Washington vs. Trump

It is hard to believe that our first and best President, George Washington, was born nearly three centuries ago.

This morning, I chose to commemorate the birth of this great man, to whom so many owe so much, by reading his farewell address, by which he notably -- in contrast to the current holder of his office -- declined a third term as President.

The document lives up to its premise as advice from a parting friend in its warmth and wisdom.

That friend provides us with ample warning against despotism which we would do well to heed today:

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

...

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. [bold added]

We are domestically in exactly the precarious position described above: Both parties are fundamentally anti-liberty and anti-American, and we now have a President clearly eager to fan the flames of tribalism to pit us against each other for his own aggrandizement.

Within the world, things are equally dire:

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

Trump's girlish crush on Vladimir Putin -- and the sympathy of many in his own party to Russia's theocratic, anti-liberty bent -- are even now damaging our nation's interests in favor of those of a war-mongering aggressor state we should be allowing (if not helping) to collapse due to its own folly.

As Washington himself would allow -- True leaders are man enough to admit that they are fallible. -- I don't agree with everything he says. But he is fundamentally correct about the need to preserve our nation's carefully crafted form of government so that it remains a powerful guarantor of liberty and at the same time too clumsy for a power-luster to abuse.

-- CAV