Trump has probably become the greatest living exemplar of free speech in the twenty-first century. As he put it, we can’t improve if political correctness prevents us from even talking honestly about what our problems are.

It is unconscionable that for decades we’ve expected heroes maimed by American involvement in unresolved conflicts overseas, and the families of those killed in those fights, to accept “We tried” as the best assessment of what was achieved by the fighting. Surveys now show most American soldiers think our recent wars have been unproductive. Maybe they, away from the spin machines of the Washington policy establishment, know what they’re talking about.

A two-party cartel, entrenched and self-serving, soon looks like the most natural manifestation of democracy imaginable. The heads of those two parties argue when they must, each party hoping to differentiate itself from the other just enough to eke out a victory in the next election — but neither wants to argue for, or if elected institute, change so fundamental that it would destroy all the stuff that the leaders of the two parties have in common with each other and not with you, the general public: unearned use of $4 trillion a year, the power to regulate, and the endless attention of fawning lobbyists and Washington powerbrokers.

It is hard to imagine someone like Harris becoming a merciful president, if American citizens find themselves running afoul of overly harsh regulations. As for Biden, he’ll shift with the political winds as he always has, talking like a champion of desegregation today but opposing busing of students to integrate racially homogeneous school districts four decades ago.

Trump sees that these issues — sound economics and a nationalist foreign policy orientation — go together for reasons much more logical than knee-jerk opposition to all interaction with foreigners. His instinctual wariness of deadbeats and moochers leads him to be skeptical of both Europe’s socialist redistributionist tendencies in economics and its post–World War II tendency to let

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Ask yourself whether you can distinguish between the foreign policies of Hillary Clinton and the late John McCain. Both advocated toppling governments around the world. Both backed the Iraq War. Both were aghast at the election of Donald Trump, who had said for decades that wars are a terrible waste of lives and money.

It’s not so crazy — it just isn’t necessarily as objective an accounting of the costs as would be made in a pure free market, where you had to pay for the land where pipelines sit with your own money, defend pipelines in trouble spots with your own gun, and fight foreign dictators with your own mercenary army. If you’re willing to do all that — without violating human rights in those countries — more power to you, no pun intended.

But the two parties were never quite literally opposites in their philosophies. The old Democrat formula, ideally stated, was something like: a big welfare and regulatory state combined with an American military subordinated to big international alliances and treaty organizations. The old Republican formula, ideally stated, was something like: free trade, big business, opposition to welfare, legislation defending traditional morality (such as pushing for pro-life measures when possible), plus never-ending military engagements overseas, with every dictator around the world due to become our fighting foe eventually.

Hanson sees a similar desire to boost national morale while also getting the biggest bang for your cautiously spent buck (or your solidus, in the case of the Byzantine Empire) in many great leaders of the past, including Pericles, Alexander the Great, Justinian’s predecessors Augustus and Constantine, the later Holy Roman Emperors Charlemagne and Joseph II, Queen Elizabeth I and Churchill of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Abraham Lincoln. They were important not just because of military victories, argues Hanson. They shared a similar nationalist conviction: “They have a historical sense that decline is not a matter of exhaustion of natural resources, or it’s not predicated on enemies over the next hill. Usually, it’s internal.

offer these stats (some of the many such facts I like to share on my Twitter feed and podcast): Two hundred years ago, 84% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, 90% don’t. 83% didn’t have a basic education. Today, 86% do. 1% lived in a democracy. Today just 44% don’t. The child mortality rate was 43%. Today, it’s 4%. All thanks to the free market socialists want to destroy. If anything, economic growth rates and progress have slowed in the past few decades as the welfare state, to which the socialists give all the credit for such advances, grew. The new socialists and Democrats steadfastly ignore these facts. And it is this delusion that makes the MAGA Doctrine more important than ever.

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Donald Trump has always been a builder, from hotels to casinos to golf courses — Barack Obama was a community organizer who gave impressive speeches. However, one of the least eloquent points that President Obama made during a speech was his infamous line “You didn’t build that.” It’s no surprise that President Trump understands that businesses and growth are good for the economy and create jobs, while President Obama focused on the government as the solution.

She also defended law enforcement officials who got convictions by withholding evidence or falsifying confessions. It is terrifying to think that about an eighth of the US prison population lives in a state with such a coldly bureaucratic conception of justice. (She may have had coldly careerist notions about sex back in the ’90s as well, since she notoriously slept with San Francisco assembly speaker Willie Brown, who was still married at the time, as he appointed her to a series of well-paid city positions.)