Leading the lunatic charge is Peter Beinart, writing in The Atlantic:
The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.
Following close on his heels is Jeet Heer bloviating in The New Republic:
Here, Trump is defining the West not based on ideals like democracy and liberty, but atavistic loyalties to territory and shared kinship.
Not to be left out, the reliably pretentious Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post concluded:
...President Trump's understanding of history [is] as a zero-sum clash of civilizations in which "the West" can triumph by imposing its will.
This "intellectual" nonsense exposes the fundamental illiteracy and ignorance of the left.
To begin with, the entire construct of "race" is a fiction. One only need look at just a handful of human horrors over time--Rwanda, Culloden, Drogheda, Srebrenica--to know that the human capacity to hate is not bounded by mere skin color.
There is but one race, and that is the human race. There is none other.
Further, what fosters and fuels human divisions are the same building blocks that form our various communities--tradition, custom, and culture. Ideals such as democracy and liberty are elemental to a full understanding of "the West", but they exist only in the communities we form in adherence to and appreciation of those ideals. Communities by dint of sheer physical reality are invariably defined both by territory and shared kinship (which is itself an anodyne term for what sensible people call "family"). Defending the West geographically is not an atavistic loyalty to some animalistic urge, but is the practical reality of preserving and promoting the ideals we hold most dear.
There are other communities in the world--and Trump does not hesitate to call out those he quite reasonably identifies as adversaries of the community of nations known as "the West", principally Islam ("radical Islam", more precisely, although the extent to which the fundamentalist Islamic creeds of ISIS and Al Qaeda are "radical" is debatable at best). Islam is many things--false religious ideology, extremist political ideology, encapsulation of Arab and Bedouin traditions and customs--but "race" is most assuredly not one of them.
The statist authoritarian nations who reject democratic governance and the rule of law are another community that attracts Trump's wrath. Yet these also are neither religions nor races, but real places, inhabited by real people, with whom we must contend if we wish our community of nations to endure.
Messrs Beinart, Heer, and Robinson are using terms they clearly do not understand to comment on concepts they clearly do not comprehend.
Donald Trump offered up a stirring defense of Western civilization. He champions the notion that our culture, our history, our customs and our values are worth preserving. He enthusiastically argues that our culture, history, customs and values warrant not just robust apology but stirring advocacy. He notes the many real successes and achievements within our culture and our history--achievements of technology, of law, of basic notions of justice and human worth--and reminds one and all that these are not just good things, but great things.
The uncontestable historical reality of Western culture is the Internet, the empowerment of women, the emancipation of slaves and the proposition that all men are created equal. Democracy exists because Western nations have endured, and freedom has expanded because Western ideals have taken root in realms far beyond the cradles of Western civilization.
The uncontestable historical reality of Islam is hundreds of millions of dead, the subjugation of women, the promotion of slavery, and the presupposition that only the select few deserve all that society offers. The uncontestable historical reality of statist authoritarianism--of Communism, of Fascism, and of Socialism--is likewise violence, death, destruction, and human degradation.
The uncontestable present reality is that the left rejects the successes of Western culture and embraces the ideologies--and communities--that oppose Western culture.
Messrs Beinart, Heer, and Robinson, in their idiocy, encapsulate why leftist thought invariably fails: despite being a product of Western thought, it is implacably opposed to Western thought. Leftist thought opposes the very culture, history, customs and values that created it. Invariably, leftist thought espouses intellectual suicide.
The tragedy of the leftist "intellectual" is that to be leftist is to concede the debate before it even begins.
