The Wall Street Journal editors wrote of “Trump’s Defining Speech” in Poland. This speech, they said, was “a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition.”
…and this shocked Washington—the speech aimed higher. Like the best presidential speeches, it contained affirmations of ideas and principles and related them to the current political moment. “Americans, Poles and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty,” he said. This was more than a speech, though. It was an argument. One might even call it an apologia for the West.
One of the defining aspects of Western Civilization is argument. As I wrote years ago in a guest column in The Daily Tar Heel, “The study of Western Civilization is history making the case for liberty, often through the process of elimination.”
Central to this study is conflict — of ideas rather than armies, in battles that continue over generations. … Western Civ features dramatic debates over the role of the state — in the lives of men, in the lives of rulers and politicians, and within, without or in comparison to the role of the church. Arguments abound throughout Western history: whether the king is appointed by God or beholden to the people; whether the church should be subservient, superior, separate, or even protected against any other churches; whether the people have the right to set up their own government (not to mention what form it should take); when and whether revolution is necessary; whether revolutionary leaders of the people are beholden to the people; etc. How should society operate? Who has a say? Only the king? Only the church? Only the aristocracy? Some combination? How so? Men? Free men? Landowners? What about women?
Conflicting ideas emerge over the nature and purpose of science and the arts, too — rich histories in their own rights, often commingled with those other debates. …
Yes, there is the pro forma protest of sorts against the president’s remarks, the lazy assertion in lieu of argument that he secretly means white guys. It is that tiresome, lamentably standard “progressive” academic/media’s insertion, IOU: One (1) substantive rebuttal. As the WSJ editors perceived, “the speech aimed higher.” Higher than the normal state speech, and definitely much higher than the mean figments of such small imaginations.
Why higher? Because Western Civilization is higher, and because its best ideals produced the United States of America (Margaret Thatcher observed, “Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy“), and because of this America is, as Lincoln and Reagan both noted, “the last, best hope” of man on Earth.
For those who would argue thoughtfully against the merits of the president’s speech, they would be acting within the Western tradition. I concluded my guest column with that point, in demonstrating the true plurality ensconced in — nurtured by, in fact — the Western tradition:
The discipline is not, as some fear, the stamp of approval on all things done by Dead White Males — rather, it is the study of the crucible of ideas that tested and approved our own society’s cherished values of democracy, individual liberty (even from the interference of one elite clique or another), the freedoms of speech and belief, and plurality (that is, diversity).
They are the same values from which the Western Civilization proposal’s critics argue today, apparently without any recognition of their heritage. But in doing so they demonstrate how compelling those values are, and how they are indeed not the sole purview of the Dead White Men. If the ideas fostered within the Western tradition are aspects of the Hope left to Pandora, they have proven as irresistible and irrepressible as the chaos that preceded it. They belong to all.
