Trump: Pragmatic Nationalism, Cruz: Traditional Constitutionalism, Rubio: Idealist Internationalism

How have the three leading Republican candidates responded to the idea of American exceptionalism? John Zmirak writes at The Stream,

Pragmatic Nationalism
Donald Trump has adopted this view, which asserts that national cohesion and solidarity should override economic efficiency — hence tariff barriers and other protectionist measures. It concentrates on American “greatness” in terms of economic muscle, military preparedness and assertiveness on behalf of American interests abroad. It pays scant regard to Constitutional niceties like the Separation of Powers or civil liberties, property rights (see eminent domain) or the dictates of just war teaching — much less the international law that grew out of such Christian roots. Hence Trump’s willingness to kill off the family members of terrorists, something which even embattled Israel, under much greater provocation, has never come close to doing. On this view, America is exceptional because it is big and powerful enough to exempt itself from the rules that bind other countries. For historic parallels, see Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson.

Traditional Constitutionalism
This worldview, which used to be called more simply “conservatism,” is most clearly represented by Ted Cruz — a man who is ready with a detailed Constitutional justification of his position on any given issue. For him, the U.S. founding was a providential event, and it documents a kind of secular scripture, which we as citizens must revere as the source of our national self-esteem.

Cruz’s economics are more conventionally free market, convinced as he is by the arguments which conservatives have been making since roughly 1932 against the expansion of state control over citizens’ economic and personal lives.

Cruz’s foreign policy is not blatantly amoral like Trump’s, but his vision of what America can achieve is distinctly tinged by an Augustinian sense that we, too are fallen, and sharply limited in what we can achieve in foreign countries with profoundly alien cultures.

On immigration, Cruz seems more outraged by the blatant disregard for law than he is worried by cultural displacement. However, Cruz sees how the growth of government, and disregard for the Constitution (among other key American traditions) is goaded by mass immigration of low-skilled people from countries without our civic heritage, so he seems willing to pare back legal immigration as well. Given forty years of flat wage growth among less-skilled American workers, and the prominence of Muslims whose deepest religious tenets are anti-Constitutional, Cruz’s position here has significant policy overlap with Trump’s, though the reasons underlying it are different.

For this school of thought, America is exceptional because the civic culture that gave it birth was exceptionally compatible with human flourishing. Not every culture on earth, in foreign nations or among potential immigrants, is compatible with our civics. Historic parallels: William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge.

Idealist Internationalism
With the fall of Communism and the rise of Islamic jihad, prominent thinkers of the center-right and center-left converged to agree on various forms of this theory as the proper approach to combating Islamist extremism, though they didn’t always agree on how it should be implemented effectively (e.g., the war in Iraq). As Stephen Bannon and Alexander Marlow argue, this theory also has strong implications for immigration policy:

[I]f the issue is saving the world — and it always is — then part of the save-the-world plan means accommodating, and welcoming, refugee flows.

Yes, refugees from Somalia, Syria, anywhere — they all must come here, so that the US can “show leadership.” That is, we must take immigrants by the thousands, even millions, as a way of pointing other countries, as well, to the virtuous path. … Thus it should come as no surprise that National Review’s Johnson reports that one of Rubio’s mentors is former Bush 43 national-security adviser Stephen Hadley. In the White House, Hadley was a champion of open borders, and just recently, he signed a letter with 19 other foreign policy savants, from both parties, calling for the US to take in Syrian refugees.
While Rubio has backed away from the large-scale expansion of low-skill immigrants that was part of his Gang-of-Eight bill, his stance on immigration still bears the stamp of Internationalist optimism about the capacity of America to assimilate migrants from countries with dysfunctional political systems and unfree civic cultures. On this view, America itself is seen as a transformative force, whose philosophical integrity and dynamism renders it almost immune from being itself transformed, by the ideas and habits which large numbers of immigrants bring with them. That’s why Rubio has said that America should welcome Syrian refugees, if it were possible to vet them for current terrorist ties (which he thinks isn’t possible now). A Jackson or a Coolidge would question the wisdom of accepting many thousands of Muslims, with or without terrorist connections.

Here Senator Rubio’s call to unseat Syria’s president Assad is instructive. For the U.S. to cooperate with or even tolerate dictators such as Syria’s Assad (as a lesser evil than the rise of Islamists who might persecute Christians) is for us to admit defeat of our ideals, to surrender our national mission and plunge into moral relativism — suggesting that liberty is only available to certain countries and cultures, especially those with a Christian, or even an Anglo-Protestant heritage. Historical parallels: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George W. Bush.

Of course, on this historical side of the wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, the nation-building aspirations of most American policymakers have been tempered to one degree or another. None of the three candidates will speak as President Bush spoke before the Iraq War. And all now avoid direct talk of amnesty and recognize the dangers of Muslim refugees. But the deep differences of world view remain, and they will matter. It will be up to conservative media to make sure that these philosophical differences are discussed with sufficient nuance that voters can decide among them wisely.

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