Anyone who questions American’s global interventionism is an “isolationist,” which has been in bad repute since World War II. Of course, if America had listened to its “isolationists” during World War I, there probably wouldn’t have been a World War II, a point Pat Buchanan makes in his book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which Justin Raimondo cites in his article. Isolationist is a misnomer. Many who are tagged with that label believe in commercial and social interaction with foreign nations, they object to the US government’s policy of continuous and ubiquitous intervention. Non-interventionism, by the way, was the politics advocated by crazy old George Washington. From Raimondo at antiwar.com:
Why do they hate Donald Trump?
Why has the Establishment pulled out all the stops in an effort to smear him, stop him, and crush him underfoot? Every single day the “mainstream” media unleashes a foam-flecked fusillade of fury at the GOP front-runner: he’s a “racist,” he’s “corrupt,” his campaign manager is a “bully,” he “incites violence,” etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Of course the media is going to attack any Republican candidate. However, this time the GOP elite is joining in, and the level of ferocity is something we haven’t seen since 1964. That was the year Barry Goldwater’s trip to Germany provoked a report by Daniel Schorr on the CBS Evening News that falsely linked the GOP candidate to German neo-Nazis – while Nelson Rockefeller denounced Goldwater’s delegates as “extremists” who “feed on fear, hate, and terror.”
Yes, “terror”!
The same violence-baiting hysteria is being deployed against Trump, but one has to wonder what’s behind it. I was watching Bill O’Reilly the other day, and he was saying that it has to do with the elite’s visceral dislike of Trump as a personality. They think he’s a “vulgarian” who appeals to the rubes in flyover country. Well, there’s something to that: these consumers of arugula and “artisan” cheese no doubt disdain the hamburgers-and-beer crowd embodied by Trump’s persona, but there’s more to it than that. And I can sum it up in two words: foreign policy.
Yes, yes, I know: foreign policy isn’t supposed to figure in presidential elections. Dan Drezner keeps telling us that. And yet I couldn’t help but notice that the anti-Trump hysteria hit a high note (or is that a new low?) when he came out with a series of foreign policy pronouncements and started attacking NATO. The hairs on the back of the necks of the foreign policy wonks must’ve stood at attention when he adopted “America first” as his campaign slogan.
An article in USA Today gives voice to the panic of the elites at this evocation of a past they thought they’d successfully banished from the American political landscape:
“In embracing “America First’’ as his guiding foreign policy philosophy, Donald Trump appropriated – spontaneously, it seems – one of the most denigrated political slogans of the last century, and one that evokes an isolationism Trump himself explicitly rejects.
“’It’s a rotten term that evokes the naive idiots, defeatists and pro-Nazis who wanted to appease Hitler and make friends with him’ before World War II, says Susan Dunn, author of 1940: F.D.R., Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler – The Election Amid the Storm. That said, she doesn’t think the old phrase means much today.
“Trump’s use of an expression so dated and discredited reflects his willingness to dip into the past for catch phrases that, no matter their historical baggage, can still appeal to voters.”
Ms. Dunn’s book is a compendium of every falsehood ever hurled at the America Firsters: she lionizes the corporate shill Wendell Wilkie, and – prefiguring the anticipated theft of the GOP nomination this year – whitewashes the effort by the Eastern Establishment to bring in “the barefoot boy from Wall Street’ at the last moment to stop the “isolationist” Taft, stealing delegates and pressuring them financially to support the elite’s chosen candidate. Dunn’s line is similar to that of the Communist Party, which, at the time, was aligned with Roosevelt: they acted as the vanguard of the anti-Taft pro-war forces, hurling accusations of pro-Nazism and anti-Semitism at such “bigots” as Norman Thomas, Gerald Ford, and other America Firsters who wanted to keep us out of the European conflagration.
Chicago Tribune publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick, whose newspaper valiantly stood against the Anglophile-warmongering tide, accurately predicted that entering the war would have to mean yet another long struggle, this time against the Soviet Union – and that’s precisely what occurred. Yet court historians of Dunn’s ilk are blind to such prescience: according to her, Wilkie was a hero for turning against the GOP after his humiliating defeat and becoming one of Roosevelt’s lapdogs.
To continue reading: ‘America First’ – The Trump Slogan the Establishment Hates
