Donald Trump, Quintessentially American - Exactly How Alexis de Tocqueville Would Have Seen Him

The hysteria and histrionics of the American political Left persist even after almost decade of Donald Trump; but they are still angered, upset, and frustrated at what they see as his outspoken commitment to turning back years of progressive liberalism.  The fact that they have found no way to stop him or his political juggernaut makes opposition even more frustrating. 

Worse, the more they encourage diversity and multiculturalism, continue outspoken commitment to far left economic, financial, and foreign policies; and the more they persist in questioning traditional social and moral values as inessential and irrelevant, the more moderate conservatives join the Trump fold. 

The Left feels they are being challenged by an impostor, a carny barker, a bourgeois poseur, a clown, and a deceptive, dishonest, and arrogantly stupid man.

Yet, despite the histrionics and the drumbeat of calls for impeachment, Trump remains an important political figure, and is as dismissive of his critics as he ever was despite lawfare, hysterical claims of despotism and insurrection, and simply ad hominem hatred.  

Not only that, he knows instinctively how to enrage the Left.  Every outrageous act is deliberate, conscious, and publicly staged  to let everyone know that there is no such thing as ‘acting presidential’, that times have changed, and that an unapologetically middle-brow, ambitious fundamentally American president is again poised to be in the White House, and is not about to leave.



If Donald Trump is Middle America’s cultural hero, he is also the champion of longstanding political ideals.  Not only does he have what most Americans want – wealth, beauty, property, and popularity; the defiant amoral individualism to get them; and the confident swagger to show them off – but he reflects basic, fundamental American political principles.

In an article in City Journal, Jean Yarbrough, Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin and lecturer in political philosophy has added this dimension to Trump’s Americanism.  Forget his bombast and outrageous personality, she writes.  Pay attention to the same principles that have underlain American exceptionalism since the founding of the Republic. 

In her article Trump – and Tocqueville? she suggests that if the French aristocrat were to return to America today, he would not be surprised.  Things have really not changed since the days of Andrew Jackson.

Visiting the United States in 1831, when Andrew Jackson was president, Alexis de Tocqueville was appalled by the “vulgarity and mediocrity” of American politics. After meeting Jackson, Tocqueville concluded that the low tone of American society started at the top. In Tocqueville’s estimation, Jackson was “a man of violent character and middling capacity.”

Worse, he seemed to have no talent for politics: he rode “roughshod over his personal enemies” in a way no president had done and treated members of Congress with disdain. “Nothing in all the course of his career had ever proved that he had the requisite qualities to govern a free people,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “so the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union had always been opposed to him.”

Considering his view of Jackson, imagine what Tocqueville’s first impressions of President Trump might be. Real-estate mogul, host of The Apprentice, owner of beauty pageants, and backer of WrestleMania... Trump would seem to confirm Tocqueville’s [conclusions about America's middlebrow culture], public life and leadership.

And yet, as Yarbrough continues,  “Trump campaigns on issues that have a Tocquevillian resonance…Tocqueville highlighted certain dangers to democratic liberty and greatness that Trump—who, it is safe to assume, has not read Democracy in America—instinctively seized on to win the presidency.”

Yarbrough begins with immigration, a contentious issue that has divided opinion on may levels, but one which has as an underlying principle a sense of national integrity, nationhood, and republican unity no different than that espoused in America more than 150 years ago.

Trump has spoken to the long-term interest of American citizens in remaining a unified and self-contained people—what Tocqueville called their “self-interest, well understood.” Today, the American project of assimilation has come under sustained attack.

Multiculturalists and globalists in government reject the idea that immigrants should adopt American culture and argue that foreigners should have the right to live in America in disregard of its immigration laws.

Trump seized on this shift to call for secure borders and a renewal of America’s national identity. At the same time, he remained open, in principle, to immigrants from all nations.

The issue of immigration is a complex one and has as much to do with economics as it does cultural integrity.  Americans are more concerned about jobs, public expenditures, and taxes than they are about ethnicity; but there is no way in a heated political environment that the two cannot help but be conflated.

Yet there is something very positive about an appeal to nationhood.  There in fact is something about America that is more than just two borders and three seas, more even than the collective believe in opportunity and fulfilled expectations; and more even than freedom.  It is that America is that of cultural inclusivity.  Americans have always welcomed immigrants but on the condition that they espouse American values, contribute more than they take away, and quietly and responsibly assume the role of citizen.



The truth of course is that most immigrants do indeed follow this model of assimilation, have come here to work and improve their lives, and respect the established laws and traditions of their new home.  Yet there is something very emotional about patriotism and nationalism.  Logic does not always apply and in fact seldom does.  Donald Trump as well as Americans in 1831 are no different in their sentiments.

Tocqueville found early 19th century Americans very patriotic, and ‘love of country’ was fundamental and unchallenged.

Tocqueville had been struck by Americans’ love of country; he would not be surprised by the appeal of Trump’s full-throated patriotism, especially when set against his critics’ championing of multiculturalism and globalization.

For Tocqueville, national identity was bound up with religion, which, in the United States and in Europe, meant Christianity. Long before the 2016 presidential election, though, Democrats had clearly come to regard Christianity as an obstacle to their goals…Ironically, it was Trump—the twice-divorced, lapsed Presbyterian—who took up the cause of beleaguered Christians, reaching out to evangelical and Catholic leaders alike, promising to stand up for them in their battle to preserve religious liberty. Tocqueville would have approved.

Mentions of God were removed from the Democratic Party platform in 2016.  Democrats have consistently championed secular rights over religious ones, and have ignored the moral concerns of small business owners and church-sponsored institutions; and Trump has argued for the rolling back of these initiatives.



Tocqueville also understood the essential individualism of early America and its suspicion of government and public overreach.

Democracy in America draws a distinction between “great parties” and “small parties.” Tocqueville describes great parties as “more attached to principles than to their consequences; to generalities, and not to particular cases; to ideas, not to men…”
Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp”—by which he meant scaling back the administrative state that had risen up alongside America’s three constitutional branches of government—can be understood as an application of great-party principles. It represented an attempt to limit the power of government’s unaccountable, irremovable, and self-interested bureaucrats.

It is no surprise, then, that in his first term Trump began to lessen government regulation of private enterprise and public and private life.  He still intends to stop the politicization of education and the intrusion of politically correct programs and agendas which dilute the process of learning, give false and unethical hopes to children, and corrode the infrastructure of American progress.

His actions to question international accords and treaties, his appointment of a Constitutional originalist to the Supreme Court, and his unilateral stances in foreign affairs are all consistent with this fundamental American exceptionalism.

Tocqueville while in America was prompted to ask the question: “Can democracies achieve greatness or must they be content with a comfortable mediocrity…?’

Tocqueville worried about whether democracies were capable of pursuing great foreign policy goals, warning that democratic citizens lacked the patience and determination to pursue long-range policies. Wars would have to be short, policy objectives clear, victory decisive.

Yarbrough concludes with this passage:

Whether Trump can deliver on these Tocquevillian themes remains to be seen. It will take patience and skill in the art of leading a free people—an art that Tocqueville believed Andrew Jackson did not possess. The French aristocrat [might] have taken a similarly dim view of Trump—but he might also recognize, in the president’s pledges and commitments, echoes of some of his, Tocqueville's, own deeply held principles.

The Dumbing Down Of America - The Fall Of Yale And The Decline Of Intellectual Honor

Yale was once a proud institution of higher learning, and as importantly a standard of aristocratic values - an unshakeable faith, noblesse oblige, manners, a certain simple but elegant sophistication, and an living archive of America's history. 

 

Yale was a place of certainty - from there young men from the best families would go on to finance and industry armed with the same Christian rectitude and belief in the fundamental rights and obligations of the Constitution with which they matriculated - more so, for along with Blake, Kant, and Planck, Yale provided a moral education. 

There has always been a universal code of moral and ethical behavior at the foundation of every successful civilization.  Honor, justice, courage, respect, discipline, and compassion, principles taught by Cato the Elder as part of his education of young Roman leaders are no different from those of Ancient Greece, Persia, or Great Britain. 

Cato taught the future leaders of the Empire in a series of courses on governance.  Not only were there lessons on management, organization, economics, and military strategy, but on morals and ethics - duty, honor, responsibility, courage, and compassion.  Leadership was a multivariate, complex concept, and those who did not honor its basic principles would fall. 

Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Cato were Roman moralists who provided the intellectual and philosophical foundations for the education of the future leaders of the Empire.  All of them stressed respect, honor, discipline, empathy, intellect, and reason.  The young Roman aristocrats may have been born with wealth, breeding, and culture; but without the foundation of a moral education, they would weaken, and both they and the empire would suffer.

The self-confidence needed to be a Roman leader, these philosophers knew, came from a certainty about moral principles.  Right action would be rewarded and respected. Self-confidence, one learns from the Romans, comes from this singularity of purpose and absolute commitment to moral achievement.  The diptychs of Cato are illustrative:

Practice your art. As diligence fosters talent, so work aids experience

If you can, even remember to help people you don't know.
More precious than a kingdom it is to gain friends by kindness

Do not disdain the powers of a small body;
He may be strong in counsel (though) nature denies him strength.

If you live rightly, do not worry about the words of bad people,
It is not our call as to what each person says.

America's Founding Fathers incorporated such values into the Bill of Rights.  Jefferson was clear about his sense of moral integrity.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were values realized only within the context of community.  Individualism itself was derived from the moral and religious principles of the Enlightenment.  It was man's duty to explore, nurture, and preserve his immortal soul and through reason and rationality to better know God - and individualism meant only that, never an amoral quest for personal satisfaction. 

 

Yale continued in this tradition until the 1960s, a decade of revolutionary change in values, principles, and morality.  The foundational principles of the new nation considered by Jefferson to be absolute, innate, and irrefutable - belief in God and country and the individualistic spirit which encouraged both - were unchallenged in 1787 when the Constitution was signed and ratified, and this core ethos remained central and respected for almost two centuries. 

Whether demographics, historic post-war prosperity, or Dr. Spock, the Sixties was a time of radical shifts in attitude.  Gone were assumptions of a universal ethos. 'Love the one you're with', an all-encompassing social and moral laissez-faire replaced the more demanding ethos of the Enlightenment and Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton.  

Out of such an individualistic ethos came, ironically, the lionization of selected groups.  Black people, the poor, gays, and women could not enjoy the privilege of free social movement and expression, and the social fabric would never be completely knit without their full integration.  Inclusion, however, replaced ethos. It no longer mattered whether or not you subscribed to God, patriotism, or the higher values of the Enlightenment and Cato the Elder. As long as you were free to 'do your own thing', nothing else mattered. 

As part of this new social dynamic all institutions were suspect because they were spiritually incarcerating, intellectually vacant gulags. Only individuals mattered and they would regroup, reconfigure and reconstitute a new, more inclusive, loving society. 

The erosion of these Roman, Enlightenment, and Founding Father principles accelerated in the decades to follow, and has hit its nadir today.  American society is a moral free-for-all, but a gulag of political enforcement and denial of individual expression. The identity politics of race, gender, and ethnicity is the result of such centrifugal thinking.  There is no center to America today, only a collection of races, ethnicities, and genders.  They only live here, pay nominal dues to belong, and are encouraged not to think about polity or the commonwealth, but only their own struggles for recognition. 

And so it is that Yale, once one of the country's premier institutions, embodying the principles of intellectual pursuit, responsible leadership, a respect for history, and a sanguine but still realistic approach to progress and prosperity, is unrecognizable.  Affirmative action and the fretful concerns about the dispossessed turned the tables on excellence. Intellectual diversity - the unique talents of artists, musicians, physicists, and mathematicians - was replaced by an errant sense of social justice.  

Affirmative action -  letting a person of color into Yale, regardless of his abilities - was tantamount to historical ignorance and worse, Utopian idealism.  'Proximity means change' replaced 'Lux et Veritas' as Yale's adage. If a student body is diverse by color, sex, and ethnic origin, then respect, tolerance, and admiration will automatically occur. 

Wrong and wrong again.  The Yale campus has become a microcosm of society at large - identity groups vying for recognition, support, and primacy, running on fumes, insubstantial, and marked only by sexual preference, color, or national origin. 

Such a culture of identity can only mean protest - whining, whingeing, and yelling for 'our rights' - and that contentiousness can only mean a further dismissal of rational thought, once the sine qua non of a liberal education. 

'This is not your grandfather's Yale', says the new wave of publicity for the university, a debunking of the George H.W. Bush days of Fence Club, the Vineyard, Nantucket, and Wall Street; but what Yale has lost in this decommissioning of its historic legacy, is relevance. It is now no better than any other college or university, any cow town vocational school, any two-year holding pen, any 'we take all comers' money mills.  

 

Yale and the other Ivy League colleges will never recover from this sorry descent into chaotic populism. They are ashamed of their history rather than be proud of it and revere and respect its traditions, and we are ashamed of them. 

Sex, Class Divide, And Sorrentino Tail At Yale - Gown Meets Town And Gets What's Coming To It

Yale has changed since the days of John Davenport, Puritan missionary unhappy with the increasingly lax morals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who set off to found a new colony where the precepts, principles, and discipline of John Calvin would be better respected.  New Haven was the perfect place - good harbor, reasonable winters, and complaisant Indians.  The colony thrived and from its founding in 1638 New Haven became a premier city of New England.  In time, and after Elihu Yale founded a religious university there in 1701, residential colleges were named for important historical forbears, and Davenport College bears the name of the man who had first come to New Haven. 

For two hundred and fifty years, New Haven was English, and after the Revolution, American - a place of patrician landowners and financiers and Northumberland and Kent yeomen to work the land and man the thriving port.  Only in the late 1800s did New Haven begin its radical change from a place of Anglo-Saxon manners and morals to one little different from Sorrento, Amalfi, and Naples.  The great migration from the Mezzogiorno to New Haven produced a Little Italy only slightly smaller than that of New York or Boston.  Wooster Square, across the Farmington canal and removed from the New Haven green and Yale, became the center for Italian life and culture. Now New Haven had two cities in one. 

Until the late 60s Yale was still a white Anglo-Saxon place of privilege - the place for the sons of New England's well-to-do.  In those days there was no such thing as 'diversity' and only a smattering of Jews and Italians were admitted each year. 

Yale at the time was an all-male school, so students travelled to the Seven Sisters - girls schools of similar Ivy League reputation and cachet - for dates, sex, and suitable mates. Yet, the lure of all those dark-haired, olive-skinned Italian beauties just beyond the canal was irresistible.  

Paul Farnsworth of the Boston and Newport Farnsworths said he 'had a hankering for guinea poontang', a crude but not uncommon way young men of his breeding and background referred to the Palumbo, Garaffa, and Petrucci girls less than a mile away. 

The New Haven Green, historic burial place for the Davenports, the Potters, and the Longworths and gathering place for Revolutionary partisans whose militias were instrumental in the war against the British, was the modern day crossroads for the two communities.  Italians from Wooster Square came across the canal to shop at Malley's and see the latest Hollywood epics at the Palace and Strand, and crossed the Green in sight of Harkness Tower, the Old Campus, and Silliman College. 

Now, while Paul Farnsworth and his Nantucket-Vineyard crowd wanted some wiry, tangled guinea snatch as a chaser for their usual blonde, silken delights, Maria Paolillo and her girlfriends wanted husbands.  Tired of wife-beaters, garlic, and goomba parading, they wanted the real America, the white, flaxen-haired, well-tailored and well-mannered men of Yale. 

'Watch your Ps and Qs', Maria's mother warned her when she got an inkling of her daughter's intentions. 'Those boys are no good' and went on to relate stories of girls of her generation who got hooked by the idea and snookered by one Yalie after another.  'You know what they're after', she said; and of course she was right.  No self-respecting Boston Brahmin or Fifth Avenue gentleman would want anything to do with them.  She knew because she cleaned up after them in their dining rooms, their residences, and their libraries. 

Maria, however, refused to be cloistered and corralled by a phalanx of fat duennas in black dresses.  Those were Old Country ways and this was America! and so she made her leisurely forays across the canal to park benches on the Green, hoping for a proper Mr. Right to notice her.  At the same time, despite her rebelliousness and hardened attitude towards Southern Italian prudery, she couldn't help but be influenced by it.  As she sat demurely on the bench, legs properly together, blouse buttoned to the top, and cardigan neatly arranged, she knew that there was more to Yale, the Green, and prospective wealthy husbands than met the eye. 

Paul and his classmates, so imbued with the idea of privilege and historical worthiness, assumed that any woman would fall for them immediately, without hesitation, and without restraint.  They had heard stories about Italian fathers with shotguns and elephantine mothers armed with bottles of acid to scar the faces of wayward daughters, but dismissed them as impossibilities - not in this day and age, and certainly not within a stone's throw from the most important university in the world. 

Yale men, tired of their weekends at Vassar, Smith, and Holyoke, and wanting some real pussy – not just fluffy blonde bush from the North Shore - made their forays into the town, the Green.  Not surprisingly there were girls from Wooster Square there who were quite willing to go out with them, perhaps not to give it up on the first date, taught as they were by their grandmothers to give just enough to keep a man’s interest but to keep their corsets laced. These goomba nonnas of course had no idea what was what north of the canal, and their granddaughters dreamed only of sailing in a white, Anglo Saxon moonlight. 

Maria Paolillo met Paul Farnsworth on a park bench on the Green.  He was so charming, so unbelievably attractive, and so rich; and one thing led to another and soon he was inviting her to spend the night with him at the Taft.   He of course had been only trolling when he picked her up.  It didn’t take much with these Wooster Square girls unlike Vassar girls who checked family pedigree as carefully as a Hebrew manuscript in the Dead Sea scrolls.  They wanted to be wooed by someone of superior wealth, charm, and intelligence, but such a man was hard to find and harder to catch given the narrow, crowded milieu in which they lived.  These goomba twats only wanted someone, anyone with money. 

Maria politely demurred at the offer of a night at the Taft, but ended up giving it up in his Trumbull College dorm room anyway. “I can’t believe I’m really here”, she thought to herself as she kissed him and looked out the window at the College’s Gothic spires, manicured courtyard, and ancient window tracery.  Shortly after what had been a marvelous, romantic adventure for her but only a Townie interlude for him, he left her on the curb.

It didn’t pay to get involved with one of them she told her girlfriends, sobbing, missing him, but angry at how she was so shamelessly treated.  “Never again”, she said. 

At about this time Yale had begun to come under increasing pressures from New Haven to invest more in the city - not only in infrastructure, but in human resources as well. It wasn't enough, City officials said, for Yale to hire the men and women who served the elite; it was time for them to recruit talented New Haven students for Yale's undergraduate body itself. The moment had come for New Haven's Italian-Americans to stop serving strawberries, and to eat them.

Yale agreed, but with a prejudice characteristic of the times, assumed that any Italian-American New Haven student would be only suitable for menial work, agreed to admit Richard Puzzi, Alderman Guido Marucci's highly recommended candidate who had been a football standout at New Haven High. At least this slab of hairy meat would make short work of the Princeton line, so fuck the grades. A memo went out to all Puzzi’s professors at the beginning of the year: "Pass this ape".

What the Yale recruiters didn't know - and in their rush to scrape up a bit of detritus from Olive Street - was that this hairy piece of meat was the son of a connected guy. Mario Puzzi had worked his way up in the Gianfredo family and was known in the neighborhood as someone who did generous favors but brooked no disrespect.  The only reason that his son Richard had been admitted to Yale was because of the pressure he put on Alderman Marucci.  It was win-win all the way around - a son at Yale, an Italian finally learning not serving, and even more respect for Mario and his family. 

So, despite her WASP yearnings, Maria returned to her roots and went to Mario for a favor.  Could his son, Richard, now enrolled at Yale, teach that philandering, deceitful prick Farnsworth a lesson he would never forget? 

No one found out how or why the unfortunate Farnsworth got so badly beaten, enough to force him to take a year off from Yale, but rumor mills, ethnic prejudice, and preconception being what they are, it was assumed that Farnsworth's goomba chippy was behind it.

They never once suspected the new Yale Italian fullback who was indeed making mincemeat of the Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth lines, but that's the upside of prejudice.  The oaf got admitted to Yale, so that had to mean something. 

All this has changed in the Yale of today of course.  It no longer is the Old World, British colonial place of privilege and wealth that it once was.  It is now 'democratic' with all comers let in.  Diversity - not just the town-gown kind of decades before, but the real kind is the meme.  No need to cruise the New Haven Green anymore.  However with such libertinage something was missing.  No risk, no crossing the canal, no pursuit, and no consequence.  A dull affair; and Yale is now a dumbed down, safe place - a university like all others without cachet, admiration, or privilege.