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Student protesters in Missouri forced the university president to resign on a race issue. Photograph: Michael Cali/San Diego Union/REX Shutterstock

Donald Trump is an unlikely president. He is also an unlikely cultural warrior. That hasnt stopped him from becoming both.

Besides throwing American politics into a tumult that wont end in the near future, President Trump has reoriented and reinvigorated the American culture war. He has wrenched it away from its decades-long focus on issues related to religion and sexual morality and created another axis around populism and nationalism.

The issues involved in this new culture war anti-elitism, political correctness, immigration, national sovereignty, multiculturalism are every bit as charged as the ones that animated the old one. They involve the symbolically and emotionally fraught questions of how we should live and who we are as a people.

Other advanced countries dont have culture wars quite like the United States. A fight has raged here since the 1970s over such issues as abortion, school prayer, traditional sexual mores, gay rights, religious displays on public property, pornography, graphic content in television shows and movies and school curriculums. The combatants have been, roughly speaking, secular coastal elites on the one hand and a religious heartland on the other.

Perhaps the high point for the right in the culture war came in 2004 when George W Bush, touting his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, won re-election on the strength of his support among evangelical Christians. Worried Democrats wondered how they could make inroads among these values voters. They havent had to worry since. Barack Obamas election in 2008 heralded a new day.

If the old culture war wasnt quite lost for the right, it was slipping away. Traditional marriage continued to decline, the entertainment culture got more coarse and old-fashioned sexual morality became the stuff of mockery. The rout on gay marriage has been so complete, with the supreme court making gay marriage legal throughout the land, that the left has moved on to the new cause of transgender rights.

Once, Democrats felt it necessary to play defence on social issues. No more. In an act that would have been unimaginable just a few years prior, the Obama administration got embroiled in litigation with an order of nuns yes, nuns on the question of whether they should have to technically abide by a federal contraception mandate or not.

In this context, Donald Trump is extremely ill suited as a culture warrior. The cliched charge against conservatives was always that they wanted to impose their morality on everyone else.

The wag might say that Trump is not threatening to impose his morality on anyone because he doesnt have any to impose. He has bragged about bedding beautiful models. His marriages have exploded in spectacular fashion, providing endless fodder for tabloids. His religious literacy is extremely limited, at best, and he was comfortable for decades in a New York City that, besides San Francisco, is the nations foremost symbol of out-of-touch, decadent liberalism.

Five or 10 years ago, a Republican could have been forgiven for thinking that if Donald Trump jumped into the culture war, it would be on the other side. But Trump has changed the terms of the nations cultural contention.

He accepts gay marriage and has no interest in fighting over what bathrooms transgender people should use. On the other hand, he has been steadfastly anti-abortion, a function of coalition politics for him more than anything else. (Trump never would have won the Republican presidential nomination if he had remained pro-choice and evangelical Christians were a key Trump voting bloc in the general election.)

Trump is most vested in different battles, mainly against an establishment and a north-eastern elite that he considers overly insulated and self-interested and due to be taken down a notch.

All during his campaign, he inveighed against political correctness, whose enforcers on college campuses and in the elite culture have had the upper hand in establishing the agreed-upon rules for public speech. They had the power to make transgressors against their rules grovel, cry and apologise. To deny them their jobs. To make them worry about telling the wrong joke or posting an impermissible thought on Twitter.

Trumps election, despite violating almost every rule set down by political correctness, represented a step toward the disempowerment of this elite.

His ongoing war with the media has to be seen through the same prism, as a tug of war for cultural power with an arm of the establishment. It is not unusual for Republican presidents to disdain, and complain about, the media. The ferocity of Trumps daily fight with the press is different. It is more tribal and raw, a cultural clash that Trumps team welcomes and intends to win.

Trumps nationalism is another front in this war. A nation isnt just a collection of people. It is a cultural expression it has founding fathers, patriotic rituals and symbols, inspiring legends, traditional poetry and songs, a historical memory, military heroes and cemeteries.

In the United States, what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called a denationalised elite has undermined these patriotic pillars. This elite has worked to submerge American sovereignty in multilateral institutions and treaties and undermine its national identity through multiculturalism and mass immigration.

President Trumps unapologetic nationalism is a slap in the face to those political and business leaders who thought we were living in a borderless world. It is no accident that in his first week, Trump authorised the building of his famous border wall, an emphatic statement of American sovereignty, and prepared the way to begin enforcing the nations immigration laws more vigorously again.

Immigration is so central to Trump because it involves the foundational questions of whether American citizens get to decide who comes here to live or not and whether the interests of American workers or foreign workers should be paramount.

The left had thought most of these questions were settled, or at least were inevitably bound to be decided in its favour. It believed, in the cliche it repeats over and over, that history was on its side. Well, Trump shows history is much less predictable than those who profess to speak in its name realise.

The great and the good assumed that Trumps working-class supporters were dying off and would have a steadily declining influence in American politics. No one had to pay attention to them any more, as the world steadily became more cosmopolitan and integrated. These voters picked up on the disdain with which they were held and their instinct to hit back propelled the billionaire populist Donald Trump all the way to the White House.

Still not recovered from its shock, the left has had to grapple with the fact that it is living in a different country than it thought and that it is on its back foot in a new culture war it didnt expect to have to fight.

Donald Trump is an unlikely cultural warrior, but if he can harness a sense of national solidarity and speak persuasively for ordinary American workers while restraining his worst instincts he may prove a powerful one.

Read this article:
Trump's new culture war has left liberals reeling. They thought they'd won that battle - The Guardian

President Trump has ordered a temporary, 120-day halt to admitting refugees from seven countries, all of them war-torn states with majority-Muslim populations: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia. He has further indicated that, once additional screening provisions are put in place, he wants further refugee admissions from those countries to give priority to Christian refugees over Muslim refugees. Trumps order is, in characteristic Trump fashion, both ham-handed and underinclusive, and particularly unfair to allies who risked life and limb to help the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is also not the dangerous and radical departure from U.S. policy that his liberal critics make it out to be. His policy may be terrible public relations for the United States, but it is fairly narrow and well within the recent tradition of immigration actions taken by the Obama administration.

First, lets put in context what Trump is actually doing. The executive order, on its face, does not discriminate between Muslim and Christian (or Jewish) immigrants, and it is far from being a complete ban on Muslim immigrants or even Muslim refugees. Trumps own stated reason for giving preference to Christian refugees is also worth quoting:

Trump was asked whether he would prioritize persecuted Christians in the Middle East for admission as refugees, and he replied, Yes.

Theyve been horribly treated, he said. Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough, to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian it was almost impossible. And the reason that was so unfair everybody was persecuted, in all fairness but they were chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair.

So we are going to help them.

Trump isnt making this up; Obama-administration policy effectively discriminated against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian Christians), and the response from most of Trumps liberal critics has been silence:

The United States has accepted 10,801 Syrian refugees, of whom 56 are Christian. Not 56 percent; 56 total, out of 10,801. That is to say, one-half of 1 percent.

The BBC says that 10 percent of all Syrians are Christian, which would mean 2.2 million Christians....Experts say [one] reason for the lack of Christians in the makeup of the refugees is the makeup of the camps. Christians in the main United Nations refugee camp in Jordan are subject to persecution, they say, and so flee the camps, meaning they are not included in the refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N.

The Christians dont reside in those camps because it is too dangerous, [Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institutes Center for Religious Freedom] said. They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community, and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.

They are raped, abducted into slavery and they are abducted for ransom. It is extremely dangerous; there is not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees, Shea said.

Liberals are normally the first people to argue that American policy should give preferential treatment to groups that are oppressed and discriminated against, but because Christians are the dominant religious group here and the btes noires of domestic liberals there is little liberal interest in accommodating U.S. refugee policy to the reality on the ground in Syria. So long as Obama could outsource religious discrimination against Christian refugees to Jordan and the U.N., his supporters preferred the status quo to admitting that Trump might have a point.

On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trumps list and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 only after he was safely out of office.

This brings us to a broader point: The United States in general, and the Obama administration in particular, never had an open-borders policy for all refugees from everywhere, so overwrought rhetoric about Trump ripping down Lady Libertys promise means comparing him to an ideal state that never existed. In fact, the Obama administration completely stopped processing refugees from Iraq for six months in 2011 over concerns about terrorist infiltration, a step nearly identical to Trumps current order, but one that was met with silence and indifference by most of Trumps current critics.

Only two weeks ago, Obama revoked a decades-old wet foot, dry foot policy of allowing entry to refugees from Cuba who made it to our shores. His move, intended to signal an easing of tensions with the brutal Communist dictatorship in Havana, has stranded scores of refugees in Mexico and Central America, and Mexico last Friday deported the first 91 of them to Cuba. This, too, has no claim on the conscience of Trumps liberal critics. After all, Cuban Americans tend to vote Republican.

Even more ridiculous and blinkered is the suggestion that there may be something unconstitutional about refusing entry to refugees or discriminating among them on religious or other bases (a reaction that was shared at first by some Republicans, including Mike Pence, when Trumps plan was announced in December 2015). There are plenty of moral and political arguments on these points, but foreigners have no right under our Constitution to demand entry to the United States or to challenge any reason we might have to refuse them entry, even blatant religious discrimination. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congresss powers in this area are plenary, and the presidents powers are as broad as the Congress chooses to give him. If liberals are baffled as to why even the invocation of the historically problematic America First slogan by Trump is popular with almost two-thirds of the American public, they should look no further than people arguing that foreigners should be treated by the law as if they were American citizens with all the rights and protections we give Americans.

Liberals are likewise on both unwise and unpopular ground in sneering at the idea that there might be an increased risk of radical Islamist terrorism resulting from large numbers of Muslims entering the country as refugees or asylees. There have been many such cases in Europe, ranging from terrorists (as in the Brussels attack) posing as refugees to the infiltration of radicals and the radicalization of new entrants. The 9/11 plotters, several of whom overstayed their visas in the U.S. after immigrating from the Middle East to Germany, are part of that picture as well. Here in the U.S., we have had a number of terror attacks carried out by foreign-born Muslims or their children. The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing were children of asylees; the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani immigrant; the underwear bomber was from Nigeria; the San Bernardino shooter was the son of Pakistani immigrants; the Chattanooga shooter was from Kuwait; the Fort Hood shooter was the son of Palestinian immigrants. All of this takes place against the backdrop of a global movement of radical Islamist terrorism that kills tens of thousands of people a year in terrorist attacks and injures or kidnaps tens of thousands more.

There are plenty of reasons not to indict the entire innocent Muslim population, including those who come as refugees or asylees seeking to escape tyranny and radicalism, for the actions of a comparatively small percentage of radicals. But efforts to salami-slice the problem into something that looks like a minor or improbable outlier, or to compare this to past waves of immigrants, are an insult to the intelligence of the public. The tradeoffs from a more open-borders posture are real, and the reasons for wanting our screening process to be a demanding one are serious.

Like it or not, theres a war going on out there, and many of its foot soldiers are ideological radicals who wear no uniform and live among the people they end up attacking. If your only response to these issues is to cry This is just xenophobia and bigotry, youre either not actually paying attention to the facts or engaging in the same sort of intellectual beggary that leads liberals to refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Andrew Cuomo declared this week, If there is a move to deport immigrants, I say then start with me because his grandparents were immigrants. This is unserious and childish: President Obama deported over 2.5 million people in eight years in office, and I didnt see Governor Cuomo getting on a boat back to Italy.

Conservatives have long recognized these points which is another way of saying that a blank check for refugee admissions is no more a core principle of the Right than it is of the Left.

A more trenchant critique of Trumps order is that hes undercutting his own argument by how narrow the order is. Far from a Muslim ban, the order applies to only seven of the worlds 50 majority-Muslim countries. Three of those seven (Iran, Syria, and Sudan) are designated by the State Department as state sponsors of terror, but the history of terrorism by Islamist radicals over the past two decades even state-sponsored terrorism is dominated by people who are not from countries engaged in officially recognized state-sponsored terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers were predominantly Saudi, and a significant number of other attacks have been planned or carried out by Egyptians, Pakistanis, and people from the various Gulf states. But a number of these countries have more significant business and political ties to the United States (and in some cases to the Trump Organization as well), so its more inconvenient to add them to the list. Simply put, theres no reason to believe that the countries on the list are more likely to send us terrorists than the countries off the list.

That said, the seven states selected do include most of the influx of refugees and do present particular logistical problems in vetting the backgrounds of refugees. If Trumps goal is simply to beef up screening after a brief pause, hes on firmer ground.

The moral and strategic arguments against Trumps policy are, however, significant. Americas open-hearted willingness to harbor refugees from around the world has always been a source of our strength, and sometimes an effective tool deployed directly against hostile foreign tyrannies. Today, for example, the chief adversary of Venezuelas oppressive economic policies is a website run by a man who works at a Home Depot in Alabama, having been granted political asylum here in 2005. And the refugee problem is partly one of our own creation. My own preference for Syrian refugees, many of them military-age males whom Assad is trying to get out of his country, has been to arm them, train them, and send them back, after the tradition of the Polish and French in World War II and the Czechs in World War I. But that requires support that neither Trump nor Obama has been inclined to provide, and you cant seriously ask individual Syrians to fight a suicidal two-front war against ISIS and the Russian- and Iranian-backed Assad without outside support. So where else can they go?

Also, some people seeking refugee status or asylum may have stronger claims on our gratitude. Consider some of the first people denied entry under the new policy:

The lawyers said that one of the Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq for ten years. The other, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the United States to join his wife, who had worked for an American contractor, and young son, the lawyers said.

These specific cases may or may not turn out to be as sympathetic as they appear; these are statements made by lawyers filing a class action, who by their own admission havent even spoken to their clients. But in a turn of humorous irony that undercut some of the liberal narrative, it turns out that Darweesh told the press that he likes Trump.

Certainly, we should give stronger consideration to refugee or asylum claims from people who are endangered as a result of their cooperation with the U.S. military. But such consideration can still be extended on a case-by-case basis, as the executive order explicitly permits: Notwithstanding a suspension pursuant to subsection (c) of this section or pursuant to a Presidential proclamation described in subsection (e) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.

Trump also seems to have triggered some unnecessary chaos at the airports and borders around the globe by signing the order without a lot of adequate advance notice to the public or to the people charged with administering the order. Thats characteristic of his early administrations public-relations amateur hour, and an unnecessary, unforced error. Then again, the core policy is one he broadcast to great fanfare well over a year ago, so this comes as no great shock.

The American tradition of accepting refugees and asylees from around the world, especially from the clutches of our enemies, is a proud one, and it is a sad thing to see that compromised. And while Middle Eastern Christians should be given greater priority in escaping a region where they are particularly persecuted, the next step in this process should not be one that seeks to permanently enshrine a preference for Christians over Muslims generally. But our tradition has never been an unlimited open-door policy, and President Trumps latest moves are not nearly such a dramatic departure from the Obama administration as Trumps liberal critics (or even many of his fans) would have you believe.

Dan McLaughlin is an attorney in New York City and an NRO contributing columnist.

See the original post:
Refugee Madness: Trump Is Wrong, But His Liberal Critics Are Crazy - National Review

Ottawa Citizen

Patrick Brown visits Ottawa to attack Liberals over 'energy poverty' Ottawa Citizen Brown blamed the Liberal green energy plan for locking Ontario into contracts for overproduction of power, knowing that we don't need it We give it away to Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York. He also attacked the province's cap-and-trade program, ... and more »

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Patrick Brown visits Ottawa to attack Liberals over 'energy poverty' - Ottawa Citizen

Millions of Americans are sick of smug liberal elites who insult their intelligence, impugn their motives and ignore their concerns. Thats why Donald Trump won. In the days since Trumps ascendancy, youll come across some version of this argument in just about every political magazine or newspaper you consult including the ones that are edited by smug liberal elites. But ask yourself: Who are these elites? Was their influence really inflammatory enough to convince voters that handing Trump the White House was their only option? Were Trump supporters acting on a rational set of social and political grievances? How much blame does the left deserve for the rise of a president who spent most of his time pandering to the right?

When a pundit moans about how disconnected the elites are from everyday Americans, he could be talking about a professor at Brown or a long-serving senator or a columnist at The New York Times.

Elite is one of those words that comes with a built-in repository of negative associations (sort of like professor, senator and columnist, but we dont have all day). If youre someone from a state like Kansas or Oklahoma who leaves work with calluses on your hands and grime beneath your fingernails, plenty of politicians (usually Republicans) are eager to convince you that a bunch of coastal snobs are conspiring to make your life unbearable.

The image of a gruff, hardworking midwesterner with no patience for the Beltway or the ivory tower is a clich for a reason: It faithfully captures a common political and cultural attitude in the U.S.

Many disillusioned (often white and working class) voters are convinced that their values and interests are constantly under threat from Washington, D.C. And this scorn is often directed at people in academia and the media as well elite stooges who live on the edge of the swamp, but only wade in when it suits them.

The 2016 election produced abundant evidence that the anti-elite narrative works 67 percent of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump (a 39-point advantage over Hillary Clinton). In 2008 and 2012, the same demographic voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 25 points and 18 points, respectively. Even though these are all substantial margins, Trump managed to secure a larger proportion of white working class votes than any candidate since 1980 (according to Pew). Does this mean the elites have been extra insufferable over the past few years? Or could it mean Trump is better than McCain and Romney at harnessing the resentment and rage of the anti-elite voting bloc? And heres a third possibility: Trump just has a talent for creating resentment and rage where none existed before (Millions of illegal votes? Yeah! Im angry about that!)

While theres some truth to the first interpretation, the second two are invariably overlooked by writers who think the outcome of the election was simply a rejection of the pious and censorious left-wingers who think Trump is an orange composite of Hitler and Montgomery Burns. Here are a few of the articles Im thinking of: How the Left Created Trump (Rob Hoffman, Politico), How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump (Tom Nichols, The Daily Beast), Blame Liberals for the Rise of Trump (S.E. Cupp, Townhall). Other than the typical complaints about Clintons inadequacy as a candidate, these articles (and countless others like them) cite liberal complacency, arrogance and intolerance as the impetus behind Trumps victory. If liberals werent so moralizing and conceited if they would just listen to the rest of the country if they would stop tarring their political opponents with charges of bigotry, misogyny and racism then we wouldnt be facing four years of President Trump.

In other words, Trump voters are right about the liberal elites they really are a bunch of cackling imbeciles who didnt realize that they were the ones who made Trump inevitable.

Im sympathetic to these arguments theres no shortage of stupid liberal dogmas that empower the right, and it would be silly to suggest that this doesnt have anything to do with Trumps popularity. Heres the sort of thing that comes to mind: the obsession with gender pronouns, identity politics, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and clumsy, counterproductive training programs for college students (I always found it insulting when I was forced to undergo training courses on sexual harassment and racial sensitivity I think I already understand the dos and donts, thanks). Theres also the immovable conviction that sincere religious beliefs are incapable of inspiring people to commit atrocities a form of advanced left-wing myopia that constantly allowed Trump to go on the offensive: Liberals dont even know who were fighting! They refuse to say radical Islamic terrorism! Sad!

Again, I get the point. But heres the problem: Trump isnt just a vessel for the complaints and anxieties of disgruntled Americans. If you voted for him, your vote was more than a repudiation of the liberal elites or the establishment or whichever murky, overused term you prefer.

You elected a man whose ignorance, narcissism and dishonesty was totally unconstrained by the standards to which Americans used to hold presidential candidates. You elected a man whose blind insularity (which is endlessly reiterated with his noxious slogan, America First) will only make the country poorer, less open and more vulnerable. You elected a man who rants about nuclear policy on Twitter and couldnt care less about the proliferation of weapons that have the destructive power to extinguish every life on the planet. You elected a man who thinks the U.S. should have stolen Iraqs oil at gunpoint. You elected a man who says yes to torture (I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding!) and no to Muslim refugees. You elected a man who promised to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and consign American Muslims to a draconian registry on the basis of their religion.

Youre to blame not liberal elites; not social justice warriors; not pretentious professors. You.

By the way, what could be more elitist than the liberals created Trump thesis? Unlike the writers mentioned above, Im treating you like a thinking person who made his or her own decision in November. You didnt elect Trump just because liberals despise him you elected Trump because you identify with his rhetoric and endorse his policies. You elected Trump because youre convinced that hell Make America Great Again. Right?

Contact Matt Johnson at (785) 295-1282 or @mattjj89 on Twitter.

Excerpt from:
Matt Johnson: Are liberals responsible for Trump's victory? - Topeka Capital Journal

English[edit] Etymology[edit]

The adjective is from Old French liberal, from Latin liberalis (befitting a freeman), from liber (free); it is attested since the 14th century. The noun is first attested in the 1800s.

liberal (comparative more liberal, superlative most liberal)

pertaining to the arts the study of which is considered worthy of a free man

generous, willing to give unsparingly

ample, abundant, generous in quantity

obsolete: unrestrained, licentious

widely open to new ideas, willing to depart from established opinions, conventions etc.

open to political or social reforms

Translations to be checked

liberal (plural liberals)

one with liberal views, supporting individual liberty

one who favors individual voting rights, human and civil rights, individual gun rights and laissez-faire markets

liberalm, f (masculine and feminine plural liberals)

liberal (comparative liberaler, superlative am liberalsten)

Positive forms of liberal

Comparative forms of liberal

Superlative forms of liberal

liberalm (oblique and nominative feminine singular liberale)

From Latin liberalis (befitting a freeman), from liber (free).

liberalm, f (plural liberais, comparable)

From lberlan.

librlm (Cyrillic spelling )

liberalm, f (plural liberales)

liberalm, f (plural liberales)

liberal (comparative liberalare, superlative liberalast)

liberalc

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liberal - Wiktionary