American Caesar, Pennsylvania Rubicon – Rod Dreher

The annals of American history will have few artifacts as potent as the iconic image taken by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci, of a bloodied but defiant Trump, rising from a symbolic grave, fist raised, and framed by an American flag. This election is likely over. Trump went down as a fatmouthing politician, and rose as a pagan demigod. If Jesus Christ and George Washington came down from heaven to replace Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket, Trump would still likely win in a landslide.

Contemporary American history has now passed into the realm of the mythic. It would have been so had the shooter never crawled onto the roof on Saturday evening in Pennsylvania. Joe Biden—the quintessential creature of the Washington establishment, now enfeebled but clinging desperately to power, even if he takes his party down with him—is a perfect symbol of an exhausted America, drained of its power, but not its arrogance.

Now, though, even Shakespeare would have hesitated to write a script like this.

When Trump rose from what could have been his deathbed had the bullet passed only a millimeter more to the right, and pumped the air with his fist, shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, I felt a sense of electricity pass down my spine. Many Americans no doubt did—and maybe European conservatives too, sick and tired of left-wing bullying. It is early yet, and we don’t know at this writing what the motivations of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, might have been. Yet speaking emotionally—and people vote on emotions more than on dispassionate reasoning—this is what it feels like to me. This is the pattern that I see:

• They wouldn’t leave Evangelical Christian Jack Phillips alone to bake his cakes and run his business.
• They won’t let parents know if their children are transitioning themselves in school.
• They won’t let parents remove pornographic books from school libraries.
• They teach little children and teenage minors to hate everything normal—their families, their own bodies, even their very identity.
• They told us that the President of the United States was a Russian Manchurian (Siberian?) candidate, and crippled his administration with these lies.
• They told us Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, though they knew it was not.
• They lied to us about COVID and its origins.
• They told us that we couldn’t have even a semblance of a normal life because of COVID…unless we were going out onto the streets to protest racism, or burn the cities down to honor George Floyd in “mostly peaceful” riots.
• They have turned professional journalism into propaganda to support left-wing narratives. For example, they ignored obvious signs of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline into decrepitude, until he choked on live TV—and are now shocked, shocked that the White House deceived them.
• They tried to ruin a high school kid who wore a MAGA hat on the Washington Mall, set upon by a provocative left-wing activist, as a bigot.
• They have conspired to destroy institutions essential to running society by keeping out the accomplished and the meritorious, for the sake of letting in those who are incapable of doing the work, but who possess the favored demographic profile.
• They have divided America and made us fear and loathe each other on racial lines.
• They have demonized white people—especially white men.
• They have destroyed statues and attempted to rewrite American history to reflect ideological convictions.
• They have led near-pogroms against Jews on elite American campuses, permitted looting in American downtowns, and in some West Coast cities, allowed Antifa to carry out a reign of terror.
• They secretly pressured, via the power of the transgender Biden assistant health secretary, a policymaking medical organization to abandon scientific considerations in order to eliminate lower limits on sexually and psychologically mutilating children.
• They passed laws in some states allowing the government to seize minor children from their uncooperative parents, for the sake of sexually and psychologically mutilating them.
• They are destroying women’s sports, and making women everywhere more vulnerable to mentally unwell men who think they are women.
• They gaslit us into war in Iraq, and now they’ve gaslit us into an ongoing, unwinnable war against Russia, risking World War III for no plausible national interest, and to the benefit of the defense contractors.
• They are wrecking the military with DEI, such that fewer normal men want to serve.
• They have frightened millions of Americans into silence over fear of cancellation.
• They have left the back door into the U.S. wide open for migrants, including Hezbollah fighters, likely Chinese agents, and others.
• They shipped America’s manufacturing base overseas, and blame Americans for being unhappy with their economic prospects.
• They colluded with their European elite counterparts to demonize Hungary and to trick Europe into turning itself into a vassal of American interests.
• They deregulated Wall Street, and when it blew up in 2008, managed to avoid punishing anyone for it.
• They failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no senior military commander lost his job for it, even though the 2014 Afghanistan Papers report revealed that the Pentagon didn’t know what it was doing, and didn’t care.
• They swept under the rug all those American soldiers, physically and psychologically maimed by the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, and by the stupidity of trying to build a liberal democracy in Afghanistan.
• They declared that Americans who dissent from all this are on the “far right” and might be “domestic terrorists”—while mollycoddling violent leftists.

• And now … an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate of the Right who, however raggedly, defied what they stand for.

Who are “they”? Not a conspiracy. There doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. It’s all out in the open now. This is the American ruling class—in part what the American neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin calls “the Cathedral.” They run all the institutions, even the woke U.S. military, which fewer and fewer normal young men want to join now. They are mostly on the Left, but not entirely. After all, it wasn’t a Democratic president who invaded innocent Iraq, and wasted blood and treasure trying to build liberal democracy in the Middle East and Afghanistan. 

It was good, I guess, to hear Democratic leaders denounce the attempted assassination. That said, they have for months been denouncing Trump as an “existential threat” (Biden’s words) to American democracy. Two weeks ago, the leading liberal online magazine Vox published an analysis headlined, “Democrats Say Trump Is An Existential Threat. They’re Not Acting Like It.”

Well, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, acted like what you would expect someone would do if they came to believe their country was under siege by a fascist. The New Republic magazine intentionally morphed Trump’s face into a 1932 Nazi Party campaign poster for Adolf Hitler. If you were a 20-year-old man who had become convinced that Trump was the second coming of Hitler, and nobody was doing anything meaningful to stop him, what would you do?

The Left is so exquisitely sensitive to the harmful power of words that they will try to destroy someone who ‘misgenders’ a trans person, or who otherwise steps on one of the ever-moving land mines the woke culture-war combatants lay. But they casually denounce Trump as a totalitarian, mass-murdering monster, and are shocked, shocked when someone in this country of 350 million people takes them seriously.

So, yes: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” If the backlash doesn’t come now, then when will it? What will it take to cast the die? As far back as early 2016, when most respectable opinion laughed at Donald Trump as a boob, Tucker Carlson nailed the power of Trump in a prophetic Politico essay called, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.” Carlson blamed the GOP for Trump’s rise, saying, “He exists because you failed.”

It was true then, though Carlson was one of the few to see it so early. Now, eight years on, it’s much clearer that Trump exists because not only the Republicans failed, but the American ruling class failed. Finally, though, this attempted murder may galvanize both Trump and a majority of the American people to deal with the Left decisively. We must hope so. And yet, honesty requires us to recognize that Trump could emerge out of this crucible as an American hero, or as an avatar of vengeance.

Whatever is to come, Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci’s staggeringly powerful image of bloodied Trump with the flag called to mind the famous photograph if U.S. Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima in the waning days of World War II—an image captured by another AP photographer, Joe Rosenthal. The Rosenthal shot marks the beginning of Pax Americana, and the rise of the American Empire masquerading as a Republic; the Vucci image, by contrast, comes at the end of the same: with a drained and divided America in retreat from the world, and from its own founding principles. The two images, side by side, are mythic bookends to what looks like a multivolume history of the rise and fall of a great nation.

That America operated as an empire under the form of liberal democracy only goes to show that history, unlike God, writes crooked with straight lines. It is the decline of empire that may coincide with the advent of strongman government. The young man who tried to kill Trump might have thought he was going to save America from Caesar. It is entirely possible that in so doing, and failing, he will have delivered the country into the hands of one. And the revolting behavior of the American ruling class and its woke janissaries who spent the past 40 years marching through the institutions will have inclined most of us toward welcoming him.

I hope I’m wrong. Again: it’s early yet. But yesterday felt like a Rubicon moment. We have all been wondering for some years now if the center would hold. Now we are about to find out.