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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
Good point. I had forgot about that.
On the other hand, maybe she should tout her uncanny ability to commit crimes without ending up in prison as a reason Democrats should vote for her.
The scary thing is that might actually work.
podcast
I think that is where I am. I get it. I am not for Trump, but he is a Nemesis created by the Hubris of the GOP leadership.
I really don’t understand this anger at the GOP. What were they supposed to do when we didn’t have a majority in either Congress or the Presidency, or now when we have a majority in Congress, but not the President. The GOP has brought up bills to overturn ObamaCare numerous times, and they were vetoed. That’s the system, folks. We live in a representative democracy. When there is a Democrat in the White House, your options are limited.
Frankly, I blame the people for whom Mitt Romney (who would have been a superb President) was just not good enough, and so elected our narcissist-in-chief. These same people are now turning towards our little home-grown Mussolini.
It isn’t that Hillary is an adept evader of our laws….but rather that the Dems are adept at protecting her.
#3 really shows that NR is not the “establishment”.
That is exactly how the establishment tricks you into listening to them. A fake attack against themselves. I kid, I kid. Or do I?
I support the National Review edition. But I think the RNC was justified in removing National Review from sponsoring the debate.
I don’t know if there is an official statement, but I believe National Review basically said it understood the decision.
I support the RNC as well. When a group shows blatant bias against one of the candidates, it’s right that they not be allowed to co-moderate a debate. I’m sure NR saw this coming well before the issue went to print.
At least the lefties are biased against everybody. :-)
If the RNC ignored the National Review insurrection, can you imagine the howls, “See, the establishment!!!”
Kevin Williamson, with whom I largely agree about Trump, went too far in this recent piece:
That is a really snotty and disgusting wholesale dismissal of Trump supporters as puerile cretins.
I’m not far behind him. There are only so many white supremacist/anti-Semitic supporters of Trump that you can encounter before writing the lot of them off.
I would say that White Supremacist crowd is just a very vocal minority. However, I don’t think we should be fooled into giving people passes just because they fall on our side to the fence. “wholesale dismissal of Trump supporters” is only wrong to the same degree that “wholesale dismissal of Democrats” is wrong. Preferably, we should do neither, however if dismissing Trump Supporters is “snotty and disgusting“, so to is dismissing Sanders.
That is not saying Sanders and Trump are the same (though they have their similarities), but if we are to be harshly critical of individuals on the left, we should be harshly critical of those on the Right as well, when their views are wrong in our own opinion. Party lines, no matter how inherent in politics, are arbitrary when it comes to the correctness of an individual.
Not arbitrary. Largely determinative. Not absolute.
If one doubts this they need simply look at the congressional ratings from the group of your choice. Nearly all Republicans are to the right of nearly all Democrats. Voting for the “R” on the ballot is a fairly good method in general elections of choosing the better candidate.
It may be the case that Trump’s racist supporters are a vocal minority, but he sure doesn’t mind retweeting them. He seems quite comfortable in their company. We should not feel comfortable in their company. We can push them away through mockery, among other methods.
Agree strongly, although I am not sure people are being fooled. I don’t think most Trump voters are cheering it on. But many are ignoring it or rationalizing it or excusing it. When I get told I have to listen to their anger, I get much less inclined.
Williamson has gotten really, really close to going off the deep end about this nomination. He’s blocking people a lot on Twitter now. Say what you will about Rich Lowry and some other NR writers, but at least they know they’re in the opinion and public debate business and will take the barbs along with the attaboys.
Politics itself isn’t a Right-Left spectrum. The distance between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum is about as large as the distance between any two given politicians on opposite sides of the fence. They shouldn’t be expected to pretend that distance isn’t there because they happen to be in the same party. The same is true of Trump supporters who reveal themselves to be far of from our own position. They are liable to criticism as much as anybody else who is significantly and consistently wrong.
No, but if I were to add libertarian-statist to create a two dimensional spectrum, I have it pretty well covered. We are not individual snow flakes of beliefs.
Grouping people into broad categories is incredibly useful.
Grouping maybe useful, but two parties is almost certainly too few. And the mere fact that you happen to be in the same party is no reasonable cause to exempt someone from criticism.
“National Review’s Conservative ‘Thought Leader’ Dana Loesch Endorses Ted Cruz” says the breitbart.com
Yeah, and she also used to work for a website called breitbart.com. No mention of that?
“In December 2012, after the death of founder Andrew Breitbart in March 2012, Loesch sued the parent company of her former employer Breitbart.com.” (Well, I guess there is that…)