Donald Trump was not my first choice for president. His past vulgar remarks and sometimes cruel rhetoric were certainly unseemly. But America, like many Western countries, is slipping into a state of emergency, and among American politicians, only Trump seems willing to face that fact. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, promised only to make matters worse - as millions of Americans showed that they realised on election day.
Too few remember what a bad reputation Winston Churchill had earned before 1940, as a warmonger in 1914 who went on to bungle Gallipoli, a party-switching opportunist and grandstanding alarmist who denounced the mild Social Democrats of the Weimar Republic as a threat to Britain's safety. The elites of the Conservative party had long dismissed him as a crank. But Churchill was right, almost alone, about the one thing that really mattered. And so is Trump.
Western values are under attack
The values of the West are under sustained attack - both in the faculty lounges of posh colleges and the smoldering streets of the no-go zones where gangs of dole-fattened Islamists promise sharia for our grandchildren. Our ideals of freedom, personal responsibility, and religious tolerance have all been taken for granted, treated like mountains or meteorites instead of precious and fragile historical achievements. And now we're in danger of seeing those ideals, long starved, be euthanised by our elites.
In America, Christian and moderately conservative academics are getting hounded off the campuses of supposedly tolerant universities. Our largest state, California, came within a hairs-breadth of yanking routine federal aid from any college that defends traditional marriage. At the largest Catholic university in America, De Paul, its priest president banned a prolife poster because he considered it offensive to racial zealots.
Eurocrats are demanding stricter censorship of the press in Britain, as CounterJihad reports: "A new report from the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) accuses the British press of not doing enough to hold down 'anti-Muslim sentiment' in the country. It seems that the press, whose job is ordinarily thought to report the news, has been given a new mandate to hide the news if it might be upsetting."
Clinton was a reckless and dangerous choice which Americans rightly rejected
Hillary Clinton made it clear in her campaign that favors such intolerance of dissenting views - telling the United Nations, for instance, that Christian beliefs on abortion would “have to be changed” in order to grant women worldwide their fundamental rights. Statements like this led leading evangelical authors such as Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Eric Metaxas to urge Christians to vote against Mrs Clinton as an act of self-defense.
Nor was she fit for our nation's highest office. Clinton's corrupt foundation took tens of millions from puritanical autocracies such as Saudi Arabia, even Qatar - at the time, the main financial sponsor of ISIS. Her closest aide, Huma Abedin, spent twelve years an an editor at a Saudi-backed journal that promoted sharia and blamed the 9/11 attacks on American foreign policy. In these dangerous times, when politicised Islam is persecuting Christians around the world and colonising Europe, Clinton was a reckless and dangerous choice which Americans rightly rejected.
Human rights come from Jesus
As the great Daniel Hannan observed, everything great about America we owe to England, and her 800-year-old struggle since Runnymede to promote the interests of citizens against the power of the State.
Our first founding father, in that sense, was Simon de Montfort. But there never would have been a Magna Carta, a Declaration of Rights, a Declaration of Independence, or the US Constitution in a pagan world.
Never before the coming of Christ had anyone thought to assert the equal rights of man, the absolute claim of the conscience against the claims of the collective. Human dignity died with Abel, and was only raised again on Easter morning. The first human rights protestors in Western history were the Christians who died in the Colosseum rather than worship Caesar. They never dreamed that with their witness they were changing forever the face of secular politics. But that's what they did.
Everything great about America we owe to England
The freedom we Westerners treasure is not the child of the Enlightenment. We see where that movement inexorably led when divorced from the Christian respect for the human person: to the French reign of terror and genocide in the Vendée.
Universal values such as freedom and tolerance don't float about like angels. They must be made incarnate in concrete societies, with historic cultures and institutions that uphold those values against the dead weight of human sin and the will to power. As Edmund Burke recognised, it is irresponsible to rapidly overturn such (doubtless imperfect) cultures and institutions, and expect them to carry those values forward. Kill the goose if you like, but look for no more golden eggs. And that's why I back Donald Trump.
John Zmirak is author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, and Senior Editor of The Stream.
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