And we didn't meet a single dislikable person. Not that day or any other.

Heh. Brian Micklethwait has some comments on Trump's July 4th speech.

I especially like what Trump said about how the fundamental principles of the USA meant that those principles would, in the end, put an end to slavery and legally imposed racial discrimination. The fundamental principles bloody well took their time, but they eventually did just this.

Here, in case you doubt me, is how Trump said this:

We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed “a promissory note” to every future generation. Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals. Those ideals are so important to us – the founding ideals. He called on his fellow citizens not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.

Micklethwait points out

The New York Times and the Washington Post, echoed by many other organs in America and beyond, have described Trump’s speech as “dark and divisive”. Well, it was a bit divisive. It divided Americans into two camps. In the one camp are violent looters and rioters and despotic cancellers, and their enablers in slightly less impolite society, like the people who run the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the other camp are all the many Americans of the sort who feel approximately as I do about America and its flawed and violent but nevertheless inspiring history.

[snip]

To call this speech racially divisive, as many have, is a flat out lie.

And, a “dark” speech? Again, I don’t think so. Naive and optimistic, starry-eyed even, historically over-simplified, yes, maybe all of that. But “dark”? Hardly.

But what of Trump’s enemies? The rioters are saying: “Screw America, smash America!” Their Democrat enablers indoors are saying: “America, you want this to stop? Vote for us, and then we’ll stop it. Meanwhile, it’s all Trump’s fault.” That’s rather “dark”, isn’t it?

Micklethwait is right. The dividing line between authoritarian, racist, violent, cancel-culture, politics of personal destruction Critical Theory/Social Justice Warriors is getting much clearer. There are the Critical Theory/Social Justice/Postmodernist/Frankfurt School reform Marxists on one side of the line being cheered on by the mainstream media and academia and on the other are left leaning liberals, Classical Liberals, Moderates and any number of types of conservatives (Lockean, Burkean, Chestertonian, Religious, Social, Hayekian, etc.)

The more Trump illuminates the divide, the darker it is for the New York Times and the Washington Post. All of a sudden the Washington's 2016 pretentiously melodramatic slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness", takes on a new and prophetic tone. Our Democracy does die in the darkness of the Critical Theory Social Justice movement. The more light shed on Critical Theory Social Justice, the more it shrinks away.

Micklethwait reminds us that the pride and celebration reflected in Trump's speech has echoes of an essay from decades ago, which I read in college (definitely not as assigned reading), Ferrari Reinvents Manifest Destiny: P.J. O'Rourke and a Ferrari 308GTS: A blood-red 308GTS streaks west, warning the third world to get its crummy oxcarts out of the road, by P.J. O'Rourke in June 1980.

As soon as Micklethwait mentioned it, I knew exactly what he was talking about. The essay is O'Rourke's reporting of his one week, high speed race across America, stopping and eating, touring, and refueling as he went. I loved the essay then and was happy to reread it now. It is peak O'Rourke.

We made it from Atlanta to Dallas in twelve and a half hours. But that was because we were just cruising, you know, taking in the scenery and enjoying the local color. Besides, we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper camper traffic all the way to Birmingham. Some big collegiate sports event was under way—the University of South Carolina versus Alabama's Crimson Tide in a varsity dogfight, to judge by the fans. No, no, I won't make fun of those good old boys in their Winnebagos driving since dawn with their good old families all the way from Columbia and Charleston and Beaufort just to root for the team of their choice. No, I won't crack wise about the denizens of that fair corner of the free world, because I feel too good about Western Civilization. And the reason I feel too good about Western Civilization is that there I was a living, breathing part of it, in the best damn car I've ever driven, smack in the middle of the best damn country there's ever been on earth. And, also, because cutting in and out of those giant travel homes at a hundred miles an hour is more fun than a Marseille shore leave, and hardly anybody riding in them threw beer cans at us either. Zoom, zoom, zip, zip, I couldn't have been happier if I'd had a sack full of Iranian radicals to drag behind me.

Heh.

What wonderfully absurdist common sense, wryly delivered. There are a couple of sections where there are obvious echoes of the sentiment evoked by Trump.

And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it's all part of Western Civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs. And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, kidnap all those Africans, and kill all the Indians in the Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one's destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can't do. Maybe we don't happen to build Ferraris, but that's not because there's anything wrong with America. We just haven't turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?

And I have always remembered this passage across the years as a paean to the American miracle.

Julian hit the record high speed of our trip, 140, on I-10 going into Deming, New Mexico. And at Lordsburg we turned off onto U.S. 70 up into the mountains and Indian reservations east of Phoenix and from there across the desert all the way to Lake Mead. And we didn't meet a single dislikable person. Not that day or any other, from the puzzled receptionist at Ferrari North America to Officer Huyenga of the California Highway Patrol. Fine, upstanding, friendly, outgoing Americans who wanted to know how fast it would go, every one. It was truly heartening. The nicest bunch of people you'd ever care to meet. It made me wish I didn't belong to the Republican Party and the NRA just so I could go out and join both to defend it all. And rolling through the desert thus, I worked myself into a great patriotic frenzy, which culminated on the parapets of Hoover Dam (even if that was kind of a socialistic project and built by the Roosevelt in the wheelchair and not by the good one who killed bears) with the Ferrari parked up atop that orgasmic arc of cement, doors flung open and Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" blasting into the night above the rush of a man-crafted Niagara and the crackle and the hum of mighty dynamos. Uplifted, transported, ecstatic I was, as a black man in a big, solid Eldorado pulled up next to us and got out to shake our hands. "You passed me this morning down in New Mexico," he said. "And that sure is a beautiful car. And you sure must have been moving because I've been going 90 on the turnpike all day and haven't stopped for anything but gas and I just caught up with you now." But we hadn't been on the turnpike, we told him. We'd been all through the mountains and had stopped for lunch and had been caught in Phoenix traffic half the afternoon. "Goddamn!" he said, "that's beautiful!" Now where on the face of God's green earth are you going to find a country with people like that in it? Answer me that and tell me any place but here and I'll strangle you for a Communist spy.

That's the spirit. The huge spirit.