The great realignment

Last week President Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Orban. Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness,

One fruit of Orbán’s curiosity is his understanding of the existential peril that Hungary faces. Dismembered in the aftermath of World War I, oppressed first by the Nazis, then the Soviets, unsettled more recently by threat of untrammeled immigration, it now faces the transnational progressive threat of an encroaching European Union for which nationalities are atavistic impediments on the road to liberal paradise (at least for the winners in Brussels and Berlin).

...Max Boot warns that Trump is “attempting to apply Orbanism to the United States.” What do you suppose that means? Here is a list of a few recent initiatives undertaken by the president:

On Tuesday, he gave a speech in Louisiana marking first export shipment of liquified natural gas from a new $10 billion facility.
On Wednesday, he spoke in honor of police officers killed in the line of duty, demonstrating his commitment to law enforcement.
On Thursday, he delivered a major speech on immigration reform, outlining his ideas for stopping illegal immigration and inaugurating a system of legal immigration based on merit. America welcomes with open arms those immigrants who come with something to contribute to America, including the desire to assimilate and become Americans in spirit as well as mailing address.
On Friday, in a speech to national realtors—the country’s largest trade association—he spoke about how America’s economic boom was making it possible for more and more Americans to pursue the “American dream” of home ownership.
If any of these speeches is an instance of Trump’s following Orbán’s “sinister” example (as Boot charged), I for one applaud his course of action.

Donald Trump is a sort of dynamo. Has any president done more to keep his campaign promises? How much richer, most secure, freer are we today than we were under the watchful eye of Barack Obama? And note that the swamp-like areas of life that remain unfree are those areas still under the jurisdiction of such “progressive” phenomena as Title IX hysteria on college campuses and the spirit of censorship that has disrupted the culture of social media and other “woke” initiatives.

The real battle that has been joined—and it is a battle that is forging a great political realignment—is not between virtuous progressive knights riding the steeds of liberalism, on the one hand, and the atavistic forces of untutored darkness represented by “populism,” on the other.

The real battle is between two views of liberty. One is a parochial view that affirms tradition, local affection, and the subordination of politics to the ordinary business of life. The other is more ambitious but more abstract. It seeks nothing less than to boost us all up to that plane of enlightenment from which all self-interested actions look petty, if not criminal, and through which mankind as a whole (but not alas individual men) may hope for whatever salvation secularism leavened by utilitarianism may provide.

We are still in the opening sallies of the Great Realignment. Many old alliances will be broken, many new ones formed. I expect a lot of heat, and even more smoke. I hope that there will also be at least occasional flashes of light.

Read more here.