US conservatives are living on a different planet

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

A nauseating remark by Donald Trump on Fox News about Germany this week has confirmed my suspicion that today’s American and European conservatives are living on different planets. Discussing the Euro crisis on Greta van Susteren’s “On the Record” show, Trump said: “Germany is trying to take over the world economically; they weren’t able to do it militarily.

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>>> Now, before I let off steam about this claptrap, let me disclose this much about myself: I am a solid conservative of the European stripe. If I were a US citizen, I could never vote for “pro choice” candidates or those favoring same-sex marriage. Like American conservatives, I want governments to be small and taxes low. I oppose the nanny state and entitlements, support free enterprise, hard work and responsible lifestyles. I am a conservative because I want to “conserve,” in the original Latin sense of the word, the Christian civilization we inherited including its religious, educational and cultural treasures, its civility and good manners.

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>>> But there are differences: I do not consider myself depraved because I like fast trains and speak foreign languages, and I see no merit in ethnic or national bigotry, including the gratuitous chauvinism inherent in the term, “exceptionalism;” I have learned in my childhood in Germany where this kind of thinking can lead. And so I feel politically homeless in contemporary America, a country I love; I despise the mindlessness reflected in Mr. Trump’s glib statement, which is emblematic of the discourse in the type of electronic media where he is seen and heard. Is this conservative? Not in my book. It is unintelligent and inelegant, two adjectives I do not associate with the grace of real conservative thought.

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>>> Mr. Trump seems clueless about the distasteful company he is keeping by trumpeting out this ugly cliché before millions of Fox News spectators: the company of Greek anarchists, neo-Nazis and Communists burning German flags in the street of Athens and caricaturing Chancellor Angela Merkel as a brown-shirted, swastika-toting fiend, or advocates of irresponsible inflationary policies of the very type Fox News pretends to be fighting in America. In his genuinely postmodern inability to think in proper analogies, it did not occur to Trump that Germans abhor this behavior, just as Americans loathed morons burning their national flag and spelling the name of their country Ameri-kkk-a in the 1960s.

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>>> O, now I get it! Perhaps in Trump’s mind solidarity is a leftist term. It’s not something conservatives do to each other, at least not from the perspective of the kind of conservatives we are discussing here, the “me”-conservatives unbound by codes of honor worth conserving, just as the rest of the “Me” culture.

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>>> What exactly is it that Trump, in line with European leftists and extremists, dislikes about today’s Germans? I say today’s Germans, those 99 percent of us who weren’t even born when Hitler came to power. He admits that Germans have done “unbelievably well,” and he surely cannot claim that they have accomplished this by force of arms or knavish tricks. I posit that they reaped the fruits of doing what Germans always do best: hard work, precision engineering, making beautiful products of the highest quality that sell well around the world, maintaining sound labor relations, training their workers superbly, and exercising fiscal responsibility. How dare Mr. Trump mention this commendable behavior in the same breath with shameful deeds a criminal regime has committed before he was even born!

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>>> Or is it that in his mind only Americans are virtuous when they work hard and well and behave prudently, whereas Germans doing the very same thing are by definition Nazis light? What must Germans do to receive Trump’s approbation? Become sloppy? Go on strike? Produce rubbish in order for others to get a larger share of the market? Should they have followed the American example, much bemoaned by Trump and his fellow Fox commentators, of destroying their own economy?

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>>> Trump’s insult to Western Europe’s most populous nation could be dismissed as crude drivel if it were not one rare item of information about Germany broadcast by America’s premier “conservative” cable network, which is too mean to base foreign correspondents in continental capitals and apparently too hick to cover Western Europe instead of badmouthing it almost daily. I will never forget thigh-slapping the hilarity in a Fox talk show when a panelist proclaimed a few years ago: “The only trouble with Europe is that it has too many Europeans.” By God, this was unadulterated Nazi diction! I am pleased to say that in Germany this kind of rhetoric would be treated as a hate crime.

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>>> As a journalist who has learned his craft with the Associated Press, I am disconsolate that for my evening news I must go to Al Jazeera, compliments of PBS, if I want to avoid networks whose liberal slant I find objectionable. Why don’t conservative billionaires like Donald Trump see a need to invest in a restoration of genuinely “fair and balanced” journalism in this country that used to be the international leader in high media standards? For democracy to survive, we need more facts to reach the electorate, not more half-baked opinions posing as “conservative.”

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>>> Contrary to what Fox’s smug talk show hosts will have you believe, the frightening collapse of journalistic standards is by no means an exclusively left-wing phenomenon. The so-called conservative media outlets are no better. Fox’s listeners don’t know that Germany, the world’s second largest exporter, maintains the third-largest NATO contingent in Afghanistan, after the US and the United Kingdom, and that German soldiers are also dying in the Hindukush. Never do the journalistic poseurs talking over their interview partners in prime time offer a detailed report of a compelling international saga that is as much a human interest as a political story: Whether you like Germans or not, the Herculean act of one middle-aged woman, Angela Merkel, carrying the rest of Europe is a unique event in the history of Western civilization, especially if you consider that Germany has just had to spend nearly €2 trillion ($2,7 trillion) to repair the disastrous damage 40 years of Communist have done to its eastern territories. But to understand this you have to know history.

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>>> When discussing health care, these pundits ridicule the British and Canadian systems but never mention Germany’s, which is the world’s oldest, having been started by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 in order to stave off socialist alternatives. It is really irrelevant whether this omission is due to prejudice or ignorance; the consequence is the same: these “journalists” keep their public ill-informed at a time when international perils call for well-educated voters.

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>>> Donald Trump said, “Germany is trying to help Germany.” So? He complained that the euro was not created “for the betterment of the United States.” So? He also claimed that the whole European project was directed against US. No! It was created by very wise men to forestall another bloody fratricide in the Old World. Mr. Trump should be thankful that he has never experienced what this was like. I am ten years older; I have lived through it, which is why I don’t long for a repetition. European wars have never been good for Americans either. Mr. Trump should have thought of that, but he hasn’t.

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>>> Moreover, it seems illogical for a champion of free enterprise to view the competitive intentions of the European Union as detrimental to the United States, as Trump insinuated in his interview with Greta van Susteren. Have I missed a class at school? Is not competition what free enterprise is all about? Why should peaceful competition be fine on a national but not on an international level, as long as both sides subscribe to the same principles of freedom?

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>>> I would not have lowered myself to venting my anger here about the utterances of a buffoon had 55 years in international journalism not taught me to appraise most somberly the state of the world we are living in. This knowledge leaves me in no doubt that that we cannot afford to indulge in narrow “exceptionalist“ dreams. American and Continental conservatives need each other today more than ever; but I mean real conservatives determined to conserve our civilization, including hard work, fiscal discipline, entrepreneurship, a commitment to the sanctity of human life and, yes, civility, which I found lacking in Donald Trump’s superfluous remarks.

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>>> Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.