Actual headline and subtitle at the increasingly mistitled Reason:
The Alt-Right Is Wrong: Trump Is an Enemy of Western Civilization, Not Its Champion
If your candidate opposes free trade and free speech, he’s not a defender of classical liberalism.
This is almost astonishingly ignorant. It amazes me to have to point out that classical liberalism is not Western Civilization, which predates classical liberalism by literal centuries.
Moreover, it is free trade that poses a deadly danger to Western Civilization, as the combination of cheap travel and communications technology, relaxed border controls, and the free movement of people that is necessary for the operation of free trade are putting Western Civilization in the greatest peril it has known since the Turks were knocking at the gates of Vienna.
It’s not just a stupid headline writer either, as Robby Soave doubles down in the body of the article itself:
No presidential candidate who fails to grasp why unrestricted trade across national borders is the hallmark of a civilized society is fit to lead one, and no leader who seeks the power to shut down newspapers who criticize him can be trusted to defend classical liberalism from its enemies.
Apparently Robby is not only ignorant of European history, but of American history as well; no American president has ever favored unrestricted trade across national borders, not even Bill Clinton or George Bush.
And, again, classical liberalism is not Western Civilization. The temporal and conceptual subset should never be confused with the set.