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How I Might Be Wrong
On Thursday night, I posted an appeal to Never Trumpers, arguing that they should hold their noses and vote for the slimeball. The heart of my argument was the following claim — which I once again urge you to ponder:
The real issue is whether in the future we will have open discussion of political issues and free elections. Think about what we have now — a federal bureaucracy that is fiercely partisan. An IRS that tries to regulate speech by denying on a partisan basis tax-exempt status to conservative organizations. A Department of State that hides the fact that its head is not observing the rules to which everyone else is held concerning security of communications and that colludes with a Presidential campaign to prevent the release of embarrassing information. A Department of Justice that ought to be renamed as the Department of Injustice, which does its level best to suppress investigations that might embarrass the likely nominee of the Democratic Party. An assistant attorney general that gives a “heads up” to that lady’s campaign. An Attorney General who meets on the sly with her husband shortly before the decision is made whether she is to be indicted. A federal department that promotes racial strife and hostility to the police in the interests of solidifying for the Democrats the African-American vote.
Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party, inventing false stories about the candidates nominated by the other party, managing the news, manipulating the public, promoting in the party not favored the nomination of a clown, protecting the utterly corrupt nominee of the other party from scrutiny.
Let’s add to this the fact that the Democratic Party is intent on opening our borders and on signing up illegal aliens to vote. If you do not believe me, read what Wikileaks has revealed about the intentions of Tony Podesta. Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally change America.” He called his administration “The New Foundation.” Well, all that you have to do to achieve this is to alter the population.
To this, I can add something else. Freedom of speech is under attack. Forty-four Senators, all of them Democrats, voted not long ago for an amendment to the Constitution that would hem in the First Amendment. Ostensibly aimed at corporate speech, this would open the doors to the regulation of all speech. The Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission have pressed for regulating the internet — for treating blogposts as political contributions and restricting them. Members of the Civil Rights Commission have argued that freedom of speech and religious freedom must give way to social justice. There is an almost universal move on our college campuses to shut down dissent — among students, who must be afforded “safe spaces,” and, of course, in the classroom as well. There, academic freedom is a dead letter; and, in practice, despite the courts, in our public universities, the First Amendment does not apply.
We entered on a slippery slope some time ago when the legislatures passed and courts accepted laws against so-called “hate crimes” — that punished not only the deed but added further penalties for the thought. Now we are told that “hate speech” cannot be tolerated — which sounds fine until one realizes that what they have in mind rules out any discussion of subjects such as the propriety of same-sex marriage, sluttishness, and abortion; of the damage done African-American communities by irresponsible behavior on the part of fathers; and of the manner in which Islam, insofar as it is a religion of holy law, may be incompatible with liberal democracy. If you do not think that a discussion of these matters is off limits, you are, as the Democratic nominee put it not long ago, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” You are “deplorable and irredeemable.” You are, as she said this week, “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision.” It is a short distance from demonization to suppression. And, let’s face it, the suppression has begun — in our newspapers, on television, on our campuses, on Facebook, on Reddit, in Google searches.
One more point. The courts are now partisan. Thanks to Barack Obama’s appointees, in many parts of the country, the circuit courts have ruled out expecting people to present picture IDs when they vote. Elsewhere — for example, in Michigan — the circuit courts have ruled out eliminating straight-line party voting. All of this is aimed at partisan advantage — at making voter fraud easy and at encouraging straight-line voting on the part of those not literate in English. Who knows what the courts will do if the Democrats can get a commanding majority on the Supreme Court? We have already had all sorts of madness shoved down our throats by those who legislate from the bench. If you think that it has gone about as far as it goes, you do not know today’s Democratic Party. I doubt very much whether the Democrats will really try to shove through a constitutional amendment in effect revoking the protections extended to speech and religion in the First Amendment. That would be too controversial. They will do it, as they have done many other things, through the courts. Can we tolerate “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” speech — speech that is “deplorable and irredeemable,” that is “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision?” Surely, surely not. And this would be easy. If we can punish the “hate” in “hate crimes,” why not punish it or outlaw it in speech? All that you have to do is to “reinterpret” the First Amendment.
To the best of my knowledge, no one who commented on the piece I wrote challenged this judgment — which seems to me to make it a moral imperative that we vote to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming President. And much as I loathe Donald Trump, it seems to me that he is the only viable alternative.
There is, however, an argument on the other side that long gave me pause and still causes me to wonder whether my prudential calculations concerning the relative damage likely to be done by each of the only two viable candidates are correct. I regard trade policy, immigration, entitlement reform, abortion, kangaroo courts on campus, and a host of other matters of public policy as important. But we can go wrong on any of these matters and later correct course — as long as we can still have an open discussion of political issues and free elections. The reason I focused on the latter is that, if we go wrong on those matters, there is no road back short of revolution. If Hillary Clinton wins on Tuesday, the odds are good that she, her party, and their friends in the judiciary will shut the system down (as they already have in our universities). Whatever defects Donald Trump has (and they are legion), he will not do that; and, even if he wanted to, he would not be able to. Presidents, on their own, are not that powerful, and The Donald will be very much on his own.
But there is another matter of public policy where Trump might well go wrong and a correction of course might well prove impossible. I have in mind foreign policy. Just as I know and like a number of individuals who are over-the-top admirers of The Donald, so I know conservatives who are, I suspect, apt to vote for Hillary on Tuesday. Those within this cohort whom I most respect make the following argument:
Our nation confronts a revanchist Russia; a bellicose, expansionist China; terrorism in Europe; and civil war in the Middle East — in short, a world reeling at the edge of chaos. The president’s first responsibilities are to maintain national security, advance our national interests in foreign affairs and provide direction for the military. As Alexander Hamilton observed, the framers of the Constitution vested the executive power in one person, the president, to ensure that the United States could conduct its foreign relations with “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”
Faced with mounting international instability, Trump’s answer is to promise an unpredictable and unreliable America. He has proposed breaking U.S. commitments to NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, closing our military bases in Japan and South Korea, repudiating security guarantees to NATO allies, pulling out of the Middle East, and ceding Eastern Europe to Russia and East Asia to China. A Trump presidency invites a cascade of global crises. Constitutional order will not thrive at home in a world beset by threats and disorder.
I am quoting from an oped published in The Los Angeles Times on 16 August by Jeremy Rabkin and John Yoo. I would urge that you read the whole thing. It is cogent.
Over the last seventy-five years, the United States spent lives and treasure to construct a world order within which we could live and trade in relative safety. That order, which has contributed mightily to our prosperity, was built by men and women educated by the disaster to which our isolationist policies in the 1920s and 1930s gave rise. They understood what “a cascade of global crises” and “a world beset by threats and disorder” could produce. I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, and I lived the first forty years of my life during the Cold War. The current generation — well represented by our current President — have forgotten just how fragile the international order is. In Europe right now and in the Pacific — thanks in large part to Barack Obama — that order is rapidly coming apart. The last time this happened it cost us hundreds of thousands of lives and treasure beyond imagination. This time, if this happens, it will be worse.
Donald Trump is not a man of ideas. He has impulses and attitudes — some of them sound, many of them foolish — and he is profoundly ignorant. Over the course of this campaign, he has said a great many things that are dangerous. Jeremy, John, and others fear that his foreign policy would make that of Barack Obama look good. I cannot tell you that I regard their assessment of this likelihood as absurd, but I can say this. If their fears are justified, then — despite everything else that I said in my post on Thursday evening — you would be right in voting for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. For she is a known quantity. In its basic outlines, her foreign policy would be a continuation of the foreign policy we have followed since December, 1941.
I do not mean to say that she will not make mistakes. The lady has never done anything well in her life. Do I need to mention her service on the Watergate investigative staff, her handling of Hillarycare and the Russian reset, not to mention the Benghazi Bungle? I merely mean to say that she would not throw away everything that we have gained in the way of a framework guaranteeing our security and that of our commerce and that there are reasons to fear that he might do that very thing.
Why, then, do I still urge you to set aside the disgust that Donald Trump inspires and to vote for the creep?
One reason — and I very well might be wrong in my judgment. I discount the man’s wilder flailings. He is an entertainer — a reality show dramatist — and he is very good at venting the frustrations that have many of our fellow citizens in their grip. I doubt that he is serious in what he says in these offhand remarks. There are two signs. He has indicated an interest in making John Bolton Secretary of State, and he gave a speech on foreign affairs at Gettysburg not long ago that was positively sane. I have heard it praised to the skies by Trump partisans. That I think ridiculous. All that I am asserting is that it was not off the wall — and that is sufficient for me. But I will readily admit that Jeremy, John, and the others who share their opinion might be right. There is no safe choice this year. Whatever you do on Tuesday you will be rolling the dice.
One final point. On Tuesday, you will not be getting married; you will not be choosing a pastor; you will not be joining a church; and you will not be choosing a hero. You will not be doing anything that might leave you with morally dirty or morally clean hands. You will be doing something much more prosaic — something akin to hiring someone to mow your lawn. You will be hiring someone to do for you what you do not have the time or the other resources to do for yourself. And, just as you customarily do when you hire someone to mow the lawn, you should — in this situation also — prudently calculate which of the candidates for the job will do the least damage and the most good. That is the way Jeremy and John approach the question, and that is the way I approach the question. The fact that we disagree is a sign that this year there are powerful arguments on both sides. Thanks to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the hapless Republicans in the Senate and House, we now live in very dangerous times — times dangerous for our republic, as I argue; and times dangerous for our nation, as Jeremy and John argue.
You can, of course, turn your back on the whole thing — you can stay home or line up with Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, or Evan McMullin. That would, however, be a cop-out. It might make you feel good about yourself, but this feeling of self-satisfaction would be false and unjustified. For to throw your vote away in a time of national crisis is to dodge your duty as a citizen — which is to do what you can to make the best of the situation you find yourself in. What that is . . . there lies the rub.
Published in Politics
Nicely put.
That might be too late for it to matter.
And I am asserting that the more important moral calculation is whether or not to directly, individually grant either one of them with power of the state. Even the lesser of two evils has to pass some kind of threshold other than the competing evil.
Paul – I believe you have described the crux of it. The lack of opposition, or even outcry, to Obama’s serial tyrannical acts (including those by the IRS and other administrative tyrannies) has only served to embolden the Democrats. If Hillary is elected, they will know they can do as they wish. We will remember the good old days when we could speak our minds on Ricochet. Today’s campus is tomorrow’s polity as to speech.
Right, or at least probably right. But the character of the two is not the proper question to focus on. One should focus on the consequences of the election of each.
I agree. The consequences of empowering either the lying crook or the orange conman cannot be understated. I am not, however, responsible for the conduct of the millions of others who will do with their votes what they will.
You’ve laid out the case pretty well that the consequences either way are likely to be on the spectrum between terrible and disastrous. It is, as you say, a roll of the dice.
At least any Trump evildoers will have a learning curve. Hillary’s are already seasoned experts.
. . . . if and only if we have an open discussion of the issues and free elections in 2020. You have not taken up at all my argument that they are endangered.
Come on, Spiral, you post. Post on this. Show everyone that I am wrong in my estimation of the danger. Show that freedom of speech is not in question, that election integrity is not threatened, that illegal immigration does not matter. Unless I am wrong about this, your argument is unsound.
First, let’s realize what you are asking for.
You are asking me to prove that the United States will hold elections in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 which will have a meaningful impact on how Americans live, even if Hillary Clinton wins next Tuesday.
Without a time machine that can transport us into the future, no one can prove any such thing.
We can agree that the Democrats want to severely weaken the 1st Amendment, want more immigration (both legal and illegal) and want them to vote. But it does not follow that because of this Democrat-Left agenda, even if it is successfully enacted, that future elections will not provide opportunities for conservatives to turn the ship of state around.
You simply assert that future elections will not matter if Hillary Clinton wins next week. But you can’t prove this to be true.
And Trump has explicitly said he’ll double down on such tyrannical acts. The guy said he’d give illegal orders to the troops and that they’d obey. In my understanding of morality, supporting such a person is not acceptable.
There is that.
Exactly. This election cycle has revealed precisely what the Democrat party and their media enablers have become. Theirs is a relentless pursuit of power. Trump in the White House just a blocking action until Constitutionalism can mount a counter attack.
Well, I thought you were wrong Thursday, and said so, with my first reason being (wait for it…) the danger Trump poses to our foreign policy. So I find myself very willing to agree with your chosen post title: yes, I think you are still wrong. I also find most of your argument for why Trump is the lesser of evils to be more about speculation on future events than actual evidence, which we don’t have. This is a judgment call, and at some point you have to respect everyone’s right to make it.
What I find utterly unconvincing is the idea that in refusing to vote for Trump or Clinton, I am guilt of a cop-out, self-satisfaction, or failing to do my duty as a citizen. Oh sure, you’ll probably reach down from on high and absolve me of my sins because I vote in Maryland, where a Trump win is not now nor has it ever been a possibility. But forget it – I don’t seek your absolution. I’m going to do my duty as a citizen and vote my conscience, and the beauty of the secret ballot means that neither you nor anyone else gets a say in my choices — even if they’re downright wacky and nothing like what you would choose. My duty as a citizen is to vote, period. And that is what I intend to do.
Amen.
Best laugh of the day, and yes, I do know it’s serious. It’s still funny.
Three objections:
Which is better, to oppose the real cause of a problem (the party-media syndicate) or to acquiesce in it? If we don’t fight the unholy sway of the party system, who will? If not now, when?
Fair enough. But, look, I really might be wrong. Like everyone else, I am guessing — on the basis of the available evidence — what this fellow will be like. Mostly bad, in my estimation. But not worse than the alternative, and I greatly fear the alternative. Not enough, however, to lie to myself and you about Donald Trump’s character.
She made a killing in cattle futures …
One or the other will have the power of the state. The only choice in front of you is which? How do you choose? If there is a lesser evil, the moral man chooses it . . . in sadness. The amoral man dodges the challenge.
Yes, alas.
I fear you are suffering from insufficient-Hillary-loathing disease. Should she win, the next four years will provide the cure.
You are responsible for doing nothing to prevent the worse of the two from being empowered. Look, this is nothing new. Men have faced this time and again. We are lucky in this country that most of the time the available alternatives have been decent. This year, they aren’t. So we have a choice to make. We need to make it in light of the dictates of morality. And that means that we should choose the one likely to do the least damage.
That might be Trump, as I suspect. It might be Hillary, as John and Jeremy suspect (so I believe). What you are proposing, however, is morally indefensible. We do not have the option of checking out. One or the other will be empowered. The responsibility for choosing between the two lies — in some small measure — with you. What do you do?
Yes, alas.
Indeed, they are.
Exactly. I think the Democrats will attempt to pass restrictions on political speech. They might even succeed, just as the Democrat controlled Congresses of the 1970s succeeded in restricting political speech. But this did not prevent the 1980 Republican wave and the election of President Reagan.
I foresee an enema. Oy.
The Democrat-controlled Congress of the 1970s succeeded in restricting political speech? What are you talking about?
So, you think that if someone thinks that, in the long run, Trump would be worse than Hillary Clinton, one should vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Evan McMullin?
What if one wavers back and forth about which one would be worse?
Campaign Finance Reform.
In some respects, we actually have more “freedom of speech” today than we did in the 1970s
In the 1970s, there was no cable TV. No Rush Limbaugh. No internet.