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Trump Defended Wholeheartedly Against the Likes of Paul Rahe
This morning, I sent a link to my piece to various friends. One, a strong Trump supporter, responded as follows:
Paul is a hold-your-nose Trump supporter. He thinks Trump is a “swine” who has “no knowledge of foreign affairs” and is likely “unfit to be president.”
Three far more accurate and well-informed assessments of Trump can be found at American Greatness, here:
http://amgreatness.com/2016/10/13/trump-the-statesman/
http://amgreatness.com/2016/11/02/the-gops-ungrateful-bastard-caucus/
Feel free to respond as you think fit. Needless to say, I do not in general share the sentiments expressed in these three posts.
Update: Here lies another piece by D. C. McAllister applying Christian apologetics to the question. What she calls “laziness” I would call a mistake.
Published in Politics
Well, NeverTrumpers.
No, I am not. I am asserting that on an individual level one’s vote is always a question of fundamental principle. If I am wrong, if my individual vote is not an expression of my politics, my philosophy, and my character — if it is a matter of mere expediency and political preference — then we assign too high a value to it.
If that happens, then it seems to me to be a lot like “going away,” in the same sense that Buchanan voters and Perot voters “went away.” They didn’t go anywhere physically, of course, but they faded back into the coalition and stopped being a force moving in a wildly different direction. If they do what you predict, I for one would be absolutely fine with it.
This. I didn’t find Dr. Rahe’s piece particularly persuasive, but at least it engaged with the facts on the ground. One of the more regrettable features of this election season is how it’s shown the center-right isn’t immune to the sort of cult-of-personality wishcasting that afflicted Obama supporters in 2008.
This is my problem with the Republican Congress. They are not good at losing in a way that positions themselves for future victories. Bill Clinton was good at losing, even though he was doing it for evil purposes.
Would not a more accurate description be that the U.S. used Russia’s troops, and not so much Allied with them? It seemed pretty one way for a number of years.
The Russians certainly thought they were bearing the brunt of the burden for most of the war, as far as manpower was concerned. And they were right. Not sure if that’s what you meant by “one way.”
Pretty much, we kept them from collapsing so they could bleed out the Germans. The raw numbers tell that tale.
I do believe this comment is a reflection of your own blindness to the state of our nation and the contribution that conservatives in positions of authority have made to the decline.
It is easy to mock others who are dealing with the bad decisions of those you support while you are insulated from the effects.
These people you mock are as worthy as you are, and deserve more than your casual contempt.
You don’t have to approve of all of the supporters of your candidate. In 1964 those of us who supported Goldwater knew he was getting support from some in the south who had less than holy reasons for it. Didn’t mean Goldwater wasn’t right, or the right person to vote for. Didn’t mean we had to divert our attention from the Goldwater campaign to attack them, either. (I was just a high school student, doing door to door work and such.)
I disagree that the author of “The Intellectual Case for Trump,” an absurd mess of special pleading that contained neither intellectualism nor a case, and in non-trivial part attempted to rehabilitate white nationalists as members-in-good-standing of the center-right, deserves anything more than my casual contempt.
The comment was considerably broader in scope than the narrow definition you provided to allow for an attack of this type.
Finding an acceptable target amongst thousands and more does not justify firing at the whole.
Again, I disagree. Poisonous garbage like that, as well as the same author’s more recent efforts to call out what he terms the GOP’s “Ungrateful Bastard Caucus,” comes to exist because there is a market for it: a segment of the center-right that’s willing to entertain arguments (using the term loosely) for the reintegration of white nationalists into their coalition, and barking-insane conspiracy theories about how they’ve been “stabbed in the back” by those of us who’ve been warning for months that their nominee was unacceptable to us and we would not support him.
These are odious people with odious views, and I have absolutely no qualms about aiming my unalloyed contempt at every last one of them. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
It’s going to be difficult to separate you and Hillary from The Deplorables.
Another of the more regrettable features of this election season is that it’s made clear that Democratic criticisms of the GOP and its coalition of voters are not entirely inaccurate.
Not mere expediency and political preference — that is not what I said. It is an expression of a strategic calculation grounded in moral commitment. First, one sorts out right from wrong. Then one asks how best to avoid the latter and achieve the former.
Your motives are pure, I am sure. But you are deeply confused as to what you are doing in the voting booth. You are not choosing a wife, a pastor, a confessor, a hero, a religion or anything like that. You are merely trying to steer things in a better direction. Voting for President is a bit like hiring a janitor. The key question is whether this candidate or that candidate is more likely to properly dispose of the garbage.
I have repeatedly raised the question of our alliance with Stalin during World War II — which was based on just such a strategic calculation. Never once have you taken it up.
That does not much matter in the larger scheme of things. But, as a morally responsible individual, you really should think a bit about the prudential character of all political action.
Please do not suppose that I think it certain that I am right in my calculation that a Trump presidency will do us less harm than a Hillary presidency. I am only suggesting that this is the only question worth considering.
Will repost tomorrow……
That is the effectual truth of the matter. But we called them allies and even friends, and we tried to get on with them after the war.
In any case, I am not proposing that we get into bed with The Donald — only that we use him.
I know the people I mock rather better than you do, and they have earned the modest disapproval I express. I am not blind to the state of our nation. Read my last post. Nor am I blind to the contribution made to our present plight by so-called conservatives. But I am not willing — out of my frustration — to attribute to Donald Trump qualities that he clearly does not possess. Some of my friends — including those who write for the pertinent website — are inclined to do just that. Angry partisan are often a bit unhinged.
What is this?
These would be the people who want the United States to have a border and a rational immigration policy, which is utterly unacceptable to the open border globalists of the political establishment.
But they can’t openly say that, because they realize that those policies are bitterly unpopular with the American people.
So, instead, we get this sort of nonsense condemning Trump supporters as racists.
Yawn. The left has been playing this game my entire life. It’s kind of stale.
It says a lot to see it now deployed by so-called conservatives- and nothing good.
I am reminded of when George Bush openly refused to enforce US law and do something to end illegal immigration, thus betraying his oath of office, his supporters, and the country. I am in no way surprised to see reports that he now supports Hillary Clinton, despite her endless criminality.
Birds of a feather, etc.
So I have a suggestion for you, Ribaldish. Go with her. It seems obvious that you want to, because you plainly can’t accept that the mass of voters in the Republican party are not open border globalists.
Your true home is with the transnationalist progressives of the left.
Go there.
I don’t know about that. Johnson is pretty much a joke globally.
I think this is surely the core of our disagreement. I am hiring more than a janitor to sweep up the mess. I am entrusting to an individual my sovereign authority. I am empowering this individual to act on my behalf to swing the sword of justice. I cannot do that with a person I know shares so little of my moral understanding or world view. I think this post on the member feed outlines the different views of voting succinctly, and perhaps was even inspired by our jousting on the topic.
If I were just attempting to influence an outcome or merely sending a signal, then voting for Trump would be a no brainer. If (and only if) my vote has more meaning, then Trump does not pass the test of acceptability. Of course, if he merely had a single (actual) positive quality to recommend him I would vote for him against Clinton in a heartbeat. I’ve set my bar that low. But, even when I asked only a single thing of him, he failed.
Right, because expressing one’s opposition to open-borders globalism — advocating for one’s sincere, race-neutral desire for improved border enforcement and a rational immigration policy — necessarily involves defending, and making political alliances with, people who advocate for an expressly racial or ethnic definition of national identity.
Oh, wait. It doesn’t, actually.
Yes, the left frequently cries wolf about racism. But that doesn’t mean racists don’t actually exist, and it’s therefore not an excuse for failing to self-police.
Decent people forthrightly condemn racists, and seek to have nothing to do with them and their contemptible ideas. A distressingly non-trivial part of the center-right — and I fully acknowledge it’s not all Trump supporters — has instead chosen to lie down with these dogs. Predictably, you’ve gotten up with fleas, and I’m neither going to pretend otherwise nor permit you to claim some sort of high ground from which you imagine you possess the moral competence to excommunicate me.
On the upside, I suspect Leader Priebus will save the RNC some money and dust off 2012’s after action report and change the date and resubmit. No one will be the wiser, literally.
Thank you, Dr. Rahe. I don’t think it can be stated more eloquently than this.
This is one long non sequitur.
Trump supporters aren’t the people who see racists, racists everywhere. That’s the left- and apparently the nevertrump fringe as well. One of the things that both creeps me out and fascinates me a tiny bit is that the nevertrumpers here seem to be awfully familiar with a wide assortment of racists and racist websites.
Why is that, when Trump supporters are the racists?
I don’t want to soil my monitor with displaying that, unlike nevertrumpers, apparently.
Anyway, I don’t want to excommunicate you from anything. I simply suggest you find your true home with Hillary, where you can join with all the rest of the race-obsessed folks who worry that somewhere, somehow, someone will think something that doesn’t meet with approval from our politically correct overlords.
That’s a high bar, which by design no one can meet.
But I wish you the best in making the attempt.
That blurry thing that just whooshed past your head was the point. The problem isn’t that Trump supporters are failing to see racists, racists everywhere. Rather, it’s that a number of them are failing to see racists anywhere.
Let’s rewind the tape a little bit. One of the articles that Dr. Rahe linked in his OP was written by Mytheos Holt. Earlier this year Holt wrote a piece in which he characterized white nationalists as being motivated by the same cultural anxieties as mainstream conservatives, and argued that they turn to white nationalism because they’ve been intolerantly “othered” by the respectable center-right (incidentally the same excuse progressives have been making for radical Islam for over a decade).
This wasn’t some little-noticed screed hosted in a seldom-visited corner of the Internet. It appeared at The Federalist, and (as Dr. Rahe’s link to his work demonstrates) Holt continues to be treated as a respectable pundit. That doesn’t happen unless there’s a non-trivial audience for this kind of swill.
White nationalists explicitly define national identity in racial or ethnic terms. They are bona fide racists, the real deal. Refusing to condemn them and their apologists isn’t a rejection of race-obsessed leftist thought-policing; it’s, at best, profound moral blindness.
And that a part of the Republican coalition has succumbed to it is nothing short of disgraceful.
Here is where you need to be specific about who you are labeling disgraceful because of their moral blindness. Does that include me since I voted for Trump? How do you make a determination of who is in that part of the Republican coalition you reference?
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Theodore Roosevelt 1907
Was Teddy Roosevelt in the disgraceful category?