Recommeded: Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality

Victor David Hanson has another of his blunt but accurate assessments, in his piece today Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality. Ignore the hype and spin and partisan distortions and angst and (often fake) outrage and just look at what is actually happening in the world, and one gets a different picture then most of the media is pushing.

The media has been bemoaning the resignations and retirement of so many of the State Department's senior staff. My thought is that, looked at pragmatically, those people haven't done so well over the past few decades, leaving us mired in endless Middle East wars, repeatedly misreading and underestimating China, Russia and North Korea, among other notable failures. So perhaps it was past time they were retired and new younger blood infused into the Washington establishment.

Commentators I respect

There aren’t a lot of commentators whose opinions I respect; most public commentators are heavily biased to the liberal or conservative ideologies, and seem to me rather shallow in their analysis of events, shallow in the sense that they seem to be knee-jerk reactions to the ephemeral news of the day (what Michael Mann once described as “the sociology of the last five minutes”) and don’t seem to be rooted in much understanding of the deeper currents of history or cultures. Three I do especially respect are David P. Goldman (author of How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is dying too) and Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research), Walter Russel Mead (James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine), and Victor David Hanson (professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, and currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University's Hoover Institution). These three seem to have a more solidly grounded view of world affairs than most popular commentators, views more rooted in facts and statistics and informed by a wider understanding of history and a deeper appreciation of the views and perspectives of other cultures. These aren’t necessarily the only commentators I favor, but they certainly are three of the leading ones.

I mention this because all of these commentators think more of the Trump administration’s successes, and of Trump’s skill at achieving his objectives, than the popular media, and so I am forced to consider seriously their arguments. Hanson is to be sure a conservative, and a bit of a curmudgeon, but not an ideologue and brilliant in his many books. Goldman sees the world from a Judeo-Christian perspective, but has a deep understanding of the cultural contexts involved. Mead writes brilliant and thoughtful articles in the American Interest.

All are perfectly aware of Trump’s eccentricities, of his mercurial nature, of his tendency to seemingly undercut his own initiatives with ill-timed Twitter rants. All three regret some of the things he has done. Yet all three think he has mastered the new world of social media far better than his political opponents, and that he has done some things which in the long run will prove to have been important and productive for the nation long after he is out of office and his eccentricities forgotten, and which would probably not have been done under a Clinton or Sanders administration.

I won’t deal here with their views, which are complex and nuanced and require reading and pondering their writings to fully appreciate them. But the fact that these three see much more competence in Trump and his objectives means I need to take him more seriously than the popular press does. Of course the popular press is in the business of being an echo chamber for their readership bases – liberal or conservative as the case may be – which is what drives readership and therefore revenue. But that means the opinions (and rantings) of the popular press are largely irrelevant to understanding the deep structural, cultural and demographic forces that are reshaping the world today. The writings of these three seem to me much more useful to that enterprise.