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If You Must Vote Trump, Please Hold Your Nose
Peter has made his decision, as announced on the recent podcast. In his view, a national election is indeed an A-B test, and he’s choosing, well, T. He’s with James Taranto and not Kevin Williamson. He’s not going to slink around apologizing for it anymore.
This isn’t surprising (he’s been reasonably clear about his views for awhile) and it’s not my place to scold him. I do think a respectable case can be made for voting for Trump. But I can’t resist the urge to point out that the way Peter has come out for Trump, to me, confirms exactly my reasons for not supporting Trump, and not believing that this can be as straightforward as the A-B test.
The best case for #NeverTrump has always been, in my mind, the Not My Monster argument. At this point is seems mostly settled that a heinously vicious and dishonest person is going to be America’s next president. Would we prefer, then, that that person be ours, or the other party’s? It’s actually a difficult question.
Our monster will, we hope, be at least a bit more susceptible to conservative influence, and a bit more congenial to our ideals and policy agenda. (That’s not certain, but at least it is possible.) The other party’s monster will be more absolutely hostile, but at least that gives us the advantage of being able to remake our party and agenda without the heavily compromising influence of an awful leader. Also, if Washington is a mess over the next four years (likely), it will be easier to win the next election if the monster in the Oval Office isn’t ours. In troubled times, voters tend to let the parties take turns in the executive office. Is it worse to give the Democrats two turns in a row, or to waste one of our turns on Trump?
Honestly, I vacillate week by week as to which candidate I hope to see win. I’m not voting for either, but I wouldn’t condemn everyone who is. Having said that, Peter’s attitude towards Trump these days is troubling.
It’s one thing to stop slinking, but it’s another entirely to stop frowning. It struck me how Peter repeated, I believe, three times in the podcast (but without much vehemence) that no, Trump is not the next Reagan. I thought: the next Reagan? He’s not the next Mitt Romney. He’s not the next John McCain. He’s not even the next John Boehner. We had seventeen choices and he was the worst. It wasn’t even close, in fact. Peter makes a negative comparison, but by choosing the conservative icon of the last four decades for contrast, he leaves the strong impression, “This outcome isn’t ideal, but basically, things are okay.”
Things are not okay. Trump is not just utterly untrustworthy and an awful person; he is also hostile or indifferent to most of the most critical planks of the conservative agenda. And he is running explicitly as a Caesarist, effectively promising to expand the abuse of executive power. It’s hard to decide whether to be dismayed or pleased by the overwhelming impression of incompetence and ignorance in all matters of state.
I was also struck by the way Peter was optimistic about Trump’s SCOTUS list, reasoning that Trump will be unable to violate his promises without totally alienating his voting base. That’s true, of course, and for most politicians it would be a compelling consideration, even for a politician of bad character. But Trump is not only vicious, he is also a complete outsider with no history of allegiance to either Republicans or conservatives. To put the point bluntly: Does he care? He seems to be the kind of guy who enjoys negative attention as much as positive, and his personal friends surely lean leftward. He might be entertained by the howls of betrayal after he picks the next Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
To be clear, I’m not saying with confidence that this will happen. If we were just nominating the selector of the next Supreme Court justice (or two, or three), then yes, I would prefer Trump to Hillary. He might betray us, but then again, it’s possible he won’t. What troubles me is how Peter talks as though he sees Trump’s betrayal of conservatives — in the one thing we most want from him — as a fairly outside possibility. Everything we know about the man suggests to me that it’s a very live possibility, and certainly one that should be considered if we’re discussing electoral SCOTUS implications.
To my mind, this shows exactly the reasons for rejecting the “A-B test” view of elections. If a vote is really just an expression of preference between A and B, it is perfectly possible to choose one without any appreciable level of support for either one. But once we decide to support a particular candidate, we tend to adjust ourselves psychologically to thinking of him as the sort of candidate that merits our support. It’s very hard to make that transition without compromising ourselves and our agenda, potentially quite severely.
Here is my final example, taken from a comment of Peter’s in the thread following that podcast. Peter is explaining that, however bad he is, he can’t be as bad as Hillary. In that context, he writes:
Hillary may be polished where Trump is vulgar, but that’s purely a matter of taste.
I thought I was losing the capacity to be amazed, but I admit that I was quite thunderstruck. Trump publicly insults women. He winks at white supremacists. He speaks gleefully about torture and war crimes. He discusses the size of his manhood in nationally televised debates. His remarks on immigration are so offensively nativist that Texas Democrats have successfully shrunk the Republicans in that state simply by playing tapes of Trump on the radio. I could go on but it’s all too familiar by now, and to this, the genteel and civilized Peter Robinson says: a matter of taste?
I appreciate that even this level of offense must sometimes be borne when the options are so exceedingly poor. But even if we have to live with it, we should at least try to resist the normalization, shouldn’t we?
Vote for Trump if you must, but please, not this! At least do us the favor of publicly holding your nose!
Published in General
I can assure you this is not the case for many. There are plenty of non A/B options.
No they won’t. Especially seeing as they wont look down and see only two names. There will be other less well known names, including a libertarian candidate and the option to write in a different candidates name.
They don’t want to defend Hillary, but they’ll vote for her in some cases! In other instances, they’ll vote “neither”, but I suspect it’s because they don’t want to have to rationalize the favor they’re doing Hillary.
Sorry, but the failure to imagine the horror of Clinton, the sequel, is every bit as morally and intellectually questionable as a vote for Trump, imo.
I never said there were only two names on the ballot. Also, note that I said most not all.
That’s fine, but you cannot say we haven’t explained why they are different, and why a horrible democrat is preferable to a horrible republican. I cannot directly link to comments anymore, so I’ll paste my response to Peter on this issue:
(cont…)
(…cont)
It’s a perfectly respectable position, but here’s my problem. Hillary is a person of bad character (though not overt, which I actually think is important), obviously. But she’s not associated with conservatives.
You wrote a wonderful book about how Ronald Reagan changed your life (I read it), and it was a book about intangibles. It wasn’t about tearing down the wall, trickle-down economics, or appointing supreme Court justices. It was about the man’s character and how that created lessons for your own character (as well as how that informed and drove his policies).
We’ve had Bill Clinton and Barack Obama showing this country all about what democrats require as far as character goes. Infidelity, pettiness, bitterness, divisiveness… it’s what has created a national attitude that gave rise to someone like trump. It validates and encourages the demons on our shoulders. Hillary will be similar, but still on the side of liberals.
Supporting Trump means justifying all of that by doubling down on it. It means the demon isn’t on one shoulder anymore, but both.
If the goodness and strong character of Ronald Reagan changed your life, how will our lives be changed by all the opposite in Trump??
That worries me far more than anything Hillary can do.
I refuse to accept that any excuses need to be made for Trump as a Republican and / or Conservative. I haven’t seen final numbers but my impression has been he has received his share of votes from the left side of the aisle.
No one has claimed he’s a Conservative – even his own claim was half-hearted and lame – he couldn’t even explain what conservatism means. So why in the name of God does he have any danger of damaging the “conservative brand”?
And if he does damage the brand it will be because Conservatives have done such a crappy job of explaining what “conservatism” is.
Right now Trump is someone who is identifying as a Republican.
I think Trump will inevitably be associated with conservatism by the general public, but that’s not exactly what I think is most damaging. It’s that Trump will rightly be associated with the Republican Party. In our two party system the GOP has been the only real vehicle (flawed though it is) for advancing conservatism politically. That’s all over. Trump will remake the GOP in his own image and conservatism will no longer be part of our political landscape. Whoever wins the fight between Trumpist progressivism and liberal progressivism, conservatism loses.
The disdain which you and people like you hold for some, Rachel, is something that turns many away from conservatism.
Pitiful? Really?
I find it interesting that you are more worked up about the wording of Rachel’s criticism of Trump’s defrauding average people than you seem to be about Trump’s actual fraud.
-contined
I disagree. And I repeat what I said before: if what you predict happens, it’s because conservatives have done such a breathtakingly crappy job of selling it.
If Trump wins and he is a disaster as President it will be no statement about conservatism.
And anyone who makes that claim in front of me will be corrected strongly and passionately. And then I’ll take the time to explain what conservatism is and why Trump is anything but.
How the hell would you know how I feel about Trump’s actual fraud?
I’ve been the victim of fraud and I would resent mightily the terms of “pitiful” and “desperate”.
Don’t change the subject – I was directly addressing Rachel’s disdainful attitude in claiming the victims were “desperate” and their life-savings as “pitiful”.
So are you saying I’m wrong? If so, could you explain why? It seems that your argument boils down to “So what if Trump destroys conservatism as a force in American politics, conservatives suck!”
The point is, the small sums of money in question were nothing to someone as rich as Trump, and hugely consequential to the people he defrauded. Which is awful not only in substance but in the gratuitousness of it.
I’ve not seen you decry Trump’s fraud. I have seen you decry the way Rachel criticized it.
I don’t disagree.
But your terms of “desperate” and “pitiful” make you sound condescending.
To reiterate my point, you ain’t exactly selling conservatism with an attitude like that.
As a victim of fraud, I would be furious to be described the way you described the victims of Trump University.
And I haven’t seen you write or speak about Tibet. Does that mean I can reach a conclusion about how you feel about it?
How can Trump destroy conservatism unless we give him the power to do so? He has barely claimed to be a conservative and can’t even explain what being a conservative is.
So if he sucks as a President, why is that on conservatism?
And as I mentioned in another comment, he’s gotten his share of votes from the D side. If he blows it, how about we make them own it?
No. It absolutely isn’t. There are options and most of us will use them.
If the only time I wrote about Tibet was to criticize the way someone denounced Chinese occupation of Tibet you could assume I didn’t care much about the brutality of the Chinese occupation.
Because he becomes the face of the party. Maybe not to you, but to most of the nation and the world.
Oh spare me. My point was Rachel’s attitude and choice of terms specifically and the way conservatives are perceived in general.
And you leaping to a conclusion about how I feel about anything.
Is anyone here following the case? It might be good to know if the fraud actually happened before we argue about it, or argue about how we argue about it.
You will notice that I’ve been careful to separate the terms “republican” and “conservatism”. It’s an important distinction. And if anyone reading this has anyone in their life who mistakes Trump for a conservative – well, that’s on you. Because no one in my life suffers from that confusion.
Regarding Trump as a Republican, as I’ve mentioned, he’s had his share of support from the D side. He wouldn’t have gotten this far without them.
He’s no more the “face” of the Republican party or conservatism than Jenner is the face of womanhood or feminism.
On this point, I refer you to Thomas Sowell, who writes:
I see, thanks for clarifying.
I think that Trump’s personality is an important factor to consider when predicting the likely results of a Trump presidency.
There are only two options that can win. Maybe most of the small NeverTrump sub-section of a sub-section of the less than 10,000 strong Ricochetti. There won’t end up being nearly as many as is currently feared.
As the nominee, he is now the face of the party, like it or not. I agree with you that he isn’t the face of conservatism because he isn’t conservative, and I’ve been doing all I can to distance conservatism from this man. But I have to work to do it because most people conflate the two. NeverTrump is doing a valuable service for conservatism in making this point, because ordinary people don’t make the distinction.