by Christopher Roach
Trump's conflict with the governing class arises from his rejection of universalism, challenging the liberal belief that all people deserve equal treatment, even at the cost of national interests.
Much of the friction Trump has with the governing class arises from his rejection of universalism, the metaprinciple at the heart of liberalism. This principle declares that one’s brother, father, wife, child, neighbor, countryman, coreligionist, or fellow tribe member are all supposed to be treated no differently from an absolute stranger. For universalists, those naturally closer to us have no priority claims upon our time and resources, and it is unfair and discriminatory to proceed otherwise. After all, we are all human beings.
In the spirit of universalism, we have been taught for many years that America is chiefly an idea or a creed, but these teachers forget to acknowledge that we are also a particular people with a shared history and a shared ancestry living on a particular piece of geography . . . in other words, a nation.
For the universalists, our country is just a grab bag, a money machine for do-gooderism and, more often than not, do-badderism.
NGOs Fuel Mass Illegal Immigration
Universalism ain’t cheap. The waves of illegals who arrived under Joe Biden depend upon an extensive network of nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, charities, and other institutions that paved the way for their arrival, helped them get government aid, or sometimes directly gave them money with no conditions, and collectively have done absolutely nothing to strengthen our country or improve the lot of citizens.
This collection of nonprofits, government-funded NGOs, and charities has become a parallel path for the managerial class, a place to make a living or kill time between administrations. The estimable Z Man has presciently described this ring of organizations as a “shadow government.” Not merely helping refugees, these institutions also engage in other activities important to the government, like fomenting color revolutions abroad and disseminating COVID propaganda at home.
While ostensibly neutral and separate from the government, these cutouts are paid to conduct studies that support government policies, as in the case of foreign “independent” media funded by the U.S. Government, and otherwise to do the government’s bidding with less accountability. Real war nerds may remember a classic example, the idiotic “NAFO” trolling campaign in support of American efforts in Ukraine.
When Trump decreed a pause in government funding of nonprofits to evaluate conformity to his agenda—until foiled by the courts—it quickly created chaos. Perhaps this was by design. While the pause led to some pushback about its scope, the tumult has also exposed the nature and extent of the enormous, parasitical world of government-funded nonprofits.
It turns out a whole bunch of people are on the gravy train, and, without ongoing funding, these organizations would have to fold up the tents, and their people would have to find remunerative, private-sector employment. Much of this work lacks parallels in the for-profit sector, and many of these people are otherwise unemployable because they are ideological true believers and absolute weirdos. Some will drop out from the white-collar middle class into something like waiting tables or working in factories if this funding goes away. Pity.
The funding cut does not merely restrain “woke” stuff. The federal government’s budget is out of hand, having reached astronomical levels during the COVID pandemic. This is why cutting government jobs, which Trump’s voluntary buyout policy will encourage, is not enough.
Most of the government’s money is spent and wasted through contracts with private companies and nonprofits, both large and small, for everything from refugee settlement and “independent media” in Ukraine to endless efforts at COVID education, even now, years after the end of the pandemic.
The portion of that money spent subsidizing an army of unskilled, unemployed, and hostile foreigners is a perverse mockery of what every government is supposed to do. Rather than contributing to the public good, the immigration nonprofits exist to hurt us by facilitating the mass migration of extremely alien foreigners in order to devolve the remaining fragments of national unity that have survived the social changes of the last 50 years. The least we can do is make them pay their own way.
Arguments that this is all some type of noble charity work that we are morally obliged to continue ad infinitum are now falling on deaf ears.
A False Morality is Fueling National Destruction
One of the dumber ideas to grow out of the post-9/11 Global War on Terrorism was the notion that because we had ourselves established a free and democratic government that protected natural rights, somehow we were obliged to export this model of government to the whole world, even in the face of violent resistance.
Missing from this crusading idea was any recognition of the human terrain. People are different. Fitness for self-government depends upon certain traits of culture and character that are themselves revealed only when such a government is a product of a people’s own efforts and struggles. The democracies we imposed on Iraq and Afghanistan quickly became illiberal and unstable because they were not the product of an organic growth but were instead imposed upon them by an overly idealistic and hubristic United States.
The same hubris lies behind much of the immigration-charity industrial complex. Advocates conflate our obligations to foreigners with our obligations to our neighbors and to our people. Indeed, they reverse these obligations because the people running these operations are not merely indifferent but actively hostile to Americans and their welfare.
We saw this hostility vividly in the Biden administration’s utter failure to assist the people of North Carolina after the devastating floods, even while boatloads of money were spent on assisting illegal immigrants to thrive and pursue fraudulent asylum claims.
Everything the government does needs to be subject to a microscope and to the scythe. In other words, everything it does and funds should be presumptively shut down until examined very closely and proven to be necessary. We are no longer as wealthy in relative terms as we once were, and, even if we could afford all of these things, a government is not supposed to undermine its own people’s welfare to benefit another’s in the pursuit of a false morality that puts strangers above one’s own community.
Christianity does not require the destruction of nations. While a certain amount of universalism is presaged by the Christian faith, the individual obligations we have to the poor as Christians cannot be made abstract and taken over by a behemoth, managerial state. Rather, charity must spring from the heart and be limited by countervailing obligations to those whom one is commanded by scripture to look after first: one’s family, one’s children, and one’s nation.
***
Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American
Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a
double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been
published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal
Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The
views presented are solely his own.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/04/the-end-of-suicidal-universalism/
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