President Trump delivered his clearest statement yet of the worldview that drives his administration during his speech today to the United Nations General Assembly. “The essential divide that runs around the world and throughout history,” Trump said, “is once again thrown into stark relief. It is the divide between those whose thirst for control deludes them into thinking they are destined to rule over others; and those people and nations who want only to rule themselves.”
For Trump, the contest is between “globalists,” who believe in a borderless world governed by transnational bureaucracies, and “patriots,” who support “sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors, and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.” Trump identified several threats to freedom around the world: Iranian theocracy, Cuban-backed Venezuelan socialism, mass illegal migration, the authoritarian Chinese surveillance state, and the “small number of social media platforms” that “are acquiring immense power over what we can see and what we are allowed to say.”
Listening to Trump, I couldn’t help recalling another president who warned, long ago, of the unquenchable thirst some people have to manage the lives of others. In 1961, Ronald Reagan addressed the Press Club of Orange County, Calif. The title of his address was “Encroaching Control.” The speech was a grab bag of Reagan themes. He recounted his fight against Communist subversion in the Screen Actors Guild, defended the motion picture industry, and attacked socialized medicine, federal aid to education, and high taxes.
“All of these things,” Reagan said, “have led to the growth of a collection of internal powers and bureaucratic institutions against which the individual citizen is virtually helpless. We now have a permanent structure of government beyond the reach of Congress and actually capable of dictating policy.” What you might call a deep state.
The growth of this autonomous bureaucracy, Reagan said, was hostile to the American idea. “Here, for the first time, the Founding Fathers — that little band of men so advanced beyond their time that the world has never seen their like since — evolved a government based on the idea that you and I have a God-given right and ability within ourselves to determine our own destiny.” A few years later, Reagan incorporated these lines into his nationally televised address in support of Barry Goldwater.
The essence of Reaganism is the freedom of the individual to shape his own destiny. While Reagan and Donald Trump, it has been observed, are different people, it was nonetheless striking, and heartening, to hear the forty-fifth president echo the themes and words of the fortieth.