned by the Secretary and our president.    

Then there is the whole horrible descent into chaos and the even greater threats to us created by the Arab Spring, with terrible outcomes in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and the ill-advised circumstances of our withdrawal from Iraq (not that we should have been there in the first place, but having gone there, surely some better consideration of how to withdraw should have been made?)

Then there was the terrible bribery and cluelessness of our deal with Iran, allegedly in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.  

For the last four decades, our State Department has called Iran the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, and here we are, far from preventing this country from acquiring the Bomb, we have now assured that Iran will be free to build a bomb in 10 years after signing the agreement.  And, oh, by the way, the mullahs are laughing at us and doing what they want to do anyway.

So, now what about Secretary Clinton’s wonderful character and political experience?  

I confess that I heaved a long and deep sigh of relief that Hillary Clinton was defeated. 

To me, it is clear that Donald Trump’s election marks the end of what I am persuaded is the worst presidency in the history of the American republic.  

I hasten to add that my sense of relief does not mean that I admire Donald Trump for his opinions on many issues. He is a man whose character and beliefs are not well aligned with many of my beliefs.  But I feel relieved nonetheless because, for one thing, I find Trump to be so much less reprehensible and threatening to the safety of the country than other side.  

At the very least, as the Green Party candidate Jill Stein observed, the election of Secretary Clinton would have provoked a shooting war with Russia because of her proposed no-fly zone in Syria.  Trump’s election may have saved us from the imminent start of WW-III.  

Almost all our pundits and pollsters were staggered by Trump’s win, but I must say that I was not surprised because, for one thing, there is a striking parallel here to how the opinions of nearly all the British and European pundits and pollsters were upset by the Brexit votes last June, which saw Britain’s leaving the European Union.  Ordinary Britons finally rose up and declared their anger against the rule of Britain by armies of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, who were wielding life and death power over their country.  Likewise, millions of Americans outside the ranks of pundits and liberally skewed pollsters (who were surveying unrepresentative samples of voters) finally rose up and resoundingly said no to the rule of arrogant, imperious, holier-than-thou politicians who always believe they know better than we how to run our lives.

My liberal friends are aghast at these assertions of mine.  Some of them wonder how on earth we can possibly remain friends now.

Thomas Sowell, in my opinion, one of the wisest and most thoughtful souls on the planet, wrote a book called A Conflict of Visions which shows how the foundational ideological visions of different people lead them to the conviction that only their own view is right.  This may be the explanation for how we come to be deaf and blind to others’ conflicting points of view, and is surely the root of that terrible personal echo chamber which is our own confirmation bias.  Sowell quotes Bertrand Russell, “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”  We can subdue our confirmation bias only by thoughtfully engaging with those who have a different vision of reality.  I have listened to my liberal friends and, in the end, I am still relieved by Trump’s election.  Now consider some of my other reasons for this sense of relief:

Trade, Regulation, and Taxes

Trump is no deeply principled advocate of the libertarian policies of live-and-let live, but he does offer a contrast to the Democrat party’s last eight years of imperious rule by armies of unelected bureaucrats wielding life-and-death power over us, unilateral rule by bossy politicians practicing top-down regulation, and he seems to understand much better than the progressives how lower taxes contribute to the growth of wealth.

Now, I don’t agree with Trump that protectionism and tariffs are the best means for growing the American economy, but some of his observations made more sense than those of the Democrats.  

Certainly scaling back the choking vines of ever-growing regulation can help dramatically.  

In my sector of the economy, the airline business, the deregulation of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978 finally gave airlines the ability to choose routes and set their own fares, with the result that today airline traffic is more than twice as big as before the dismantling of the CAB. Before deregulation of routes and fares, only rich, fat cat executives and the occasional vacationer could afford to fly.  Now flying is everybody’s normal mode of long distance travel.  

Unfortunately, the simultaneous growth of airline regulation in other areas of the business has had a senselessly repressive effect too.  

For example, the FAA has now taken over the ability of long-haul pilots to judge when and how to manage their own sleep!  Our judgment is deemed good enough to steer hundreds of passengers safely from New York to Hong Kong over the north pole, but we are not allowed to decide for ourselves when to sleep!  The FAA has written yet another long chapter of regulations that micro-manages every aspect of when and how we are commanded to sleep.  Insanity.  

The 2012 edition of the Federal register was over 78,000 pages long and shows the government’s growing eagerness to dictate damn near every aspect of the lives of people and business.  

Trump’s election promises to cut back some of these oppressive regulations.  I believe this is a good thing because these regulations mostly do less for improving safety than for empowering big companies to enlist the power of the law to put their smaller competitors out of business without having to win over their customers through better services and products. 

Lowering taxes, especially corporate taxes will attract foreign companies and repatriate great numbers of American companies who have been driven out of the country in order to protect themselves from the deeply hostile policies of this gang of progressives that is now being removed from office.  American corporate taxes are at 35% and are therefore higher than any other major industrialized country.  Moreover, these taxes are just another factor of production which are all paid for by, guess who?—you, the customer.  Corporate taxes are just another income tax on us, but they are popular because “soak the rich” policies appeal to the economic ignorance of many envy-ridden people who believe that economic equality is not only possible but morally ideal (Footnote: the only possible equality is what can be, but is not often, granted under the law… see Don Watkins and Yaron Brook’s Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.)  

It is too much to be hoped that Islamo-Marxists like the outgoing president will soon be shunted into the dustbin of history because they are everywhere in the ranks of academe and among lefty politicians, but Donald Trump’s election may go some way towards discouraging them.  Until now, they have largely been able to boss us around and bully us with impunity.  Now they may think twice before uttering their liberal views, confident that nobody could possibly challenge them on matters of logic and history.  

While I know that I can’t change their views, when I am in a room of progressives who are waxing happy over their mutual politics, I sometimes tell them that I don’t agree.  There is rarely room to mount a big enough argument to persuade.  The totalitarian-minded heirs of Plato, Kant, and Marx are everywhere!  But even if these folks were to be open to persuasion, sometimes the mere statement of my disagreement is enough to send a little chill over their confidence and righteousness.

Environmental policy  

The NY Times today reports that Donald Trump has called human-caused climate change “a hoax” and vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.”  

I say, hallelujah!  This may be the most important thing about Trump’s election, even though the issue of environmentalism comes in dead last among the surveys of most citizens, but it is indeed a new religion that appeals to the hearts of so many.  It is important too because the matter represents a profound threat to liberty.  

The likes of NASA and NOAA’s James Hansen and Michael Mann, 350.org’s founder, Bill McKibben, and the vaunted “97%” of scientists who are said to be behind the affirmation of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are all largely in agreement with Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, on this matter.  About a decade ago, Chirac declared at the last Kyoto Protocol conference (at the Hague) that the theory of AGW represents the very best opportunity for these like-minded politicians and scientists to impose global governance for the purpose of creating social justice in the world, meaning, of course, the socialist hijacking of the industrial world.  This is a profound threat to freedom and the possibility of the personal unfolding of the gifts of the world’s peoples, especially those of the bottom billion, whose prospects are so threatened by the righteous environmentalist leaders who want to deprive them of the chance to use the cheap energy that is available to us today, namely fossil fuels (see Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.)  

For the first time in two decades, I see a chance for a loosening of this death grip of the environmentalist ideologues and social justice warriors who want to take over the world.  

My hope is that intellectual freedom will be emboldened here by having the president of the US declare war on these data-altering frauds and liars at NASA, NOAA, the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (who were caught red-handed trying to fudge the data in order to hide two decades of declining temperatures.)  Scientists who see the careers of others ruined by daring to break ranks with these politically powerful ideologues may feel encouraged to raise their dissenting voices from now on.  

For 20 years, the academic and political elites have largely dispensed funds, grants, and tenure only to those who keep in line with the ruling narrative, that global warming is unprecedented, caused by humans, and portends a climate catastrophe unless governments take over industrial civilization.  Is it any wonder that this staggering flood of money has bought studies that attempt to prove this narrative? 

Immigration and National sovereignty

I do not agree with Trump that building a wall across our southern border will answer the problems engendered by tens of millions of illegal aliens (Footnote: my younger daughter tells me that she finds the term “illegal alien” offensive.  Her political clique calls them “undocumented immigrants,” which is fine with me, but I can read nothing offensive into this simple statement of legal fact.  I believe that, ceteris paribus, immigration in a free economy leads to good things!  I believe that liberty is an inherent aspect of human nature [not an arbitrary convention of governments granting goodies to citizens] and I can see nothing wrong saying that this liberty should surely include the liberty to decide where in the world one wants to live.  

(Footnote: Is it not true there is nevertheless a question of a nation’s sovereignty?  What is sovereignty and what are its limits?  One would have to give a better answer than I am hearing in political discourse today on the matter of the legitimate relation between the individual citizen and the state.  These are matters for another time and place…)

In short, I have no problem with immigrants who are peaceful, self-responsible, respectful of the rights of others, and productive.  I don’t believe that Trump can possibly attempt to send armies of police into homes in order to deport undocumented immigrants.  

Neither is he now proposing sending in armies of police to deport tens of millions—what he is proposing is the deportation of those criminals among this population who are already in jail or who are hiding in sanctuary cities.  I have no problem with this.  I don’t even see this as an actually racist dismissal of Hispanics because it is not the race of those among them who are violent criminals, it is those among them who are violent criminals.

Neither do I have a problem with the policy of assuring that we do not allow hundreds of thousands of improperly vetted refugees from war-torn countries with large populations of Muslim terrorists who want us dead.  I say we repudiate the suicidal policies of Germany, Sweden, France, Holland, and others which, among many sad developments, have turned Sweden in to the rape capital of Europe, where before Sweden experienced almost no rape.  Instead, we should lend a helping hand to these refugees so that they may remain in their homelands or in neighboring countries which share their cultures and values.  They should not be uprooted and brought here willy nilly. 

Health Care.

It is clear now to anybody who looks at it soberly, that Obamacare was never intended to work well, it was intended to provide an excuse for the progressives to look at its wreckage and say that capitalism has once again failed, so now we have to turn the health care system over to a single payer system, like that in Germany and other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Respect for Women… the Glass Ceiling… and Gays?

Is Donald Trump a misogynist?  It would seem so, although his views on women are outright benevolent compared to the Islamic hundreds of thousands of refugees Secretary Clinton wanted to bring to our shores.  Ditto for the LGBTQ community.  The glass ceiling, said to be holding down women in business?  I would like to see a comparison between the salaries and status of the many women holding high positions in Trump organizations compared to those in the Clinton circles.    

Conclusion

While I do not agree with all of Trump’s beliefs, or believe that he is always  a man of exemplary personal character, I am nevertheless relieved by his election, which is a finger in the eye to the arrogant, petulant, bossy elites who have made such an even bigger mess of things during the eight years of Obama, and which promised to become even vastly worse, had Secretary Clinton taken over the reins of power from Obama.

Certainly not my choice for president, but my guy did not win.  And Trump’s election promises to shake things up and stimulate some deeper thought on how we can make things better for all of us… at least for those of us who are not advocating the destruction of America and all the other quasi-liberal (classical liberal, the old definition, namely free) countries around the world.

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