Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Trump cuts old Gordian knots
He refuses to play by the traditional rules
THE proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed.
When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the year from remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.
In the past, traditional and accepted methods failed to deal with all of these challenges. Bill Clinton’s “Agreed Framework,” George W. Bush’s “six-party talks” and the “strategic patience” of the Obama administration essentially offered North Korea cash to denuclearize.
American diplomats whined to China about its unfair trade practices. When rebuffed, they more or less shut up, convinced either that they could not do anything or that China’s growing economy would sooner or later westernize.
Europeans were used to American nagging about delinquent NATO contributions. Diplomatic niceties usually meant that European leaders only talked nonstop about the idea that they should shoulder more of their own defense.
Mexico ignored U.S. whining that our neighbor to the south was cynically undermining U.S. immigration law. If America protested too much, Mexico usually fell back on boilerplate charges of racism, xenophobia and nativism, despite its own tough treatment of immigrants arriving into Mexico illegally from Central America.
In other words, before Trump arrived, the niceties of American diplomacy and statecraft had untied none of these knots. But like Alexander, the outsider Trump was not invested in any of the accustomed protocols about untying them. Instead, he pulled out his proverbial sword and began slashing.
HANSON
nationalism and the headline-grabbing style of would-be revolutionaries such as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X had made King seem a bit of a relic.
As so often happens, it was King’s tragically premature death that reminded so many of his historical stature. But even then, the riots and chaos of 1968 were not the ideal climate for sober appreciation of his contribution.
And, if you can forgive a bit of partisanship, the way some of his heirs — literal (the King family) and figurative (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton et al.) — tried to claim a monopoly on his legacy made that appreciation more difficult as well.
King’s views on economics and American foreign policy were also too bound up in his persona for some conservatives to forget or forgive. More importantly, the generation of conservatives (though not necessarily Republicans, who disproportionately voted for the Civil Rights Act) who wrongly opposed the civil rights movement either out of misguided constitutionalism or simply out of archaic racism needed to die off before King’s contribution could be better appreciated across party lines.
So what was King’s contribution? Simply this: He forced America to fulfill its own best self.
It’s popular today, particularly in certain corners of the left, to deride the hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers by pointing to the disconnect between the rhetoric of the founding and the reality on the ground. The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And yet America countenanced slavery, among other lesser but still abhorrent assaults on the ideal of equality.
But hypocrisy is only possible when it illuminates a violated ideal.
It was not until Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address that the ideal embedded in the Declaration fully became both the plot and theme of the American story. “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
That idea, always present in America’s self-conception, became the heart of the American creed. But it was not truly so until 100 years later, when King called upon Americans to live up to the best versions of themselves.
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King proclaimed in the figurative shadow of the Great Emancipator at the Lincoln Memorial. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
King was not demonizing “white America.” He was appealing to its conscience, asking his fellow Americans to live up to the ideals that they claimed defined our best selves. Rhetoric, literary critic Wayne Booth said, is “the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe.”
King’s rhetoric did exactly that, which is why he, like Lincoln, not only belongs to the ages now, but belongs to every American.