Victor Davis Hanson relies on a 65-year-old Western in his latest analysis of President Trump for National Review Online.
In director George Stevens’s classic 1953 Western, Shane, a mysterious stranger and gunfighter in buckskin with a violent past, rides into the middle of the late-1880s Wyoming range wars between cattle barons and homestead farmers. The community-minded farmers may have the law on their side, but the open-range cattlemen have the money and the gun-toting cowboys. …
… In less melodramatic fashion, we see variances of the Shane paradox in all aspects of our lives, and we are now also witnessing something similar to it in the current Trump administration, especially in these confusing and unsettled times after the midterms. …
… To the degree that either party offered possible solutions, the establishment, like the wary sodbusters, seemed to think that they were even worse than the original problems, whether those solutions meant systematic deregulation, a Neanderthal border wall, less utopian internationalism and more self-interested nationalism, offending Europeans, dreaded tariffs, a taboo interest in the plight of the white lower-middle class, or an ossified idea that immigration should be legal, diverse, measured, and meritocratic. …
… The idea of welcoming in the gunslinger-outsider Trump was deemed absurd. To the extent that we sodbusters had contemplated something similar (a Ross Perot candidacy in 1992 and 1996) or actually voted in larger-than-life “problem solvers” (Governors Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California), the results had ranged from unimpressive to disastrous.
Then came 2016, and the public turned to Trump, despite his lurid personal history. Voters did not ask too much about Trump’s checkered but admittedly successful business career; they assumed that he somehow had enough skills to become a billionaire, despite having to navigate New York City’s unions, politicians, community organizers, regulators, environmentalists, tax collectors, and tough competitors. So perhaps the fewer questions about Trump’s past, the better.