Andrew Bolt (and Steve Kates) extract some Mark Latham commentary from The Spectator with approval:
Mark Latham says Donald Trump is now the hope of Western civilisation:
Trump
believes in the supremacy of the individual, in judging people on
merit, by their work ethic and creativity, rather than race, gender and
sexuality. These are the essential elements of civilisational
leadership. Trump stands for the freedom of the citizen in the nation
state. That is, the right to free speech, to meritocracy, to national
pride and a freestanding national culture. The key political divide is
no longer between Left and Right; it’s between civilisational and
non-civilisational leaders. Trump is on the right side of history, with
domestic ascendancy seemingly assured. He now needs to turn his mind to
an even greater challenge, promulgating a Trump doctrine: a new brand of
American global leadership based on the defence of Western
civilisation.
It's getting to the stage of when I hear "Western civilisation" I want to reach for my (imaginary) revolver. (Now that I mention it, didn't the Nazis come out of the one of the national hearts of "Western Civilisation"?)
5 comments:
A bit of evidence to support such absurd conclusions would help.
Trump is the saviour of Western Civilization. He does not want a rules based trading system, He does nor support economic alliances, He does not support political alliances.
What a saviour!
Even Jason should trouble disagreeing with you this time, Homer. (I hope!)
Soony is a lot of things but a complete loon he is not.
I love you soony!!
Uh oh - he's just tweeted a link to Right wing Canadian political catastrophist James Allen's talk given in Hungary where the think tank he gave it to entitled it "Political crisis in Australia?" (reprinted in Quadrant, but without that title).
Allen says he would have voted for Trump, and seems to give him credit for being "a disruptor".
As usual, you never know which parts of a tweet linked article Jason may agree with fully, conditionally, or disagree with.
But I will note this - Allen whines about spending under Labor, and notes no debt under Howard as a good thing: yet expresses no concern at all about the deficit increasing tax cuts of Trump.
He also is one of these Right wing twits who thinks Australia can ignore greenhouse emissions it makes as if that would make no difference to India and China and their attitude to their own greenhouse gas cuts. (Of course, because he almost certainly doesn't believe in climate change as a serious threat - that's just not part of the culture club he belongs to.)
That Jason thinks this guy contributes anything much of value is always a worry.
The Western civ and Trump thing is big in the US right now and derives from conservatives promoting the writing of NAZI jurist Carl Schmitt and German Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss. Hence statements like 'Trump has sovereign right to step outside the law' and 'An authoritarian free market State is possible.' In their view Trump is the necessary authoritarian leading the West to reassert the preeminence of Western Civ.
'Writing to Schmitt during 1932, Strauss summarized Schmitt's political theology thus: "[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men ... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state."'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
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