President Donald Trump’s executive orders don’t all fit into simple policy areas such as immigration or the economy. Instead, they are linked by a no less important desire to restore a proud and dignified traditional American culture.
Perhaps the most seemingly trivial or even capricious order is that the highest peak in the land should again be named Mount McKinley, after the 25th U.S. president. Most Americans grew up calling it McKinley, its eminence under that name probably being remembered from middle school geography lessons. It thus strikes a patriotic chord and is part of the inheritance of every American, a thread that binds them to the nation they knew as children.
Then-President Barack Obama changed the name in 2015 to Denali, meaning “the high one,” which is what the Athabaskan people of Alaska called it for centuries before our nation became a nation. The switch was provocative and unnecessary — why can’t the high one be called McKinley? — and was in keeping with Obama’s etiolated left-liberal embarrassment that our traditional civilization is rooted in the history of Europe and the white man. Trump’s order is a small but important token of pride in what our nation was, where it came from, and what it again can be.
Another excellent Trumpian order is that federal buildings at home and abroad may fly only the American flag. The LGBT flag has increasingly signaled left-liberal virtue atop government buildings, on embassies abroad, and even at the White House. Former President Joe Biden hung it at the executive mansion like a triumphal banner, implicitly forcing those who worked or walked under it to give tacit assent to the ideological agenda it represents.
The LGBT flag hijacked the purpose of buildings that represent all Americans, transforming them into billboards for an ideology with which the majority of the public disagrees. It delivered an insulting and arrogant visual lecture instructing citizens as to what they should think. Flying it alongside Old Glory, often more prominently, suggested that the national flag did not represent all Americans and needed to be supplemented by something more inclusive. It undermined the dignity of our government “of, by, and for the people,” and it denigrated the inclusiveness of our traditional American culture and its best-known symbol.
Finally, there is Trump’s excellent order that government buildings should be beautiful, should be built with the intention of commanding public admiration, and should do so by being designed with respect to classical and local architectural traditions. Detractors scoff and complain that this means imposing a philistine uniformity, but it does not. Creativity benefits from working within and against constraints of taste and tradition rather than floating, or sinking, in a postmodern vacuum. Classical architecture, being characterized by balance, taste, and coherence, expresses the best republican values in the solid building materials of stone and brick.
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Taken together, these three executive orders declare that America and its people, represented by the national government, are proud of their post-independence history, as a nation, value their magnificent place in a line of succession from great European civilizations, and believe that the structures and appurtenances of their government should represent the whole nation with confidence and simple dignity.
That is not too much to ask, and it is what the nation needs.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
