The cowardice of the Republican Party and its allies has embittered people who love America’s heritage and see it as necessary for preserving free government. They see Trump as a champion.

Donald Trump deserves to be president. More than any of the current candidates—although not to their exclusion—he is the best choice to lead this nation.

This is not an easy position to hold in DC. Having already lost friends of multiple years and having been subjected to practically every hysterical insult you expect people to stop using at the age of 15, I think it’s safe to say that the social pressure so many #NeverTrump people want to bring to bear on Trump supporters has materialized.

Speaking for those same Trump supporters, I also would say that it only hardens our opinions. I have never been so certain of anything as I am now that Trump is the one man who could deliver on a promise to make not just America, but the Republican Party, great again.

However, I owe those railing against me an answer to this question: “Why?”

It’s a valid question, even if those asking it often do so because of bigoted and incorrect assumptions about Trump supporters. Some of our detractors think we’re all old, stupid, kneejerk reactionaries with poor bank accounts and even poorer educations, not to mention total bankruptcy in the realm of conservative principle, if we even knew conservative principles existed. Others think we’re simply unaccomplished, cynical opportunists trying to introduce toxic white identity politics (or worse, white nationalism) into the GOP to feather our own nests while destroying the party.

I’m Not the Trump Caricature You Think I Am

For me, nothing could be further from the truth. I am young, financially secure, and graduated from one of America’s elite liberal arts colleges with strong academic distinctions thanks to a senior thesis attempting to reconstruct Frank Meyer’s fusionism post-George W. Bush. I once vocally supported the Gang of Eight immigration bill, and my employers since leaving college have included National Review, the Senate GOP leadership, the Washington Times, Glenn Beck, and former Republican Party Web Director and anti-Trump gadfly Liz Mair, none of whom could be accused of being either fringe or unprincipled.

Trump’s capacity to adopt the posture of a strongman is an asset in dealing with illiberal foreign regimes, which generally view the heads of Western liberal democracies as easy dupes and empty suits.

My resume needs no help, and without going into detail, it would probably be far better for me from a career standpoint if I had backed Ted Cruz this entire time. However, deciding who to support for president isn’t about me. It’s about what’s best for the country and for the Republican Party. Trump is both.

How can I say that? I could make the standard boilerplate argument about qualifications for the job. After all, Trump is probably the most accomplished man in recent history to make a run at the presidency. He has built an international business empire that is instantly identifiable. Furthermore, unlike Mitt Romney, whose business experience was arguably difficult to transfer into the realm of politics, the specific type of business Trump does has required him to work with everyone from local politicians to foreign heads of state in order to succeed. The man knows his way around finessing politicians probably as much as some diplomats do, and, given the president’s responsibility to represent America to the world, this experience is invaluable.

Furthermore, Trump’s capacity to adopt the posture of a strongman is an asset in dealing with illiberal foreign regimes, which generally view the heads of Western liberal democracies as easy dupes and empty suits. Trump’s presentational style is a type of politician they recognize, and I daresay one they will respect more easily.

Or, I could talk about Trump’s great personal virtues. Yes, I said personal virtues. For while it has become de rigeur among conservatives to sneer at Trump as a man who personifies the opposite of family values, I submit that the evidence of Trump’s character as a family man and father is not only irrefutable: it literally stands beside him every time he wins a primary. I’m talking, of course, about Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. Any parent who had raised even one child to turn out as well as any of those three adults would have cause to beam with pride. To have raised all three is simply mind-boggling.

Whatever Trump’s flaws as a spouse—and to be sure, they exist—we should all be so lucky as to have a father like him. In fact, one of the filthiest and most transparently dishonest memes to have emerged from this election is the image of Trump as a leering incestuous molester because of some (admittedly cringe-worthy) comments he made about Ivanka. However, if Trump was crawling into his daughter’s bed to molest her, let’s just say Ivanka doesn’t seem to have noticed and leave this disgusting smear in the trash where it belongs.

The First Part of the Intellectual Case for Donald Trump

However, convincing as I do think these arguments are, there is a conspicuous absence of a third case, which one usually sees being made for presumptive GOP nominees (and whatever the denialists say, yes, Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee now) at this point in their run—i.e., to my knowledge, no one has yet made an intellectual case for Trump.

No one has marshaled philosophical, practical, and principled arguments in defense of the idea that thinking people who care about such things should, without any compromise of their own critical faculties, decide that Trump is the man to lead America.

Make no mistake, it is not an easy case to make, not because there are no arguments for it, but because you can’t meaningfully separate Trump from the numerous other cultural and historical phenomena that gave rise to his candidacy, many of which are far from obvious without being exposited. However, at its most basic, that case will advance three arguments:

That Trump, alone among the candidates, is forcing conservatives to defend the people left behind by liberalism, however unfashionable they may be, and however culturally alien they may have once been to our movement. That Trump’s candidacy is about more than one man becoming president: it is symbolic of a national cultural Zeitgeist, and speaks to the modern political moment, in ways that no other candidate has been willing or able to do. That Trump’s candidacy is the only tonic that can cure the conservative movement of its many ills, by forcing it to reckon both with the many ways in which the country has left it behind, and with the damning ways in which it has betrayed itself: in short, that Trump is chemotherapy for the soul of the Right.

Now, the reader can probably tell that this isn’t so much a hard case to make as a big one. When it comes to the first prong, I speak not merely from dusty Ivory Tower pontification, but from actual real-world experience with my subject matter. When I say “the people left behind by liberalism,” I’m not speaking of some abstract demographic category. I’m speaking of actual people whom I really knew, including some of the very people whose attraction to Trump most frightens his critics.

Trump is chemotherapy for the soul of the Right.

For this reason, and also because (being a Trump supporter) I’m not exactly above a little sensationalism, I’m going to start this piece by answering a very uncomfortable question: Why do white nationalists support Trump, if he isn’t one himself?

I’m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I’m pretty sure I’m disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I do have a fairly unique ability to answer this question, and with apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, it can be summed up this way: I know white nationalism. A white nationalist was a friend of mine. Trump is no white nationalist.

If he’s president, there might well be fewer of them. Why? Well, if you’ll indulge me in just a little more autobiographical navel-gazing, you’ll find out.

The Girl in the Brown Skirt

“Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.” —“A Christmas Carol,” Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits

I once met a young woman whom I will call Sylvia, after her favorite poet, Sylvia Plath. At the time, Sylvia had been raised as a member of an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean “infamous.” These weren’t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who probably get raided by the FBI.

She was more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and restricting immigration.

Where I met her was probably the last place you might expect to find white nationalists, closeted or otherwise. Now since I am, as already established, Jewish, this obviously made me initially regard the girl with something less than charity. I was almost afraid to speak to her.

That is, until I actually did speak to her, in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help, mostly out of morbid intellectual curiosity. When we first spoke to her, Sylvia was fairly careful with her words, and obviously seemed to realize she wasn’t among company who’d take kindly to open admiration of Adolf Hitler. She was, however, more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and restricting immigration.

Now, at the time, I was fresh off having argued for the Gang of Eight bill until I was proverbially blue in the face, so when Sylvia started talking about immigration, I obviously pounced on this as a first opportunity to break down her worldview. I’m fairly certain that all I managed to do was scare her, though she did actually put up a far better fight than any white nationalist has a right to, probably because, despite her sheltered upbringing, she was off-the-charts brilliant. This instantly registered with me, and was later confirmed when she later revealed she’d learned a new language in only two weeks.

This time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells. After a while, she got used to me, and we bonded over our mutual love of H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor. As a result, she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew. Needless to say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone’s features, yet I had registered as pure Aryan. The realization that “they can look like us,” to use her words, set off something of a minor existential crisis for her, but I’m pleased to report that she got over it, and that my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.

When Two Worlds Collide

That’s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal. From someone who belonged to a group that she’d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual on my end.

What shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal.

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation. What happened instead was that, with the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other’s decency and humanity, we started dissecting the other’s culture as it actually existed rather than how we’d been taught to believe it did. To make a very long story short, she came away understanding that my people weren’t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting.

I say “unfairly” for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash. Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling. One doesn’t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are. In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.

The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia’s community is unfair is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own. Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.

Lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest.

One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English, and achieved total fluency in both by their teens. I’m from California, and our own education system wishes it were that good. We don’t have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do. After all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn’t mean punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC Metro system pretends.

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture

This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.

The sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control.

No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone” ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford to keep).

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.

They think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible.

Where this otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride in Western culture atrophies into white nationalism when the person holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race. One particularly irreverent white nationalist YouTube songster sums this attitude up in a video mocking libertarians: “It’s not that freedom is bad/But only whites think it’s rad.”

Moreover, and this cannot be stated enough: these people genuinely believe that to be proud of the history of Western European accomplishment, and one’s own descent from the people responsible, is taboo in modern America. If you look at what cultural studies departments, much of modern media, left-wing college students, and the crazy wing of the Democratic Party says, this is probably at least partially accurate. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just leftists who are responsible for the rise of white nationalism in communities like Sylvia’s. We conservatives bear some blame too, though in this case, largely because of misunderstandings of how our own behavior is perceived.

The Right Has Also Failed

The biggest problem we have is that many conservatives are, understandably, reluctant to engage with the sort of leftist, victim-culture-spouting loons who regard Western civilization as unrepentantly evil. This is not because we have no good arguments against them; we do. But to argue with them, we think, makes them look more serious and relevant than they are. If you live in the rarefied world of Washington policy debates, this approach probably makes sense and even seems obvious.

If you’re a blue-collar worker being screamed at that you have ‘white privilege,’ you assume conservatives are either ashamed to express our disagreement, or don’t disagree.

But if you’re a blue-collar worker in Appalachia being screamed at by leftist protesters that you have “white privilege” and all you hear from the official Right is stony silence, you come to a wildly different conclusion: you assume conservatives are either ashamed to express our disagreement, or don’t disagree.

Add to this the fact that so much of the official Right’s response to left-wing attacks about diversity involves not denying their premise, but instead pointing to how many token members of each ethnic group are Republicans, or the fact that we’ll throw accusations like “racist” around over issues like immigration, and it gets harder and harder for otherwise conservative people to deny the idea that “conservatism” doesn’t want to conserve them, or the Western values and norms that made conservatism and constitutionalism possible, at all. The only people who do seem to want to man those barricades, from their perspective, are white nationalists.

This is not ground we should be ceding to extremists. Yet, so far, only one candidate has refused to do such a thing: Donald Trump.

Trump, whatever else he might be, is unabashedly pro-Western. What’s more, he understands the essentially cultural and even spiritual nature of the vacuum white nationalism fills. Unlike so many so-called “reformocons,” who wax poetic about the need to empathize with blue-collar workers’ economic concerns, yet are only willing to throw “family-friendly” tax credits at them like table scraps to starving dogs, Trump understands that however besieged people like Sylvia feel by economic woes, they feel even more besieged by attacks on their pride and dignity.

However besieged people like Sylvia feel by economic woes, they feel even more besieged by attacks on their pride and dignity.

Unlike the white nationalists, Trump has defended that pride and dignity without once mentioning race, but instead with reference to the historical reality and promise of uniquely American greatness. His pitch is nationalist, yes, but it is not racist, and so immediately understandable that you can even put it on a baseball cap.

In fact, Trump, and Trump alone, has been willing to say what should have been obvious from the start: that the universalism and Whig historical pretensions of Kemp-and-W-style “bleeding heart conservatism” are dangerous distractions if they leave the American people as wounded prey for anti-American, extremist bottom feeders.

His image of a man fighting for America and its allies, and only them is a long-overdue return to form for a GOP long since captured by delusions of immanentizing the eschaton at the point of a gun. Those delusions have to stop, and Trump has to be allowed to punch through them.

Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.