“To every thing,” observed the sage of Ecclesiastes, “there is a season.... A time to be born, and a time to die; ... A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up,” et cetera. What this estimable observer of human life omitted from his bracing catalogue of oppositions is the fact that one side of these partnerships tends to be much easier to accomplish than the other.
To the eye of experience, this is obvious. How much time, labor, and inherited expertise go into building an automobile, a house, a city, a civilization. How quickly they can be destroyed by disaster or neglect.
...Look at Venezuela. With the world’s largest proven oil reserves, the South American country emerged from military rule in 1959 and became a bastion of prosperity in the Southern hemisphere. Then came the socialist Hugo Chavez in 1999. His policies pushed the country into decline, slowly at first, and then rapidly. Today, under the rule of Chavez’s hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, the country is on the verge of collapse. Inflation is running at 40,000 percent, there are widespread shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities, looting and corruption are rampant, people and capital are fleeing the country.
It did not take long to destroy Venezuela. It will take many years, much heartache and suffering, and enormous resources to put it back together.
Donald Trump's
actions are methodical, thoughtful, and (what’s more) effective. His first seventeen months in office have been nothing less than extraordinary in their litany of successes. Superb judicial appointments, welcome tax and regulatory reform, economic growth, consumer confidence, military preparedness, and that difficult-to-measure but still palpable quality of national morale: all on the upswing. These are good things, not bad things. And they are just a few of the many successes Donald Trump has presided over in his short time in office.
...Moreover, the “dissenters,” far from being a “majority,” are in fact a tiny minority cloistered mostly in three protected menageries: 1) the universities; 2) Hollywood; 3) the media.
...the dirty little secret of The Resistance is that what it is “resisting” are the results of a free, open, and democratic election. Donald Trump won in 2016. Hillary Clinton lost. That is the painful, indigestible, intolerable reality. The Resistance is therefore on the side of the enemies of democracy, and its never-ending cascade of calumnies about how Donald Trump is “dismantling democracy” is just a blind, what Freudians would call “projection” and Marxists “increasing the contradictions.” A more commonplace phrase is “arrant nonsense.” They don’t like the results of the election. That does nothing to invalidate it. They don’t like Trump’s pro-American, pro-growth policies: most people do.
...we contemplate the childish, anti-democratic extravagances of the Resistance, that the contest between barbarism and civilization is perpetual. There are no permanent victories, only permanent values. There is, to quote Ecclesiastes again, “Nothing new under the sun.” It is something worth remembering as you listen to Maxine Waters rage, to anti-Trump television personalities call for a recession to check the president’s popularity, or democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer fantasize about nuclear war in order to undo Donald Trump. CNN’s Jim Acosta is exercised that Donald Trump calls the mainstream media “enemies of the people.” But the people seem to agree with the president. It’s harder to build than destroy.
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