The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary ten years ago, and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The Right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering burning garbage pile—that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”
Trump has never used the words “festering burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.
But that’s not what Levin or other AEI types hear. To them, Trump’s criticisms of the ruling class sound like criticisms of the country. It would be unfair to guess that Levin simply believes the nation’s elite and the institutions they run are what counts as the country itself, but there are precedents for such a view. In traditional monarchies and aristocracies, the rulers are the embodiment of the realm. Our Declaration of Independence was quite radical in breaking away from that understanding, asserting that the people are the realm, and all its institutions are answerable to them, not the other way around.
Levin and other intelligent non-populist conservatives know this, and they’re well aware of the failings of the pre-Trump Republican Party, and the country’s political establishment as a whole. But knowing and feeling are different things. Much of what survives of the pre-Trump conservative movement even now feels that the virtues rather than the vices of the old elite (and the institutions with which they are almost synonymous) ought to be emphasized.
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