07 Mar Trump: On the Shoulders of Giants
Conservatives, as a general rule, operate under the presumption that there is nothing new under the sun. We are all, as Newton argued, “standing on the shoulders of giants,” merely building on and marginally modifying that which our forefathers built and bequeathed to us. No matter how radical and revolutionary we or others may perceive us to be, we are usually anything but. As I put it just the other day in my piece on John Maynard Keynes and the Bloomsburies, “the group itself became famous for its public celebration of unconventional sexual behavior. Of course, one can be quite certain that they did nothing to or with one another that had not been done to or with others since the beginning of time.” And so it is with most things. Even the radicals are mostly derivative.
Two of my favorite examples of this can be found in the world of “culture” (used loosely).
The “punk” movement, for one, was notoriously rebellious. It was angry and angst-filled. It was vicious and unmanageable. It perfectly expressed the bleakness of the defeatist Cold-War West and the disillusionment that it communicated to the late-Boomers who came of age during the 1970s. It spoke to the fears and frustrations of the working class, even then feeling left behind by the New Left and its cultural obsessions.
Punk music, by contrast, was notably less rebellious and radical. Indeed, for the most part, it was pretty tame. It was raw and unrestrained compared to much of the rest of the music produced in the ‘70s, but at its core, it was “rockabilly with distortion pedals.” If you’d unplugged The Clash, the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, and many of the other big names in the punk scene, they were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis with lesser voices, weirder clothes, and notably worse politics.
There are some exceptions to this rule, of course – the Sex Pistols and San Francisco’s second-wave punk scene come to mind – but for the most part, the music is the least rebellious aspect of punk.
The same can be said – although not as definitively and not without controversy – about the raucous, radical, underclass music revolution of the following decade as well. The Heavy Metal of the 1980s, as personified by Metallica and its imitators, shared the punks’ rebellious attitudes. When Joey Ramone moved on to covering Louis Armstrong, Joe Strummer got into Irish folk music, and Mick Jones dabbled in progressive pop, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich took the angry, unruly banner from them.
Dave Mustaine, one of the original members of Metallica and the founder of Megadeth, likes to tell people that he and Hetfield “created” an entirely new sound and a new way to play guitar. That’s true, I guess, but only if you think that surf music with distortion pedals is “an entirely new sound and a new way to play guitar.” That, for the most part, is what 1980s Heavy Metal is. The punks of the ‘70s borrowed from the rockabillies of the ‘50s, while the Metal Masters of the ‘80s borrowed from the Beach Boys. The only difference between the two is that the punks never pretended otherwise. And while I consider myself a fan of surf music with distortion pedals, I’m not so naïve as not to notice the similarities between the two “radically” different genres.
In short, then, the differences between the rockabillies and the punks and between the Beach Boys and Metallica are attitude and distortion. That’s it.
If you pay attention to politics today, you may notice that one of the enduring claims by commentators and observers on the Left and the Never-Trump Right is that the GOP today is practically unrecognizable to traditional Republicans. Ronald Reagan, they like to say, could never win the GOP nomination now. His politics and Trump’s are so radically different that they can hardly be categorized as the same ideology/temperament/genre.
I don’t think that’s true. Indeed, I think much of Trump’s agenda is quite in line with Reagan’s and, for that matter, with Barry Goldwater’s. At his core, Trump wants lower taxes, smaller government, less waste, less intervention by Washington in people’s everyday lives, and a retreat from the “Foreign Policy as Social Work” practices introduced by Bill Clinton. Clearly, Trump is not Ronald Reagan in temperament, character, or beliefs, but he is, in many ways, a reasonable evolution of the Reagan-ite model.
In other words, I think it’s fair to say that Trump is to Reagan what Joe Strummer was to Elvis or what James Hetfield was to Brian Wilson. He is Reagan but with attitude and distortion.
Now, to be fair – especially to my very smart, very good and decent, and very conservative Never-Trump readers – much of that attitude can be off-putting, and many of those distortions can be mind-bogglingly foolish (at best). The president’s obsession with tariffs, to name just one policy distortion, is especially difficult for a Reaganite conservative to understand. Likewise, the president’s attitude on matters of sexual behavior and marital fidelity is positively un-Reagan-esque. All of that notwithstanding, Trump still makes a reasonable successor to Reagan.
I understand that Reagan was adamantly anti-communist and, therefore, adamantly anti-Soviet. He would probably find Trump’s affinity for KGB agent Vladimir Putin to be especially distortive. At the same time, though, he might also find Trump’s unwillingness to commit American troops to foreign soil without a clear and established connection to the national interest to be compatible with his own attitude about such matters.
Again, the whole point of this exercise is to point out that there us nothing new under the sun and that even Trump had precursors. It may not seem that way at times, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the case.
