WSJ: Suffering From Trumphobia? Get Over It

Via Billy

 

Unlike the fear of Islam, which is a rational response to Islamist violence across the world, the fear of Donald Trump really is a phobia. There is a precedent for this: the panicked Reaganphobia that preceded the 1980 election. We heard that Ronald Reagan was a member of the John Birch Society—whose essential creed was “Better Dead Than Red.” He therefore rejected “mutual assured destruction,” the bedrock strategy of the liberal consensus to guarantee coexistence by nuclear deterrence. Reagan, it was said, believed in “counterforce,” that is in a disarming first strike to win a nuclear war.

Mr. Trump irritates many with his vulgarities but Reagan was insistently depicted as a threat to human survival, so that most of the columnists and editorial writers of the quality press reluctantly called for Jimmy Carter’s re-election, despite the clamorous failures of his hopelessly irresolute administration. In Europe there was no reluctance. In London, Paris and Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, the re-election of Jimmy Carter was seen as a necessity to keep the bomb-thrower Reagan out of the White House, and well away from the nuclear button.

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