Thanks for your thoughts here, Josh.
First, I’m not conservative, whether an “intelligent” conservative or otherwise. I am independent, holding views that span the gamut, from far left to far right.
Second, I’m not someone who voted for Trump (or for anyone else), and I’m not some uncritical Trump supporter. For instance, I was completely against his tax cut (you don’t need a tax cut when there’s a booming economy), completely against his backing out of the Iran deal (I agree with him it was a bad deal, but I think backing out of it at this stage just makes us look untrustworthy and doesn’t benefit us in any way I’m aware of), I’m totally against his uncritical support of Saudi Arabia (the source of the extremist strains of Islam rapidly spreading throughout the world), and I’m very much against Betsy Devos' privatization of education.
On the other hand, I actually approve of his attempt to move to a merit-based immigration system (a high-tech economy requires talented, skilled, educated workers, not uneducated, unskilled masses flooding in to compete for disappearing low-wage, blue collar jobs, many of whom will ultimately become dependent on public benefits, all increasing income inequality), though I don’t like aspects of how he’s going about getting that system implemented, and I find the difficulties he’s created with H1 visas for Indians, who are the highest-earning ethnic group in America and disproportionately work in the high-tech sector, totally baffling.
I like the fact that Jeff Sessions has turned the focus of the criminal justice system back to cracking down on crime rather than persecuting people for illusory civil rights violations to further someone’s contentious conception of “social justice” (I’ve explained repeatedly on Medium why the empirical evidence completely fails to support the whole #BlackLivesMatter narrative), though I don’t like the fact that Sessions has busied himself with marijuana offenses rather than real crime (I’m for drug legalization, though I don’t partake myself).)
I like Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy. I thought he did a great job in Syria so far, avoiding the mistakes of both Obama’s empty red-line threat and G.W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War. Instead, when Assad used chemical weapons, Trump deployed targeted strikes to send a clear message and then got out immediately, with no larger escalation. I have every confidence that if the nation-building, hyper-militaristic Clinton were president, we’d already have ground troops in Syria by now and would be unleashing more chaos throughout the Middle East the way Bush, the worst president in my lifetime, did with his horrifically stupid Iraq War.
Most of all, however, I like Trump’s bold stance against the excesses of political correctness. And this is my entree into explaining to you why I spend my time writing some of the things I do that you’ve questioned. You see, I don’t view these things as trivial issues in the least, the way you seem to. I’ve published pieces in places other than Medium explaining my views in some detail, and this is the one that’s probably going to give you the biggest bang for your buck in understanding why I fundamentally support Trump’s nationalism agenda, despite issues with him as a person and with the way he goes about many of his actions:
If you want to take a deeper dive and understand why I don’t think some of the superficial issues the regressive segments of the left are concerned with are really that significant compared to the cultural issues that I believe truly matter, the answer is here:
In lieu of repeating to you what I’ve already said in those articles, I’ll add a few words about my motivations. My main interests are literature and philosophy. I was an English major at Yale, and that remains my principal passion. What I’ve witnessed in the years since I was an undergrad there in the 90s is a devastating attack upon high culture emanating from the identity bozos of the ignorant Alt-Left. These people are functional illiterates who want to attack everything that’s better than they are because greatness makes them feel small and insignificant, while they’ve been raised in the cult of self-esteem that teaches them they’re perfect just the way they are, without striving to be anything better. These brittle and arrogant ignoramuses have set about destroying canons of merit. They have destroyed universities, turning them away from their fundamental educational mission by making any attempt to educate someone tantamount to a micro-aggression. Instead of education and learning to appreciate otherness, these people expect to find “representation” wherever they look, as though the fact that some author or artist or thinker or musician is the same race or gender or sexual identity that they are were more important than aesthetic, philosophical or scientific greatness.
So you want to tell me about the climate change denialists or brainless creationists on the right? Yeah, I get that, and I abhor scientific illiteracy of every sort. But what I abhor even more are the brainless aesthetic denialists on the regressive left, because, for me, a world where great art and culture are replaced by second and third-rate mass culture is a world not worth living in. And we are unfortunately very rapidly losing that battle. We are being assaulted on all fronts by the incursions of incredibly dumb, debased and vulgar mass culture that is leaving fewer and fewer of us able to think independently, reason critically, process ambiguity and appreciate truth and beauty. We are becoming a nation of crude boors and descending into barbarism.
The regressive left’s politicization and destruction of humanities curricula has directly resulted in the wholesale attack on the humanities and higher education by short-sighted Philistines on the right, who are understandably disgusted by what they are seeing. “Why should I send my children to be brainwashed in these bastions of illiberal groupthink?” they reason.
And this is the critical point: while we have many good and worthy people fighting against the right’s scientific denialism, we have almost no one fighting the aesthetic denialism on the left. This is why I feel such a need to step up to the plate, as it were.
So you wonder why I write articles about the regressive left’s attacks on figures like Wagner (Spotify didn’t actually ban him; the article explains that this was just a slippery slope I was describing that led directly from Spptify’s actions with respect to R. Kelly) and Einstein? I write articles like that because people like those represent the heights of art and science, and we have these fools and knee-jerk SJWs demonizing or rejecting them for racism or misogyny or whatever the latest, trendiest bias of the moment is, just as they are attacking the Founding Fathers and dead white male authors and thinkers and all the rest.
Hopefully that, along with the articles I linked to, gives you some sense of where I’m coming from and why I value the things I do. I was a Bernie Sanders supporter. My opinion of Trump always has been and remains mixed, but I thought and still think he is worlds better than Hillary Clinton, who married regressive, pro-corporate economic policies with hyper-militaristic foreign policies, and then to distract people and get them to focus on something else, pandered to identity politics in the worst, most transparently disingenuous way. In a recent interview with Fareed Zakharia, Steve Bannon observed (correctly, in my view) that there was really much more similarity between Trump and Sanders than either had to Clinton. She represented the worst of all possible worlds, a regressive economic policy that would further entrench economic inequality, an insane immigration policy that would admit more unskilled, uneducated simpletons to further increase such economic inequality, a disastrous foreign policy that would result in more foreign wars creating more migrant crises and extremist movements and a social policy that would result in getting everyone still more focused on their identities, with the result of amplifying differences and dismantling the fabric of this nation.
I’ll stop here and let you pick up whatever thread you want to explore further. I’ve obviously made many points in a loose, rambling, general manner, and there may be something in particular where you’d question my ideas or conclusions.
But let me end with this: I very sincerely appreciate your comments and appreciate people like you who read things they disagree with and engage with it critically. I try to do that myself constantly and make an effort not to get stuck in a groupthink bubble of any sort. That, unfortunately, means that I’m going to take positions that, at various points and in various ways, have a chance of alienating virtually anyone and everyone … simply because I don’t support any party or agenda straight down the line. But I’m okay with that.
