Donald Trump: defender of liberalism

Some things are right even if Donald Trump believes them. The President’s Constitution Day speech was a doughty defence of America from the slanders of its enemies domestic, but it was also an uncanny, if wholly inadvertent, defence of liberalism. Uncanny because liberals have waited a long time to hear a senior liberal politician demur from the ascendant anti-liberalism, let alone challenge its ideology head-on, and yet the dissent is being led by an anti-liberal of a different stripe.

Mainstream Democrats quibble here and there with one aspect or another of the new regime — whether the giddy apologias for violence; conspiracy theories about routine, homicidal police racism; or contempt for freedom of speech — but few are willing to attack the worldview in toto. Coercive progressivism is taking over the American centre-left with nary a grunt of resistance.

Speaking yesterday at the National Archives, Trump advanced a populist case for patriotism in American education to counter ‘decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools’.