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Pat Buchanan: ‘Has the Trumpian revolution begun?’ – ‘EPA pick appears to be a lead indicator of a coming revolution far beyond Reagan’s’

Posted: Saturday, December 10, 2016 12:00 am
Associated Press
The wailing and keening over the choice of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA appears to be a lead indicator of a coming revolution far beyond Reagan’s.
“Trump Taps Climate Skeptic For Top Environmental Post,’’ said The Wall Street Journal. “Climate Change Denial,’’ bawled a disbelieving New York Times, which urged the Senate to put Pruitt in a “dust bin.’’
Clearly, though his victory was narrow, Donald Trump remains contemptuous of political correctness and defiant of liberal ideology.
For environmentalism, as conservative scholar Robert Nisbet wrote in 1982, is more than the “most important social movement’’ of the 20th century. It is a militant and dogmatic faith that burns heretics.
“Environmentalism is well on its way to becoming the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history,’’ wrote Nisbet, “the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism.’’ In picking a “climate denier’’ to head EPA, Trump is rejecting revealed truth.
Yet Trump he has shown himself to be an unapologetic apostate to liberal orthodoxy.
Indeed, with his presidency, we may be entering a post-liberal era.
In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.’’

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