Donald Trump And The Wild West, The Defining American Icon That Europe Will Never Understand

Donald Trump didn't come out of nowhere as the American Left seems to assume - an alien being of vast intelligence and inimitable power with the conquest of earth in mind, an interloper, an unexpected, unexplained viral threat, a demon cast out of someone else's hell. 

He came from America, from everywhere in America - from the prairie, the bayou, the backcountry, the Mississippi, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the mean streets of New York; but most of all from the Wild West.  For all of these origins, he is more American than any president before him. 

Europe can understand part of this legacy.  They can fathom the wide open spaces. 'Purple mountains' majesty' may not have the resonance it does for Americans, at least older, native ones who remember Flag Day and Fourth of July parades, and the Pledge of Allegiance, but any European who has travelled beyond the Mississippi and has some inkling of American history can combine the grandeur of the West with Monroe's Manifest Destiny and come up with a vague conception of our origins. 

They cannot understand the Wild West - that vast territory settled by early Americans, a contentious place where Indians resisted colonization with militancy, savagery, and persistence but Union soldiers cleared the way for white settlement. Where settlers staked their claims and defended them with the same determination and violence as those who wanted to take their land. 

Europe has been settled, civilized, and sedentary for a millennium. The tribal Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and Celts have been long forgotten in Britain, too distant in memory and cultural destiny to become icons.  Only after the Romans and William the Conqueror did history become real; but only thanks to remnants - French and Latin influences in language, amphitheaters and aqueducts. 

The French have a more living past.  It has always considered itself the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church since Charlemagne and Charles Martel defeated the invading Muslim Saracens at Roncesvalles and kept Europe Western and Christian. Other European nations have their own history with its victories and defeats, defining culture, religion, castles, and cathedrals.

Yet this recognition of the past, this pride of legacy and cultural patriotism is a far cry from the nativism of America - a country which does not simply remember its history, but lives its legacy every day.  Westward Expansion, that heady period of American history where Monroe and Jefferson were determined to create a country from coast to coast, to create a European continent in the New World, to dominate, control, and profit from the remarkable land discovered by Columbus, settled by pilgrims and cavaliers in New England and Virginia, explored and claimed by Lewis and Clark, and settled by new citizens tempted by the unimaginable richness newly settled. 

Wagon trains, the horse-drawn caravans of 'prairie schooners', the Donner Party and the crossing of the Rockies to the promised land of California, the winning of the Southwest, the clearing of the cypress, snake-infested swamps of Mississippi to make way for cotton plantations, the northward expansion to Alaska...all were not simply the ordinary territorial imperative common to all countries in history, but an expression of common character.  It was the kings, queens, and popes of Europe who initiated expansionist wars. 

In a seminal scene from Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry goes incognito into the trenches to hear what the common soldier thinks of his heroic adventure.  Cannon fodder for royal vengeance they are is the consensus, dampening but not destroying Henry's dream to retake English territories from the French. 

American westward expansion was done by the people, not kings and courtiers.  It may have been conceived and initiated by Presidents, but the real work of plodding, planting, fighting, and settling was done by ordinary Americans. 

The frontier was indeed a lawless place where justice was administered from the barrel of a gun, where summary, extrajudicial hanging of cattle thieves was common, where The Gunfight at OK Corral was a fictional representation of the harsh reality of the times. 

The market was as free as it gets, and the only rule was 'Let the buyer beware'.  It was a marketplace of raw supply and demand, horse trading, snake oil salesmen, canny entrepreneurs, suckers, and gold diggers. Fortunes were made through diligence, violence, insight, and defiance. Laissez-faire was the mildest way of putting commercial transactions. 

 

Eventually civilization came to the West.  Those first settlers understood that the six-shooter was only a temporary, inefficient way of protecting one's investment; and out of that understanding came the rule of law, land titling, court access, and the gradual ordering of new lands.  The early years were indeed lawless and violent, but reflected the insuppressible frontier spirit of the new Americans willing to risk their lives for prosperity, land, significance.

The typically American valuation of individuality and independence grew out of those days.  Government was non-existent, towns grew up willy-nilly and only as supply depots.  The new Americans had no use for government until it could do what they could not.  The platting of urban land facilitated property rights, provided order to development.  In the old Southwest (the Florida panhandle) where English, French, Spanish, and Americans fought for dominance, transport, infrastructure, social services were all private until settlers and entrepreneurs realized the benefits of a benign overseer. 

The early days of industrialization - the era of the Robber Barons Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan - was an urban extension of the Wild West.  These first capitalists built and grew businesses on their own in bloody, unmediated competition with others.  The Al Capone era in Chicago where gangsters fought for turf and influence was no different, simply the other side of the American coin. 

So it is no surprise that after a scant 250 years, America is still redolent of the Wild West, robber baron capitalism, expansionism, territorialism, and fierce individuality.  The inner city black ghettoes are not anomalies, but legatees of this persistent, timeless ethos.  Guns, territorial ambition, individualism, violence, and lawlessness there are no different than the Wild West of two hundred years before. 

Donald Trump is the most complete expression of this ethos that America has ever seen.  The Left thinks he runs against the grain - baldly and defiantly individualistic, capitalist, and opportunist while they are compassionate, commiserating, and inclusive - but he goes with the grain.  Even the most casual student of American history with one or two trips to the wide open spaces understands his profound Americanism.  Only those with fanciful visions of a world that never existed and never will think he is out of step. 

Trump is a gunfighter, a robber baron, a carny barker, a roughhewn salesman, an adventurer.  He brooks no opposition and confronts any resistance with violence of his own.  He is uncultured without social graces.  He does not suffer fools, makes way through the ranks with intimidation and force of character; and he is exactly the president to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Putin and Xi.  He has, like his OK Corral gunslinger ancestors, no hesitation to use all the weapons in his armory to defeat his enemies, gain hegemony, wealth, and control. 

Why should anyone be surprised at the personality, character, and ambitions of Donald Trump?  He is a product of America, speaks for America, embodies every bit of its aggressive, uncultured, bourgeois appeal. 

Europeans shake their heads as they always have at American low-class excess, and the American Left goes apoplectic at his use of power and authority; but both have ignored or at best overlooked his origins, his social and cultural inheritance.