Nikki Haley deserves credit as the one cabinet-level appointee who has consistently implemented President Trump’s policy, according to both the words and spirit he articulates. In her area of responsibility, there has been not a hint of the contrary disposition that has, for example, marred the tenure of more than one or two other members of Trump’s cabinet.
Supporters anxious for the success of Trump’s efforts to restore and defend the sovereign identity of the American people have reason to regret Ambassador Haley’s decision to resign, for she has consistently represented Trump’s reassertion of our nation’s self-confidence.
It’s especially regrettable in light of recent speeches by Trump and his secretary of state reiterating the well-founded premises of America’s vocation of leadership in the world.
Secretary Pompeo’s speech thoughtfully reiterated the principled foundation of those premises, first set forth in the American Declaration of Independence, which foresightful American statecraft has consistently upheld since the America people first appeared as such on the world stage.
Trump’s recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly reiterated the commitment to cooperation among individual nations, respected as such, that informed our vital contribution to the survival of humane justice and liberty in the 20th century.
He did so in conformity with the federalist principles that inform our constitution of government at all levels. Those principles have allowed people from every nation on earth to add their distinctive threads to the fabric of our national identity while affirming our commitment to the common sense of right, justice and lawfulness that respects the transcendent spiritual and moral substance we share as human beings.
Like the tributaries of a mighty stream, people from different nations surge together, dangerously at times, but according to a pattern of common decency that respects gleaming facets of human existence each people contributes, thus shedding light on the special prospects of humanity as a whole.
Both Trump’s U.N. speech and Secretary Pompeo’s reiteration of America’s foundational principles accentuated the special commitment of the American people to the prismatic wholesomeness of human existence.
But President Trump also celebrated our nation’s rejection of the totalitarian communist and socialist ideologies that always and egregiously have failed to achieve their bold promises of human equality, peace, and prosperity. He frankly observed that they have failed because they viciously, violently repress the plenitude of human existence, rather than striving, within just bounds of natural decency, to respect its proven potential for great achievement.
People who hate and seek to destroy the United States have every incentive to embrace and tout the socialists’ evidently false egalitarian promises of peace and universal caring. Once they achieve total control of government, they have everywhere re-established self-selecting oligarchies, prone violently to persecute, dispossess and kill all who refuse to accept their toxic abuses of power.
In their just-concluded effort to sabotage the Constitutional process for confirming presidential appointments, the speech and deportment of Congressional and other Democrats revealed their intention to follow this rabidly vicious pattern for a totalitarian dictatorship.
No one familiar with the history of totalitarian ideological movements expected them to do otherwise. They view history as a train of thought driven entirely by the impulse of power. There is nothing right or wrong, good or bad but in terms proved, and therefore approved by the manifestation of superior power.
The idea that there is some transcendent spark in every human person, enlightening and enlivening each individual’s intrinsic worth, has no place in their calculations. Their “egalitarianism” consists in understanding that a human being has no more worth than a lump of coal or grain of sand. Each is valuable only in terms of their contribution to amassing power.
This is why the totalitarians care only so easily consider people to be “masses,” as if human beings exist as inert lumps; excrescences of material force with no inner meaning or even existence, but in material terms.
Though they pretend to respect scientific reasoning, they acknowledge no “reason” for anything at all but in effect. Theirs is a universe in which all meaning is confined to things, accretions of force meaningless in themselves, and evaluated in human terms by emotions fortuitous in every respect but the pattern of their material effects.
There is thus no order in things, only in power, confected in and through the otherwise meaningless interactions of things. Totalitarians obsessively strive to impose order according to their will because there is no “will” — i.e., no meaningful future state — but in consequence of that imposition. But if there is no meaning but from their will, nothing but what conforms to their will has meaning, including other human beings who in any way resist what they seek to impose.
The Trump administration’s diplomacy reiterates the fact that the people of the United States came into existence in respect of an understanding of right and justice utterly at odds with totalitarian ideology. That ideology rejects the notion that every human being is the provision of a will that, at all events, substantiates human existence, recognizing that it has meaning as such, before as well as after it becomes what it is meant to be.
In terms of the Declaration in which the American people Declare that they are entitled to assume “among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the law of nature and of nature’s God entitles them,” it relies on the premise that we exist as a people because God informed our existence — first as individuals and then because of our share goodwill as a whole.
God’s information, therefore, gives form and substance to our existence, quite apart from happenstance, because events themselves are informed by the very will that makes us what we are. What God has foreseen is our destiny. It is fulfilled already, in His thought, however errant the courses of history that purport to thwart the fulfillment of His intention.
And we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified (Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans, 8:28)
The totalitarian, elitist America haters encourage us to forget that this explication of the meaning, purpose, and destiny of our humanity states the essential paradox of a self-conscious (and therefore partially self-willed) human condition more succinctly and with greater truth (in terms of the common sense of humankind) than the tomes of Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche.
It does so honestly while acknowledging the inevitable assumption of God– which in one form or another, even the totalitarians cannot avoid, yet consistently deny, obfuscate or simply ignore.
God is the assumption of right that makes sense of America’s doctrine of unalienable right and justice. God is the assumption of self-discipline required to assert human self-government in terms that explain the imperative of civility, without which that self-government destroys itself. God is the assumption of love that reveals at the heart of our self-consciousness, the reason for our stubborn sense of worth.
Like many presidents before him, Trump verified this critical assumption at the conclusion of his speech to the U.N. General Assembly:
So together, let us choose a future of patriotism, prosperity, and pride. Let us choose peace and freedom over domination and defeat. And let us come here to this place to stand for our people and their nations, forever strong, forever sovereign, forever just, and forever thankful for the grace and the goodness and the glory of God.
In the 20th Century, the United States became the focal point for co-operation against violently repressive socialist totalitarianism. The Trump administration appears to be returning to the vision of true diversity that helped succeed in that leadership role.
I pray that Trump will continue, as well, to reiterate the God-revering principles that comprise the strong foundation of that vision. By doing so, he will inspire to thwart the haters, as we reclaim the love of God and country that mean certain defeat for the America-hating elitists now seeking to disintegrate us.
Dr. Alan Keyes is a political activist, prolific writer, former diplomat, and the founder of LoyaltoLiberty.com
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
