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NRO Standing Athwart Trumpism
National Review, the venerable conservative institution founded by William F. Buckley, has just released an unprecedented special issue titled “Against Trump.”
Editor Rich Lowry reached out to a wide variety of conservative writers to register their disagreement with the GOP frontrunner. Authors include Thomas Sowell, William Kristol, Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, and of course NR’s editors who prefaced the issue with a blistering editorial:
Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.
Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it…
Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism. Trump nevertheless offers a valuable warning for the Republican party. If responsible men irresponsibly ignore an issue as important as immigration, it will be taken up by the reckless. If they cannot explain their Beltway maneuvers — worse, if their maneuvering is indefensible — they will be rejected by their own voters. If they cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them.
What do you think, Ricochetti? Will this issue make self-described conservatives think twice about supporting Trump, or will it only fuel their contempt for inside-the-Beltway thinking?
Published in General
You’re on your own. I let my subscription run out after little Jason Lee Steorts’s piece in favor of same-sex marriage last summer.
They’ve been far too easy on Rubio for my tastes. After Rubio-Schumer, Rubio shouldn’t have even been part of any conservative conversation. Legalization of all illegals followed either by path to citizenship or by almost immediate naturalization, and we have a one-party state. There were many unforgivable sins in the Rubio-Schumer monstrosity, but one of the worst was moving the task of assimilation from within the federal bureaucracy to a number of nonprofits that invariably would be left to hard-left. And they’d receive funding in perpetuity with no Congressional oversight. I’ll pass on Rubio.
For Trump supporters, it’s largely about immigration.
Speaking for myself, there are three litmus tests a candidate must pass to get my vote:
Trump is very questionable on number 1 and outright fails on numbers 2 and 3. Simply put, I cannot vote for him in a primary where better options exist.
You’ll get no argument from me on this point. I am and always have been deeply opposed to Trump and thought from the beginning he should have been a laughingstock.
My point was a bit different. I was trying to explain how the misled conservatives among his supporters might be weaned away. I wasn’t trying to argue that they are not misled.
Ace of Spades has offered his own explanation of the motivations of conservative supporters of Trump, by the way.
I’ll be very interested in the rhetorical and tactical moves Cruz makes in these last days before the IA caucus and NH primary.
Was so disappointed to see Sowell’s name on this list. Like many I imagine, I was inducted into conservative thinking with his books and hoover interviews with Peter Robinson. It was even more disappointing to see him engage in an amateur psych evaluation of Trump, with the inevitable devolution to godwin.
I suffered through JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter , Clinton and W. I can handle a guy from Queens. Just keep the Chicago people out. That one nearly took us out.
I take it, National Review has opted out of the sackcloth option.
Resolved: Donald Trump is the Least Conservative Candidate with the Worst Chances of Winning
That doesn’t follow. He isn’t conservative, but the disproportionate reaction to his surprisingly resilient candidacy is the growing realization that he may very well win.
Trump’s response was typically Trumpian. As John Fund notes:
Trump’s response to criticism is always ad hominem – to assert that the critic is somehow a “loser,” “dying,” or (if a competitor for the nomination) floundering in the polls. He does not address the substance of NR’s criticism, and I suspect that is because he hasn’t even read it. He certainly hasn’t read NR in the past, because he evidently thinks it’s a newspaper.
Can you imagine a conservative Republican running for the presidential nomination who is unfamiliar with NR? One might almost conclude that such a person is not a true conservative and/or a political lightweight.
Trump went on to say that William F. Buckley would have been “ashamed” of NR’s anti-Trump cover. I doubt that Trump has much of an idea what WFB stood for or might stand for today. As Fund points out:
William F. Buckley, Jr. on Donald J. Trump:
Nice: the inverse of the Buckley Doctrine.
Winning the 270 Electors in the General Election is a very different undertaking than winning the Republican Nomination. Remember, he only has a plurality of Republicans, the General Election requires a majority of Americans. And I have my suspicions of a Third-Party in 2016.
Oh, it’s getting worse over there. National Review… the magazine where William F. Buckley blew his stack after Gore Vidal called him a crypto-Nazi, that NR just openly suggested that the GOP frontrunner is… a crypto-Nazi.
Surrrrrre you do, Jim.
By definition, the candidate leading in the polls is not the least likely to win. You’re claiming that a dozen other candidates who can’t even crack double digits in the polls for their own party’s nomination all have a better chance of winning. That makes no sense.
Trump has the highest negatives of any candidate. Meaning those who don’t support him are more likely to vote against him if he wins. As opposed to the other candidates, who may not be a lot of people’s first-choice, but will still get their votes if they win the nomination.
None of which proves he is least likely to win. Simply asserting something doesn’t make it so. I don’t care for Trump, but this continual dismissal of him that refuses to take his candidacy seriously is exactly why the GOP now finds itself in the position of potentially being saddled with him as its nominee.
I’m so pleased with National Review’s stand against Trump that I sent them $100.00 this morning. This election is an indication that conservatives have to do better at explaining and promoting the principles that unite us.
Johnny – You should post the entire column by WFB in the member feed. It should be promoted to the main feed. I wonder why I haven’t seen the column before; it’s an excellent find.
He can’t win the election because in the process of gaining his plurality in the GOP with populists, he has isolated everyone else. Millennials, Hispanics, women and other minorities simply aren’t going to give him the light of day. On top of that, a lot of Republicans will probably jump ship if he is the nominee (I won’t vote for him).
Compare that to other candidates, who still have a chance of getting some non-republican voters, and who won’t face defections.
It has always been so. Same with the other side.
The Cultural Cognition project at Yale has data showing how it works, mainly with the climate issue.
That’s a Democrat idea. I prefer the Constitutional method.
So now we’ve moved from least likely to can’t. It still doesn’t change the fact the making assertions doesn’t make them facts. The widespread panic about a Trump presidency proves quite a few people are convinced he can win which is why they’re so vocal against him. Just because you won’t vote for him doesn’t mean he can’t win.
A lot of people won’t vote for him. He may have some very happy voters, but they can’t vote twice.
Let me put it this way. There is a reason Democrats have tried to paint Republicans as Stupid Xenophobic Billionaires with Narcissism issues (See: The Colbert Report).
And several months ago the same people who are telling us he can’t win were telling us his run would fizzle out when he got bored so there was nothing to worry about because there was no way he could win the nomination. Oops.
Then maybe he should run for President of Mexico too, if us thinking it’s impossible will give Donald the power to make it happen.
Bernie would be… Bernie, ’nuff said.
Hillary should be locked up (Scooter went in for far less).
So ‘The Donald’ would be better than either of them right?
No, because even if he was nominally “better”, what little indications there are point towards him further shaking loose the underpinnings of our constitutional/separation-of-powers government (ala B.O) and the Republicans wouldn’t have a leg to stand on after that.
I expect the response to this will be that it doesn’t matter, there already is nothing holding back the Dem’s from doing whatever they want, constitution be damned. To this I respond… good point.
What Mr. Klavan just said over at PJ Media.
Do you listen to his podcast? I’ve thought he has a better handle on this whole thing than anyone else I’ve heard. He understands the Trump phenomenon without belittling his followers, yet he’s still clear-eyed about what Trump really is.
Not yet but I’ll check it out. Thanks.