Your absolute must-read for today

At City Journal, Harvey Mansfield offers an essay spurred by this circumstance and this thought:

A conference that I attended recently at the Chateau of Alexis de Tocqueville in Normandy brought me to confront Tocqueville with Donald Trump. I did not see how I as an American, just now, could come to Europe and say nothing about America’s latest choice as president.

He explores a couple of dichotomies that we find particularly pressing in the present moment, but that have always been with us in some form:

• the particularities that make for a distinct culture in a particular land and the diminishing of those by the advent of global supply chains and international trade in general, or, as Mansfield puts it, "the tension between nation and commerce," and
• equality and hierarchy

It's one of those pieces the contours of which find their convergence at the end, but it's also full of great money lines. In fact, those money lines, presented in sequence, can give one some idea of those contours and their convergence:

"Tocqueville was a great thinker, a philosopher greater even than his admirers believe, and Trump is great mainly in the amazing extent of his pettiness and willingness to level insults at his rivals. Occasionally, he reaches upward, as in his recent speech at the World War II invasion beaches of Normandy, not far from the Tocqueville Chateau, though he frequently spoils his moments of elevation with a cheap remark."

"In two well-separated passages in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), [Montesquieu, one of Tocqueville's favorite authors] says, first, that 'movable wealth . . . belongs to the whole world, which in this regard comprises but a single state of which all societies are members,' but later, in the context of political laws for a nation, says it is among the right of nations that a “great state” can exclude one 'imbued with foreign maxims' in the royal succession under the principle (set in capital letters) that “the well-being of the people is the supreme law.' Montesquieu adds that 'men care prodigiously for their laws and their customs; these make the felicity of every nation; it is rare for them to be changed without great upsets and great shedding of blood.'"

"A demagogue in the classical sense is one who seeks to be loved indiscriminately, not caring by whom, one eager to move the people as he or they wish, thus an evil endemic to democracy. Trump’s success in gaining the presidency without experience in diplomacy or government reminds us of the essential vulgarity of democracy, for he is not above or against democracy, as is said by his opponents."

"there are many others who never read books, and in a democracy they have votes. And there are, too, plenty of book-reading intellectuals who are disgusted with the display of easy moral superiority that impels political correctness and has come to be called 'virtue-signaling,' one vice Trump manages to avoid."

"Democracy, with its demand for ever-more equality, robs all inequalities, whether of family, piety, race, sex, birth, or especially intelligence, of any pretense of authority to rule. The result is an anarchy of equals, none having authority over anyone else. Yet democracy has need of precisely the expertise that is the source of inequality in authority."

Ironically, says Mansfield, democracy spawns its own aristocracy, and thus breeds an inherent resentment:

"Democracy, with its demand for ever-more equality, robs all inequalities, whether of family, piety, race, sex, birth, or especially intelligence, of any pretense of authority to rule. The result is an anarchy of equals, none having authority over anyone else. Yet democracy has need of precisely the expertise that is the source of inequality in authority."

He points out that the way Trump rolls is rich in irony:

"[Trump's] policy of 'America First' is ambivalent between hawkish bristling and dovish isolation, as if a nation could warn possible enemies without ever having to punish them in case the warning is ignored. He warns enemies so as not to join the company of the Democrats, but refrains from attacking them in order to distinguish his policy from neoconservatism. This potential for inconsistency can easily upset sound policy, but again, it is a failing more democratic than anti-democratic." 

"Trump is accused of authoritarianism, but this is because he is as impulsive, abrupt, and inconsistent as a democratic majority. Like an untaught, unshackled majority, he seeks the advantage of immediacy against time-consuming, obstructive intermediaries, procedures, and legalities that hinder his, or the popular, will."

And soon afterward Mansfield delivers a money line that brings us to the summation of his position:

"The founders of the American nation would not have admired Donald Trump. "

I'll tease you by leaving it to you to read his concluding paragraph, which expands his subject matter to the level of general principle, principle that we would do well to consider deeply.