F.H. Buckley

Since I had written speeches for Trump and his family in 2016, I was asked to provide an inauguration address for him. What I came up with was the kind of speech that Biden delivered today, a healing speech that reached back to earlier ones that had been given by Martin Luther King and JFK. But when I listened to Trump’s inaugural speech, from the balcony of the Canadian Embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue, I knew that my speechwriting days were over. Trump’s address was an angry, Bannonite screed devoid of any sense of graciousness. Biden’s halting delivery today reminded us why a majority of Americans had supported him. It wasn’t his sparkling personality. Rather, he was Chance the gardener, the un-Trump.

Americans enjoyed a tremendous sense of solidarity in the days following 9/11. People gathered on street corners, at subway stops, holding small candles, and for a time we quite forgot about politics. I had expected something like this to happen now, during the corona pandemic. But it hasn’t, and this has made me think that the country’s breakup is even more likely than I had thought when my book, American Secession, was published in January. One difference, of course, is that we’re not supposed to be together during an pandemic. We’re supposed to be six feet apart, the length of a hockey stick. We don’t do group hugs anymore. If you’re a misanthrope, these are the glory days.

People are seeing a comparison between Boris Johnson’s Conservatives and Trump Republicans. In the Wall Street Journal, Dominic Green tells us that both are populists, as if the Brits were emulating Americans. But it’s the other way around. We’re emulating the Brits. On the right, we’re enjoying a Tory Moment. Trump put together a coalition that was right-of-center on social issues and middle-of-the-road or left-of-center on economic issues. It was, as I explained at the time, the sweet spot in American politics, the place where presidential elections are won. Previously, we’d been asked to choose between extreme social liberals on the left and free market libertarians on the right, and the voters were tired of this. Trump gave them what they had been looking for.

The United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this? Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together.

Of all the things candidate Trump said, nothing outraged the Democrats more than his claim that, under him, the GOP would become a workers party. The workers! The Democrats thought they had ownership of that label. And at one time they did. But that was long ago, and by appropriating it Trump was announcing a revolution in American politics. After past economic downturns the American economy always bounced back, but after the Great Recession of 2008-09 we experienced the slowest recovery since the Great Depression, in terms of jobs and wages. That was the new normal, we were told. Those manufacturing jobs were never coming back. We also told pollsters that we no longer thought that our children would have it better than we did.

Something has happened to us, coarsened us, made us more uncaring. It’s not something we saw happening, but one day we saw an unfamiliar face in the mirror. That’s what moral decay is like. We discover with a start that we enjoy something that would have revolted us in our more innocent days, such as the voyeuristic thrill of reading J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy or watching television series such as Breaking Bad and Justified, about a passively rotten working class that quite deserves our contempt. Not that I have a problem with J. D. Vance. Rather, it’s with the people who enjoyed his book.

Over the course of 2016, together with my wife and the sainted Bob Tyrrell of the American Spectator, I wrote several campaign speeches for Donald Trump and his family. They were well-received, and in December of that year, at the suggestion of Stephen Miller, I prepared an Inaugural Address for the president-elect. The American president is the country’s head of state as well as its head of government. That asks grubby politicians to pretend that they’re the country’s pontifex maximus, the bearer of sacred fire. And so, after the mud-slinging of a presidential contest, we ask the winner to give a soaring address that inspires Americans and sends us home with a comforting sense of our star-spangled awesomeness.