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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
And this remains true after nearly 8 years of the most Left wing president in US history.
I forgot. Mea culpa. And she has become unbelievably rich in the last sixteen years. Mea maxima culpa.
I am with Kevin Williamson who wrote a great post at NRO stating that 2016 is not the apocalypse.
It 2016 really important? Yes, but then we shouldn’t have nominated a carnival barker.
I honestly believe that either Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be terrible Presidents. They will make a further mess of things and will be out of office in 4 years.
We blew it with our Presidential nominee, so lets hold the Senate and House, continue gains in the States and make a comeback in 2020 with SOMEONE WHO IS SANE.
I agree with most of this. But you have ignored my argument about what the Democrats are now doing to prevent the open discussion of political issues and to put an end to genuinely free elections. The year 2020 may not matter.
After we keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.
Once again, you focus on the man not on the situation. There is no way that he would get away with this. He would not have the backing of Congress or the courts.
If you were to say to me, “Character matters,” I would agree. If you were to add, “His character is bad,” I would agree.
But that is not the issue. The issue on which you should judge is this: what is likely to be the consequence. Judging on any other basis is irresponsible and, yes, immoral. Prudence is a moral imperative.
Campaign finance reform is still in place, and it is tighter than it was in the 1970s. As for Rush Limbaugh, there is a move afoot to rein in talk radio. It was begun under Obama; it will be completed under Hillary. The same applies to cable TV and to the internet. As I explained in my post, the Democrats on the FEC want to treat blogposts as political contributions and to regulate them.
Go back and read what I wrote.
Two observations before I cash my chips in for the night.
First, no one has taken up the argument presented by John Yoo and Jeremy Rabkin. It deserves attention. They are anything but stupid and anything but malicious. Someone on Ricochet should challenge their position or defend it.
Second, I may be misreading the conclusion about this election that they are leading us to. If am wrong, I hope that John Yoo appears to set me straight.
The key word in your last sentence is may.
Most likely, despite all of the awful things Hillary Clinton and the Left want to do and will succeed in doing, the 2018 and 2020 elections will matter.
Open discussion of issues. Even in a worse case scenario where there is extreme censorship, the voters are likely to rebel against such restrictions and they will desire to defeat those associated with such restrictions, especially if the economy performs poorly and Obamacare is still delivering high premiums and fewer choices of doctors.
Would you rather I vote for Clinton? Because that’s the alternative.
So first off, it’s just awesome that you’d take the time to put out these posts because I’m almost certain you aren’t getting paid a singular thing to add this sort of content.
Second, what’s better than you doing the original content? You’re wading in and tangling with us in the comments section after you put in all of that unpaid work in the first place.
So back to combat… :)
Morality is actually one of the reasons why I didn’t vote for Trump. I have a long standing policy that I will not vote for pro-abortion candidates and we already have Trump undermining his implausible pro-life conversion story on abortion by telling us that Planned Parenthood does good things. He couldn’t even sustain the farce for the campaign cycle.
If I vote for Trump, I’m basically giving up and saying that I don’t have any minimum standards at all for President of the United States. I’m not going to define deviancy down to vote for someone who I think will be just as awful as the alternative that the Democrats coughed up.
The GOP and Democratic primary voters collectively decided that we will have an awful and unqualified candidate no matter what happens next week. The more of us who withhold our votes or vote for alternative options, the lower the popular vote total will be for the loathsome winner.
I’m an MBA so I look at this like a business decision. I want this to be the market signaling to the producers that we don’t want to buy their product and they need to create better products in the future to maintain market share and to keep ahead of their competitors. They aren’t going to change the product if I keep buying it no matter how awful the quality is.
How can you say that? He is focused on the situation and the man within the situation.
He offers something explicitly for 18 months or whatever. His supporters here and everywhere champion it for 18 months. Over and over and over…
How is that not a situation?
And so you effectively vote for the candidate of partial birth abortion. You may have reasons for not voting for Trump, but morality isn’t among them.
This is why I’m skeptical that center-right will be able to come together after this all is done. Accusing each other of immorality, questioning motives, and accusing each other of self-righteousness are going to cause wounds that won’t heal easily or quickly.
Your lips . . . Ricochettian ears! Why, for the love of all that’s Holy, is this so hard for otherwise smart, savvy people to understand? I think it’s because they’ve subconsciously adopted the Left’s narrative about the GOP — that it’s always two goosesteps away from a Nuremberg rally.
If the 2020 Republican presidential nominee is someone who has not spent his inherited wealth donating to people like Harry Reid and John Kerry, it will be relatively easy for Republicans to come together and support the nominee.
Trump is the reason why we are fractured. When Trump goes away, or rather if Trump goes away, the healing can begin. If Trump decides to run again in 2020 in the GOP primaries, then the healing will not occur.
There will still be divisions within the GOP. But not nearly as severe as the ones we are witnessing now.
I have renewed respect for Professor Rahe.
He is not a slimeball.
That is not the only choice. The real choice in this situation is to be responsible for the evil or not. It’s not amoral to seek to do right rather than less wrong.
I judge that putting either of these two candidates in office will result in bad, unethical, immoral, unconstitutional, and unjust government. Is it prudential or moral to choose this end?
This is not like choosing who will mow my lawn. This is choosing who wields the power we grant to them. Others will inflict one or the other of these two candidates on us all because we live in a democratic republic of hundreds of millions. I have no power to decide the outcome, but I do retain to myself the ability to not be the cause of it.
That is where the Flight 93 Trump voters diverge from the rest of us. I don’t believe that 2016 is the end. Democrats have been awful for 100 years. Woodrow Wilson was evil. FDR didn’t give a damn about the constitution. Some Democrats from those days praised the Soviet Union. McGovern wanted socialism. Jimmy Carter was a buffoon. So no…, they aren’t worse now. They’ve always been bad.
If we actually elect Trump, and he is terrible, he will ruin the Republican party and conservative movement for years to come.
Lets be smart. Let Hillary ruin the Democrat party. Lets then wallop them in 2018 and 2020 with great candidates. This will set us up much better for the future than a 4-year terrible Trump presidency.
If it needed “renewing” look within, pal . . . something needs tightening up. [:-))
Funny, when I read the last paragraph on this one I went the other way.
This !
I have a question for Dr. Rahe,
IF what you say is true, and I think is very to somewhat likely true that the trajectory of the Democratic party is toward censorship in the name of statism that will end (at least effectively) much of the 1st Amendment, won’t the push continue after Trump’s one or two terms in office. What good does delaying it result in, what kind of firewall would Trump’s presidency build around it?
I offer as an exhibit a discussion I had with a young person at a typical small state college in a very conservative part of the nation, a school not known for it’s leftist or radical proclivities, a mediocre party school. The graduate students all sat around praising Karl Marx.
It seems that it is a matter of time until the rising generation crushes our freedoms in the name of heaven knows what.
If we have a Trump presidency and he doesn’t revert to what appear to be his leftish tendencies, I don’t see how this does anything but delay this demographic shift in the culture, and furthermore, if he is anything but a popular president, couldn’t he end up accelerating it? Since we’re all sitting her reading the tea-leaves, does his election matter? I don’t know?
@paulrahe I’d like to say that I love how you post and participate. Thank you.
This is one of my considerations as well. If conservatism is the only shovel we have with which to beat back the leftist zombie army of the democrats, then what benefit is it to us to burn off the handle by electing Trump?
You make a darn fine point that Hillary isn’t uniquely bad for the democrats. Trump is, however, uniquely bad for the republicans. This can’t end well for the GOP regardless of who wins. There’s already movements aimed at resetting the party post ’16. We’ll see how that goes.
The Benghazi Bungle compounded the error of the Qaddafi Qatastrophe which definitely exacerbated the migrant problem and opened Libya up to al Qaeda etc.
Vote McMullin: This means something different depending on where you live. It’s understood that very few McMullin voters would think of voting for any Democrat and would almost certainly, if not for Trump, vote Republican.
If you live in a deep blue or deep red state with a winner take all system of allocating electoral votes, then a vote for McMullin might be possible to construe it as “protest” in that it “denies as big a popular vote / mandate” to the victorious candidate.
If you live in a state that is actually contested between Trump and Clinton, it is an attempt to cause Trump to lose. Since that means a Clinton victory, it is a vote for Clinton.
Either way it is intended to be a vote that leaves the voter with a “clean conscience.” This is a profoundly narcissistic act on a par with many people’s votes for Obama, himself a narcissist. Lincoln’s second inaugural address does not come from a “clean conscience.”
One trusts that Ricochet members who vote in this election are actually U.S. citizens. The President of the United States is your president. Your fellow citizens elected him or her. If you voted for Reagan back when the world was new – or if you didn’t – you to some degree own both Iran Contra and Reykjavik.
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Reagan was a great man. I hope that as long as he had the mental capacity to reflect on his presidency that his conscience was not clear. I hope he was troubled by his failed actions and failed inactions during his presidency both so that he could learn from them and do better and because I hope that the man I admired was not a conscienceless psychopath or sociopath whose failures leave him with a clear conscience even if they cost others dearly.
I hope, as U.S. citizens, that you share that regret and that your conscience is in some degree not clear. The same is true for Obama and his wretched policies. We, as Americans, own them. The members of the Republican establishment that failed to back Palin once she was nominated should not have clear consciences. Nor should those whose judgment of their fellow Americans’ desire for dynasty was so flawed that they backed Jeb!’s candidacy. If you seek for a clear conscience in politics, you are looking for it in the wrong place.
My grandfather, A”H, was a physician who delivered many babies and loved children. One of the babies he delivered sometime in the 1930s had two heads. It was born alive. He let it die. He told the parents it was born dead.
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My mother remembers to this day how devastated he was when he came home. He neither stopped delivering babies nor stopped loving children. His conscience led him to suffer. He bore his suffering. He accepted responsibility for his actions. He had the courage to go on, to not to let it make him callous and irresponsible out of not wanting to feel that pain again.
He spent his last years demented and unaware; I know that if he had had the choice he would have chosen to live aware and suffering the pangs of conscience. To Hell with irresponsibility, to Hell with a “clean conscience.”