As the United States approaches midterm elections, devastating hurricanes and other dangerous winds threaten the fabric of its society. The explosives-laden packages sent to Democrats and the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh are veritable canaries in the coal mine. Attempts to attribute the boiling tensions to Trump's personality are escapes from the truth.
From its inception, American democracy has been entrenched in the stabilizing force of liberalism, even in the face of immense crises. European liberalism permeated American liberalism and rattled this stability, and now Trump is trying to curb this trend.
European liberalism is different from the American version. In the spirit of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, it is predicated on "the right ideals" – basic Utopian assumptions concocted through human imagination. The first ideal is that human beings are born equal. This narrative has no basis in nature, which produces humans different in kind and character. In Europe, the effort to force equality and uniformity on naturally different people gave rise to social experiments, from the French Revolution to socialism, communism and Nazism, which arose as an antithesis to the aspiration for equality. In this century, Europe's short-term historical memory has led it to adopt multinationalism and multiculturalism, Utopian ideologies that have revived memories of the Weimar Republic period.
Unlike European liberalism striving to create a "new" man, American liberalism, similar to biblical morality, accepts man's limitations and the fact that human beings are born different. Seeking to emulate society's "natural state," the morality behind this liberalism is derived from the axiomatic, eternal and harmonious laws of nature. The purpose of adhering to these principles (unlike Utopian principles) is to foster stability and harmony, similar to that found in nature, between people as well. This harmony is justice – the alternative to equality that cannot be created between people because they are different. (We must not conflate equality of opportunity, which is desirable, with equality of outcome.)
More than its devotion to liberty (to which the Europeans are also devoted in their own misguided way), American democracy owes its stability to the education from birth of the average American (Republican and Democrat alike) to also uphold the principles of truth (there's only one), justice (or "fairness" in the American sense), and peoplehood (patriotism) which the Europeans hold in contempt. This practice has helped the Americans avoid the terrible consequences of Europe's social experiments.
Trump's fight against fake news and political correctness (the legalization of lies), his push to ensconce his country's internal and external economy on fairness and reciprocity, and his prioritization of patriotism over cosmopolitanism, are expressions of his desire to refashion American democracy on the traditional principles of American liberalism.
The tense atmosphere Trump has created to save America from a fate similar to that of Europe is currently far more dangerous than the tensions that bred the Civil War. At that time, the discord stemmed from the argument over the limits of human liberty; today's tensions stem from a type of Huntingtonian clash of liberal civilizations that differ across their entire spectrum of principles and beliefs about their origins.
The Americans must decide between traditional liberalism which has safeguarded long-term stability, and a Utopian liberalism, which shuns the laws of nature and thus always ends in disaster.
