General, Politics

A Public and Self-Centered Betrayal

Why American Nationalists Should Support the Impeachment of President Trump

The impeachment spectacle in Washington is heartbreaking for American nationalists on so many levels.  As mentioned previously, Trump was always a flawed standard-bearer for nationalism, if simply because of his shameless public encouragement of the Russian and Wikileaks hacking of the Democrats.   The Mueller report has since shown that his consultant Roger Stone knew at the very least when the leaks would occur. Further, Trump knew Stone was using this knowledge to coordinate campaign activities.  Any hope that Trump would mend his ways and find nationalist ideals has been cruelly dashed by the results of the House impeachment investigation, which exposes his attempt to hijack American foreign policy and defy the law for his own electoral benefit.       

Trump’s own betrayal, however, does not mean we should overlook the hypocrisy of his Democratic critics, who have either engaged in or condoned similar sleazy conduct.  Whether it is Hunter Biden using his and his father’s name to whitewash a corrupt Ukrainian company or Bill Clinton hitting foreign leaders up for money for the Clinton Foundation while his wife was Secretary of State, it has apparently become acceptable for American politicians and their kin to trade on their connections much like Russian oligarchs and Chinese princelings.  The recent Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s misconduct in the investigation of Russian ties to the 2016 Trump campaign also showed how our own foreign intelligence community can be manipulated and abused by foreign and domestic governmental elites for personal political interests.  Trump’s conduct can arguably be seen as simply the logical extension of this sickening phenomenon.   It proves that, while globalization and the globalist ideology may have spread some freedom elsewhere, we have blithely ignored how it is importing here to America the same kind of elitist corruption seen in the worst authoritarian regimes.  If this continues, the American Century of Shame I warned about in another post will occur faster than we think.       

The key to preventing this decline is to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s advice above and stand by our country first, not the President, whatever the transgressions of his detractors.  Indeed, true American nationalists must lead in holding the President to a high standard of loyalty to our Constitution and values if we are to build the consensus we need to attack the sleazy elitist betrayals. Thus, we should sadly, but resolutely, support his impeachment and removal from office.   

The Law

We begin with the Constitution itself, which authorizes impeachment for “Treason, Bribery and other High Crimes and Misdemeanors”.  The language, derived from English constitutional law, is designed to prevent impeachment for simple policy differences.  At the same time, even the President’s own Attorney General Bill Barr has said that this standard is much broader than the statutory criminal law:

By including that English phrase, our Founding Fathers intended to expand the scope of impeachable offenses beyond the scope of criminally indictable offenses. This language incorporates political offenses against the state that injure the structure of government and tarnish the integrity of the political office. As Alexander Hamilton observed, these political offenses include breaches of the public trust that a president assumes once he has taken office.

Barr, William, “High Crimes and Misdemeanors”, 2 Texas Review of Law and Policy, pgs. 9-10 

However, the case against the President can still start by referring to the statutory law.  The federal bribery statute prohibits a public official from corruptly demanding or seeking anything of value personally in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act.  As bad as bribery is, of even more concern to American nationalists should be the potential solicitation of a political contribution by a foreign government in violation of federal campaign finance law. See 52 U.S.C. Section 30121.  Like the bribery statute, it prohibits the solicitation of anything of value from a foreign government by a political campaign.  In this case, the “thing of value” would have been the expenditure of money by the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden and the Burisma company for the purpose of injuring the candidacy of former Vice President Biden.   

The Facts  

The evidence against the President is quite direct.  Rudy Guiliani began pushing publicly and with Ukrainian prosecutors in January of 2019 for an investigation into not only Hunter Biden, but also former Vice President Biden.  In mid-July, Trump instructed acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to withhold $400 million in aid to Ukraine.  Immediately afterwards, the President spoke with Ukrainian President Zelensky to ask for a “favor”.  He then proceeded to talk about Biden’s son and that “[former Vice President] Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that …. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution”.  He urged President Zelenksy to pursue this not only with the Attorney General, but also with Guiliani, his personal lawyer.  Indeed, he seemed to be encouraging Zelensky to act mainly through Guiliani, not Barr.

Trump’s supporters advance two main defenses to the clear implication of this narrative.  First, they correctly state that corruption in Ukraine has been a concern of the United States for years and that this was simply an outgrowth of that policy.   However, the transcript does not refer to the prosecution of corruption in the Ukrainian energy industry in general, which was the subject of past conversations between Secretary of Energy Perry as well as his predecessors.  It focused on only two specific subjects – the issue of whether Ukraine was the source of the 2016 hacking incidents and the activities of the Bidens, one of which was potentially a strong candidate against Trump in the 2020 election. If the purpose was simply to pursue an element of American foreign policy, then why was Trump’s personal lawyer Guiliani involved?  It was because the President wanted Ukraine to focus not on corruption in general, but on the Bidens and especially the former Vice President in particular.

The other defense boils down to the claim that “Obama did it, too”, pointing to the Inspector General’s report.  The Horowitz report is definitely disturbing and calls for more controls over foreign intelligence investigations. However, there is no evidence that any of this was directed from the White House.  It appears to have been almost a rogue operation by elements of the FBI.   The only relevance to the accusations against Trump may be to essentially justify his dismissal of James Comey as FBI chief, and thus refute any charge of obstruction of justice arising out of it.  It does not justify engaging in a modern-day version of the Watergate burglary by using the American foreign policy apparatus to dig up dirt on a political foe.

Conclusion

If American nationalism stands for anything, it is that our leaders must be loyal to the country first and the welfare of our citizens, not their own ambitions or the interests of other nations.   The Ukrainian incident, when combined with his public support and inside knowledge of the Russian hacking of 2016, show that Donald Trump does not have that kind of loyalty to our country.  Moreover, this is the kind of conduct that injures the structure of our government and breaches the public trust within the meaning of the Hamiltonian definition.  The draft impeachment resolution is correct when it says that Trump will be a threat to national security and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-government and the rule of law.  The House of Representatives should impeach the President on the charge relating to Ukraine and the Senate should convict and remove Trump from office.  The Constitution and the facts demand nothing less.

General

The Origins of the Trump Revolution

The 2016 election ushered in a realignment of the political culture from a debate about big vs. small government and social issues to a one between globalism vs. nationalism. Aspects of those old debates remain, but they are now best understood as a clash between globalist elites ideologically committed to free trade, immigration and relaxed social values versus those who believe that stable families and the preservation of a national identity and the American Dream are more important. The attached article from 2016 is thus still relevant, if simply because it explains why approximately 40% of the electorate remains devoted to President Trump in spite of his obvious personal failures.

Politics has become more caustic because neither side fully recognizes this new alignment and the realistic legitimacy of the other side of the spectrum. To avoid this reality, media and governmental elites obsessively recycle the old debates much as the politics of the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century degenerated into recycling old arguments about alcohol temperance, immigration, and responsibility for the Civil War (Rum, Romanism and Rebellion).

The rise of the Populist Party in the late 1800’s forced economic inequality, pernicious market power and the resulting crisis in democracy to the front of the debate. Eventually, the confrontational populist approach gave way to the Progressive Era, of which Theodore Roosevelt was a leader.

Donald Trump clearly is not that leader. However, his election will hopefully open the system to a new more constructive approach to the same kinds of issues that exist today. Whether this will require a new political party or an ideological shakeup of the current two parties still remains to be seen.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/03/08/the_25-year_tide_that_gave_us_trump_129902.html

China, Foreign Policy

A Coming American Century of Shame?

19th century Chinese Opium Den
Chinese Opium Den

It is always better to be an original than an imitation, even when the imitation is of something better than their own; but what shall we say of the fool who is content to be an imitation of something worse? Even if the weaklings who seek to be other than Americans were right in deeming other nations to be better than our own, the fact yet remains that to be a first-class American is fifty-fold better than to be a second -class imitation of a Frenchman or Englishman.

Theodore Roosevelt, True Americanism, The Forum Magazine, April 1894

Chinese Communist leaders constantly justify the legitimacy of the rule by claiming to have reversed China’s “century of shame”. This refers to the 19th century colonial exploitation by the European powers and Japan that carved up much of the country into “spheres of influence”. The most ruthless and shameful episode of this era occurred in the beginning, when Britain fought two wars to force China to accept the importation of opium. This enriched the British at the expense of the misery of millions of Chinese addicts and the Chinese economy as a whole.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Hong Kong residents carry American flags while insisting that the city’s leaders and China honor their previous commitments to expand democracy in the territory. This call to our conscience is then rejected by Apple and other American tech companies, who bow to demands to remove apps that the Chinese government believe aid the democracy movement. Meanwhile, the National Basketball Association apologizes for a tweet of support for the demonstrators by General Manager Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets after Chinese government protests.

Why such craven subservience? The reason is simple – money. Many Fortune 500 companies earn millions selling their products in China and utilizing cheaper and more compliant Chinese labor to manufacture them. They are thus willing to be co-opted by the Chinese Communist party and thus sacrifice the values of their American employees and customers simply because it preserves those profits

Like the Europeans reduced China to vassalage with the drug of opium, China now seeks to bring America to heel with the new opiate of money. The willingness of American companies to submit to this addiction puts the lie to Fortune 500 CEOs plea to “trust us” to responsibly balance social obligations with shareholder profits (more on this later). It shows that, far from being a benign new entrant on the world stage, China is on the offensive to create its own semi-colonial empire. Indeed, as this excerpt from an National Public Radio feature showed, they may be ruthless enough to use essentially the same opiates forced on them in the 19th century to control poor Americans in the 21st.

This is not an argument for any kind of American intervention. We should remain the advocates of liberty everywhere, but the guarantor only of our own. However, the endurance of this guarantee at home and the future of liberty abroad will depend on whether Americans let the new opiates of money and despair cause our nation to sink into its own century of shame. Or will we hark to TR’s call that it is better to be a first-class American than a second-class Chinese?

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/10/china-has-begun-shape-and-manage-us-not-other-way-around/160646/?oref=defenseone_today_nl