In less than one week’s time, Donald Trump will be officially elected as the nation’s forty-seventh president, a most remarkable political feat – the light at the end of the tunnel following four harrowing, tragic years that were among the darkest in living memory for this country. The triumph of Donald Trump — which all polling suggests is the inevitable outcome considering undeniable realities on the ground:Americans everywhere (as the MSG rally proves beyond any doubt)) overwhelmingly want him to steward the ship of state – will go down as the most incredible achievement in the history of American politics.
One man against titanic forces of opposition, emanating from within the government itself and spreading to virtually every significant power broker in society, has triumphed. His political success goes much deeper than simply winning yet another presidential contest; it has completely redefined our expectations of politics, and the possibilities thereof. For so many years, American political life has been a rush to the lowest common denominator. A bloated bureaucracy replete with talentless political hacks has dictated life in accordance with their own mediocre horizons. They have been talking down to the American public for years: convincing us to hate our past heroes and cast everything that made American civilization great – from our venerable legal tradition to the Church – to the dustbin of history.
Instead, per the prevailing view, our future was to be denominated along the lines of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This latter-day manufactured version of communism was differentiated from its historical antecedent insofar as it was less intelligent, and therefore, more befitting to the proclivities of the regnant leadership class it was designed to beclothe. Kamala Harris as the consummate exemplar of DEI made flesh, was to be the New Order’s first true leader: she embodied in every sense the spiritual aptitude of the DEI statesperson: an empty vessel to pantomime the queer tendencies of the administrative apparatus she was designed to represent. In the administrative state, true politics would effectively vanish. Instead, there would be something like a figurehead, who kept the chemically stupefied masses in check, reassured by the facade of political succession and constitutional governance, even though such things were as antiquated as the parchment on which the Constitution was written itself.
The administrative apparatus would technically be self-governing, but not in the way the Founding Fathers designed the original Republic. Instead, it would be self-governing to the degree that it operated like a self-replicating virus: it would parasitically feed on the remaining productive human capital and create a society of blindly loyal civil servants, none of whom produced anything of tangible value. Everyone would functionally become a bureaucrat. Even though the American nation, at least for the time being, was home to the world’s greatest talent, the true craftsmanship would occur overseas – in cheap foreign outposts like China, India, and Mexico, whose low-skilled laborers would produce the goods – of ever diminishing quality, mind you – that the administrative society of the United States would need to satisfy to its basic requirements. But should someone come along, be he an Elon Musk or Donald Trump, and aspire – like his forefathers did – for something a little higher, a little greater; should he dare internalize and treat seriously his God-given right to pursue happiness, ordered to the highest capacities of human potential, then he should be met by the heavy hand of the administrative state – which would silence and bankrupt him, if necessary, to command the obedience it requires to survive.
Donald Trump was not supposed to happen. More significantly, the great awakening he inspired among the body politic – first gradually, then like an avalanche – was not supposed to happen. Why was it not supposed to happen? Largely because its possibility was not within the realm of the limited intellects and imaginings of the administrative class; the uncreative civil servant, the human parasite, the bugman, who depended on the status quo ante to derive purpose – and, more insidiously, power – in the regnant order. If someone like Donald Trump, a self-made businessman and successful mogul who thrived in the domain of brick-and-mortar (not simply, digital) reality to challenge the bureaucrat’s reality, he would begin writhing and seething, coming to full realization that he simply, biologically, cannot compete at the same level. He is ill-equipped to do so: though human beings are all made in the image and likeness of the Creator, not everyone is made equal. That is a fundamental distinction, one that our Founding Fathers, certainly no ordinary men, knew intimately well.
The beauty of nature – indeed, this is what conclusively proves nature’s existence – is that men are differentiated, naturally, by talent. Some are great athletes; others are extraordinary musicians; others are deep thinkers, fearsome warriors, or genius philosophers. The diversity of the species known as mankind is what makes human beings distinct and unique from the beasts of nature. Humans have souls; and their souls are ordered by gradations. Some souls are higher, the consequence of a lifetime of tinkering and fine-tuning, while some are lower. That is a function of both nature and nurture. In designing America, the Founding Fathers wanted to create a place where men could achieve the best of what their natural gifts offered, unencumbered by the prejudices and superstitions of the Old World. The idea was to maximize individual liberty, within the constraints of nature and morality, that would lead to the cultivation of greatness at levels never before seen.
To the extent that American history is any indication, that experiment – which, better described, is a noble mission – worked, and resoundingly so. In a way, Donald Trump is both a throwback to that older regime – the nation – that produced men of greatness, as well as a conduit for the path forward. With him lies the hope for restoration. But all great things need great people to keep them preserved in perpetuity. America, though decoupled from the Old World, is inextricably linked to the universal rights, laws, and customs – including the rules governing inheritance and valuable property – that have governed all nations through time. Our inheritance is not, as the Left frames it, expendable – and certainly open to the world. It is sacred insofar as it is particularized to a certain group of people and place – namely, the American people and nation – whose ancestral ties bind them to a shared destiny, one born out of the Revolution of 1776, and solidified by the history of the last two hundred fifty years, that carve out the American identity.
Equality – in the context of “equal justice under law” – that august phrase inscribed on the Supreme Court building, is, in its original formulation, inherently limited. Its limitations are so designed as to allow human beings to flourish to the best of their abilities unencumbered by the frivolous dictates of government. Equality, so defined, necessarily requires limited government: that is to say, a government of republican complexion, one characterized by its smallness and delegation of power to local municipalities. The government created by the Constitution, one of three separate but co-equal bodies, is one of limited scope. It remarkably squares a perfect symbiosis between democracy and nobility: its original design was oddly enough far more accountable, even though not every citizen was given the vote, than its current, perverted form. This was because voters elected legislators who designed laws – furnishing deliberation and transparency. The Congress, not the bureaucrat, made the statute.
Grievances with the government could be directly traceable to an individual, who bore the responsibility for the decision made. Disgruntled citizens could petition accordingly. Unpopular decisions could thus be held in check by an electorate that had direct accountability with those who governed over them. No legislator could point to the bureaucratic morass as a form of responsibility evasion: he must boldly face the people, and not hide behind some bogus procedural rule, a convenient coverup for a society enervated by cowardice and a lack of virtue.
Donald Trump originally pledged eight years ago to drain the swamp: the swamp was the largesse of government bureaucracy and unaccountability. A corrupt system that claims with megalomaniac fervor to be the quintessence of democracy, even though reason and common-sense dictates that it operates like a tyranny. Happily, this is not a tyranny with a long lifespan, as the success of Donald Trump’s political movement shows. Unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union, which was at least competent, our government has been rotted down by mediocrity and idiocy. The bureaucrats know nothing: functionally, they possess the historical awareness of a child, the moral constitution of a knave. Simply put, they are children – but with imaginations, so limited, as to do injustice to most children by making such a comparison.
Unlike the civil servants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the golden age of administrative governance, ours are functionally useless, made impotent more and more with each passing day by automation and the competitive pressures of their betters from overseas. That is not to say that there is a dearth of talent in America today, far from it. But it is to say that our government – and the driving mentality of our society – actively drives out superior talent from public life, and worse than that, enacts rules to prevent natural talent, of the sort of genius that produced Donald’s towers and Elon’s rockets, from germinating. This is a society that elevates the weak at the expense of the strong; it derides genius in every form, from great musical prodigies – when, last, was there a man of Pavarotti’s talent to arise? – to entrepreneurial prowess, to statesmen of the caliber of a George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt, whose greatness stands as existential reminders of the modern bureaucrat’s infinite mediocrity.
Even their smears and aspersions are mediocre – everyone who they revile, the projection of envy (the deadliest of sins) – is a racist, if not “Hitler.” “Hitler” is the vague personification of some amorphous, nebulous evil, one that cannot ever be defined at any level of specificity because those who cast the stones of moral outrage are themselves too immoral and too stupid to have a working set of convictions. The inability to speak truth – and the manic reactions of those who hear it – run downstream of fear. The fear is invariably born out of ignorance – those who fear unsettling truths are too ignorant to identify them on their own. Thus explains the paranoia and the sanctimonious indignation that those of us who would rather be tending to our own proverbial gardens are forced to deal with relentlessly for the last eight years.
Donald Trump’s political moment was a necessary prophylactic. The status quo – even though it has been going on for decades – was bound to come to an end, at some point. There is no end of history: politics will always be there, even if the rest of civilization deludes itself into thinking those bitter natural truths have been overcome. That delusion may even persist for multiple generations, but it will surely come crashing down. The truths however should be saccharine, not bitter, for they make up the core of what it means to be American. The bizarre ideologies that have taken root in America over the last six or so decades, brainwashing significant portions of not just the masses, but also the political class, that the self-evident truths delineated in their country’s founding documents are themselves anathema to American identity will be analyzed by future historians as an ominous portent of how even the best societies – including the only society expressly dedicated to human greatness – can succumb to the worst temptations of human nature. If nothing more, it is a reminder that humans are not gods: there is no conquering nature, by science, ideology, or other means. The cult worship of man cannot replace Biblical Revelation, nor can it be a worthy substitute for the rules that have always kept men in check and are indispensable to self-discipline and self-government.
This convulsion of self-sabotage, one that has suicidally brought American civilization to the brink, is more than a peculiarity but a cancer that needs to be excised root and branch. Our society has no choice but to elevate and reorient itself to the good: that which elevates man’s better angels and allows the greatest of men to flourish on the principle that greatness begets more greatness. And that the innovations that emerge from the inner sanctum of the genius’s mind are to the collective benefit of humanity, and the one hallmark of true progress, in every sense of the term.
Make America Great Again is thus much more than a political movement. It is the moment demarcating the start of the renewal of our society – and Western civilization. It is the moment of great awakening whereby we once again, as a people, are reminded of the possibilities of what man can achieve at his highest levels. Perfection is not a bad word, despite what the powers that be might want us to believe. It is high time we return to that principle, not mediocre equity, as the lodestar of society. It is egregious that we have allowed inferior minds to delude us into thinking anything but our birthright as Americans is good and sacrosanct. Thank God for Donald Trump, who came along and reminded us of that. That will be his greatest gift to our society, the cornerstone of his legacy. He reminded us of what American greatness means, and in doing so, allowed us, once again, to revive that aspiration as the driving force of American life.
A slightly modified version of this piece was originally published in The Gateway Pundit, and can be found here.
Paul Ingrassia, a graduate of Fordham University and Cornell Law School, is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the NYYR Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow Paul on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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