Making America First By Way of Chaos
The major theme of President Trump’s inaugural address was “America First” — to make American, hire American, and buy American. Since his inauguration, he has signed a series of executive orders aimed at this task. The thing that has yet to be answered, however, is what does it mean to make “America First”? There seems to be very little intellectual framework that underscores President Trump and his administration in their project to “make America great again.” The inability for his administration to properly validate their executive orders against standing law displays the disregard they have for the preservation of the republic. The inability to lay out a cohesive set of policy positions that have a coherent function displays the reactionary nature of their leadership. This reactionary nature has lead to contradictions, vapid platitudes, and a strategy best described as chaos.
The problem with labeling it such is that for us, chaos means to be disordered. In Greek, it means nothingness or the void. So, the way I mean chaos is a combination of both — disorder and nothingness. The lack of a clear intellectual framework, a void of principle, stands at the heart of this cacophony of nonsense. One of the essential characteristics of political leadership is the capacity to understand the principles at the bedrock of self-governance (not principles of ideological concern but ones that transcend them) and then take an assessment of reality, constructing a way to respond to reality in a way that is in service to those principles. This is prudence. President Trump has yet to display anything resembling this capacity. Former presidents, ones I’ve agreed with and disagreed with, ones I’ve lived through and ones I’ve only read, have shared in this capacity to greater or lesser extents. This principle is why Lincoln is nearly always second only to Washington because both had amazing prudence. The disorder, drawn from the void of an intellectual center, displays in shocking clarity the lack of prudence from the current president.
If our immigration policy system is flawed, the question is how do we change it without fundamentally tarnishing the principle of being an open society with a republican form of government. His policy is far closer to what Chipotle did when people ate some bad food — shut down, do some re-calibration, and re-open. Works fine when you are selling burritos — the only principle that matters there is making money and if you fail, you open a new burrito restaurant. It doesn’t work when the principles of a country, the leader of the free world, are questioned and where you don’t have the capacity to just shut shop and open a new one. Prudence dictates that sweeping policy changes must be vested in something more than just visceral reaction but so too must be the reaction to the reactionary policy.
The response from the so-called “Resistance” cannot be mere platitude or vague and vapid obfuscation which is nestled within partisanship. The principles of America, of liberty instead of just freedom, of the recognition of human dignity and the value of human life, of the opportunity to seek out human happiness without being limited by the circumstances of your birth; these principles cannot be lost nor can they be corrupted in pursuit of state actions which are antithetical to the purposes of good governance: being a steward of public power for the benefit of the entire public and not just a subsection of it. Democracy can be just as destructive to the ends of government as oligarchy or tyranny. The principles must stand above everything including the Constitution; the Constitution is meant to be a document which enshrines the principles of the nation. Lincoln calls it the ‘frame of silver around the apple of gold.’ America is about those principles, not about documents, not about institutions, not even about the people; it’s about the ideas.
An abdication of those ideas, for whatever reason, guarantees that America will never be first. America cannot ever be first if it’s principles are not enshrined in what we become. America might be able to hire its own before it hires externally; it may be able to purchase goods made here instead of elsewhere; it may be able to seek out agreements which only serve our interests and allow the world to delve into a realpolitik instead of a morally driven understanding of relations. But America will not ever be first unless those principles are in every word and every deed of our country. Leadership by chaos, one which does not seem to root its decision making in those principles, results not only in disordered implementation of questionable policies, an incoherent smattering of reactionary executive orders, or even a devotion to creating (and selling) a media narrative of popularity where none exists. It results in the end of American exceptionalism; we become just like every other country in the world: governed by accident and force, not reflection and choice.
