The End of Trump’s Punk Rock Presidency

    “Haven’t you heard? There’s a new world coming.”

    This is a line of dialogue delivered by the actress Dorothy McGuire in the 1955 film Trial. In the film McGuire plays Abbe Nyle, a colleague and love interest of an attorney named David Blake, played by Glenn Ford.

    The line that McGuire delivers, about a “new world coming,” is said not with optimism and joy, but bitterness, sarcasm and sorrow. Because Abbe Nyle is a former American communist who has seen the evil of that belief system. She’s mocking communism while showing desperation at the persistent stupidity of its believers. (We hope to screen Trial at the 2027 Anti-Communist Film Festival).

    Seventy years after Trial first screened, more than a century after the Russian Revolution, and the Left is still declaring that a new world is coming — a world of socialism.  The recent results of the midterm blowout indicate that the American people want to take that ride with the left.

    Trump’s presidency is pretty much over, but, like punk rock, Trump will be remembered as a truth-teller. In that sense, Trump is like a punk rocker. In October 2016, James Parker wrote about Trump’s “punk rock appeal” in The Atlantic. Parker noted that “with his followers,” Trump “has co-created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” Trump has done it even though he’s a conservative candidate: “It’s as if the Sex Pistols were singing about law and order instead of anarchy, as if their chart-busting (banned) single, ‘God Save the Queen,’ were not a sarcastic diatribe but a sincere pledge of fealty to the monarch. Electrifying!”

    In Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer compared Trump and his supporting political movement, the Alt-Right, to punk: “Hillary’s recent speech denouncing the alt-right has raised eyebrows. It was as if in 1976 progressive-rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer had released a double album devoted to excoriating this new band nobody had ever heard of before called the Ramones. If you can remember back four decades, it might strike you that the alt-right phenomenon of 2016 is basically political punk rock: loud, abrasive, hostile, white, back to basics, and fun.”

    The fun’s now over. As I explained in a recent piece, in his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, journalist Tim Mohr explores how the postwar communist German Stasi harassed, monitored, censored, and beat punk rockers. It’s notable how many times the word “fun” is used by the punks to explain their outlook. Between 1981 and 1985, one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece that, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.” The Stasi eventually shut them down. The Democrats are the American Stasi. They're about to shut everything down — except transgender athletes.

    As the Democrats have already indicated, the rest of Trump’s term, and perhaps long after, will be focused on hearings and retribution. (Here come the yearbooks!) In James Piereson’s groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, the author revealed that modern liberalism, unlike classical liberalism, feeds off of the desire to punish others. Piereson calls this phenomenon “punitive liberalism.” It goes back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Prior to Kennedy’s death, liberalism was pro-American, anti-communist, pro-labor, and for change to address social ills such as racism. When Kennedy was assassinated by communist Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals found themselves at a loss to explain the tragedy. It simply couldn’t be possible that the conservatives were right, that Kennedy had been a martyr not to the civil rights movement but to the Cold War and that his blood was on the hands of the communists. Liberalism explained Kennedy’s death by blaming it on America. It wasn’t Oswald, a Castro-loving zealot, who pulled the trigger; it was “right-wing America,” the “climate of hate in Dallas,” and our collective historical sins. America was to blame.

    Piereson summarized his theory in a 2004 essay in The Weekly Standard: “From the time of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the Democratic Party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement.”

    Punitive liberalism has been the manual for the American left for almost half a century. Trump was a break from the show trials. One of the reasons I insisted on showing Hail, Caesar! at the first Anti-Communist Film Festival is that it is a fun movie. Totalitarians hate people who are smiling, drinking, watching banned movies or telling jokes, because those people are impossible to control. Trump was impossible to control. Yet as Orwell noted, people can only take so much truth.

    The 2027 Anti-Communist Film Festival is gonna be lit. If the inaugural year made us the Sex Pistols, year two makes us the Clash.

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