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Admit it: Trump’s Victory Is a Win for Conservatives
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
Conservatives should be the first to recognize that Donald Trump’s victory was a win for them. Indeed, many forward-looking former NeverTrumpers have welcomed the electoral outcome. And yet, a few of the usual suspects still seem fixated on the fact that Trump is not one of us; and they are only tentatively accepting the proposition that Trump’s victory is preferable to that other of the two possible outcomes.
I sense that some of our colleagues are carefully positioning themselves and patiently biding their time in preparation to pounce. For the new President will certainly violate some conservative principle at some point, and those violations will certainly deserve clusters of posts asserting his assault on conservatism. We’ll be treated to dissertations on the damage that the Orange Populist has wrought on the “conservative brand.”
I get it that the “I told you so!” card is one of the most sought after cards in the deck; and I truly appreciate that many here are devoted to defending conservatism in its purest forms. But none of that moves conservatism forward in the real world. Sen. Mike Lee (R–UT) presents some surprising ideas on the importance of populism, and I’d like to zero in on this particular passage from the most principled of principled conservatives:
The chief political weakness of conservatism is its difficulty identifying problems that are appropriate for political correction. Conservatism’s view of human nature and history teaches us that problems are inevitable in this world and that attempts to use government to solve them often only make things worse.
This insight actually makes us good at finding solutions.
…
Populists, on the other hand, have an uncanny knack for identifying social problems. It’s when pressed for solutions that populists tend to reveal their characteristic weakness. Unable to draw on a coherent philosophy, populists can tend toward inconsistent or unserious proposals.
The rough terms of a successful partnership seem obvious. Populism identifies the problems; conservatism develops the solutions…
There is much to debate in Lee’s piece, but I’d like to pick up on this simple proposition and suggest that our primary focus right now should be exploiting the many opportunities that lie before us in the wake of our populist ally’s crushing defeat of the Democrats.
By all accounts, the Democratic Party a decrepit wreck. Breathe in the feeble despair over the popular vote. The Pelosi reaffirmation confirms that the party is a slave to its progressive instincts, obliviously doubling-down on identity politics at a time when its political potency has been buried under the rubble of a collapsed blue wall.
Let’s face it: Trump’s electoral strategy was a tremendous success. He not only won the election, but he decimated conservatives’ archenemy, attacking the leftist vision for America built by Pelosi/Reid/Obama, propped up by the media, and finally repudiated by an exhausted nation. The Clinton machine was “destined” to hold the corrupt, lawless Democrat coalition together long enough for demography to determine the arc of history. Thanks to Trump, the Obama phenomenon, including most of his administrative legacy as well as his Leftist rhetoric, can be deposited in that dustbin designated for debunked ideologies.
Populist Trump defeated candidate Clinton, but he also discredited the progressive support infrastructure throughout the media and academia. It is now abundantly clear that none of the conservative candidates could have delivered this kind of defeat to progressivism. Trump’s victory was decisive, and not merely partisan. It provides the greatest opportunity in decades to enact conservative reforms. He’s bringing serious people with conservative ambitions into his administration. Let’s get to work.
Published in Politics
He may be more of a facilitator for conservatives in congress, rather than a policy leader. He’ll be “leading from behind” as it were, which will be very good indeed. I was worried a while back that he might find common cause with Democrats on a lot of issues, but it now seems pretty clear that the political cost of cooperation with Trump is way too high for them.
Agreed. And, credit where it’s due… There were very few people who saw Trump’s potential. Maybe fewer than a handful here at Ricochet. I was not one of them. I was only hoping to avoid a leftwing catastrophe.
Someone once described the difference between a leader and a driver to me. Obama is a driver with the citizenry helplessly sitting in the back seat as he speeds toward the cliff. Trump is a leader — setting out in a general direction and enlisting highly qualified people to direct the action.
I did not see this coming.
I am more hopeful for the trajectory of the Trump presidency than I was before election day. He still tweets embarrassing stuff sometimes, and I’m VERY skeptical of another big stimulus bill, but his Cabinet picks have mostly been solid conservatives and indicate a desire to really shake things up.
So I think there is good reason to hope that Trump’s election will be a triumph for conservatism. But the man is not actually president yet. I’m going to wait till Trump actually has some time in office before I declare his election a big win for conservatives.
I also worry about conservatives becoming too confident in the light of our recent victory, and declaring the left wing’s and the media’s power as broken. I think it highly likely that if someone other than Hillary had been the Democratic candidate they would have won.
But I do think conservatives have a good opportunity these coming years to advance our cause. And so far I have no regrets about voting for Trump.
Agree x 1000.
I agree with this, but I know the #NT crowd is still suspicious of this claim. I don’t think it would have been impossible for a Romney to pull this off, but it would have required being someone he is not and then turning off his NT supporters for the same reason Trump did.
Going on the attack, rhetoric over substance, limiting media exposure to policies, refusal to apologize.
He has to govern a little before we can know how he’ll govern and pass judgement on it. I also think you underestimate the zombie nature of the left. The undead will arise from under the rubble of the blue wall and start trying to rebuild it. It won’t take many bad decisions from Trump to assist them in the task. That said, so far so good with the appointments and most of the tone. He could rise to the office or not, but he’s doing ok so far.
From Victor Davis Hanson at NR today … Beware The Laws Of Unintended Consequences
Thanks. I needed that.
Perhaps I’m looking downfield before making the catch. But boy, that is one wide open field ahead.
This is a time to be hopeful, but also to be watchful.
Republicans can exult in Trump’s victory, but should also be aware of how lucky they were and he was that the Hillary vote, more numerous than his by several million votes (1.8%), was concentrated in such a way as to minimize her electoral votes. And Hillary was beyond terrible in every way. It is not at all “abundantly clear” that she could not have been defeated by someone with a much better approval rating than Trump.
Praise him when he deserves praise. I hear, for example, that he’s going to choose Mattis for defense. That’s great. I like Sessions at justice and Price at HHS. But it’s a little disconcerting how many Goldman Sachs alums are being bandied about for important positions. Not so much because of how I feel about Goldman, but because of how Trump claimed to feel about them. I wonder how much his base will tolerate deviation from what they were promised.
The problem with VDH’s piece, in this context, is that it ends with the election. So, if all you wanted was to win power, congratulations. Enjoy the moment.
On the other hand, if you wanted to be finished with business as usual, you might be in for a long wait. Trump hasn’t even been sworn in and we have a Goldman Sachs guy heading to Treasury*, crony capitalism, an unelected first daughter working on climate change, a stimulus “plan”, and rolling back the promise of a southern border wall.
It is, of course, far too early to throw the panic switch but, likewise, it’s far too early to put the Trump presidency in the Win column.
*Gosh, it seems like only a few months ago when my Twitter feed was overrun by people screaming that Cruz had to be defeated because his wife – HIS WIFE – worked at GS.
As a practical matter, who cares? Are you suggesting that the GOP should dumb down their conservative agenda because Hillary got more votes?
As Bob Hope warned us long ago…
My point is that although others might have been able to defeat Hillary, they wouldn’t have done it in a way that secured all of the other political benefits that Trump secured.
I’m not as concerned about his base being scandalized by “Goldman Sachs” as I am about him appointing the best qualified people. I’m very impressed after hearing interviews of these two appointees.
How about setting aside the “scary Goldman Sachs” meme and listening to what these two guys aspire to accomplish:
Treasury Secretary Nominee Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Nominee Wilbur Ross on repatriation, the Federal Reserve, Obamacare and the negative economic impact of regulations.
As for the conservative agenda, the more the better. The country needs a heavy dose of conservatism.
What I’m saying is that what looks like a fairly substantial victory if you only consider electoral votes isn’t really that substantial, and things could be very different the next time around with a different (less toxic) Democrat candidate, with the movement of people from state to state, as Californians move elsewhere, for example, as immigrants come in (legally, I would hope), as young people become old enough to vote, and the Fox News audience starts to die off.
If the shoe were on the other foot, and Hillary had won the electoral vote but lost the popular, we would be doing some analysis of what it would take to win next time. That’s what the Democrats will do if they are not completely stupid.
Trump is the essential addition for conservative ideas to become reality.
He will fight the infowar 24/7 and hire billionaires and others who owe nothing and need nothing to drive change while conservatives can sell policy ideas to them.
If they do not want to play, get out the way.
Your points here are well taken. But the Dems are facing a mountain of problems. They’re business model is an abject failure; their leadership is washed up; and now the GOP has taken territory. Yes, the margins were narrow, but as of today, the Dems seem to have nothing going for them. They have suddenly become an extremely weak adversary with no effective path forward. They’ll regroup at some point, but there’s no reason to think that they’ll be capable of inspiring sufficient numbers of voters to wield significant influence anytime soon. Conservatives should boldly charge forward.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but I was quite willing to say that on Election Night.
Tentatively. I don’t regret not voting for him, not one bit. I don’t recant any of my previous evaluations of his character and fitness for the office. I didn’t vote for him in part because I calculated (accurately) that my vote would be far from decisive, and while I knew Trump was picking up one kind of nontraditional Republican vote, I wanted him and everyone else to see that his kind of leadership — at least in my state — gets less votes than decent genuine conservatism.
So got exactly what I wanted on Election Night. This is what I’d considered the best-case scenario for months.
I believed he would govern better if he won not like someone who could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it, but like someone who needed the worst opponent in history and all the support of his party’s main leadership and infrastructure to get the electoral votes he needed. I couldn’t vote for him, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t think Hillary Clinton deserved that reaction from her party’s traditional voters even more. That happened — where it mattered. (The popular vote doesn’t bother me — other than telling us what we already knew about California — and shouldn’t bother him.)
I do not think “#NeverTrump” misjudged Trump’s character. I always thought the best analysis of him was that he’s exactly the kind of demagogue the Founders feared — but I also thought that analysis missed the flipside of that — that therefore he’s exactly the kind of demagogue the Founders built our system to manage. If he had just been elected Dictator Trump of Banana Republic, or even if he’d won a massive landslide like Obama, things would be different — but he was elected President of the United States, and I think we’re watching the Constitution play out amazingly well at the moment.
We’ll see what the future holds.
Relatively speaking:
The national election was a conservative triumph.
The primary election was not.
I’m still ReluctantTrump, sorry. I don’t buy into this “only Trump could do this” stuff (I do give him credit for identifying a growth opportunity for Republican voters, but I think others could have done nearly as well after Trump opened the door, and without the corresponding loss in in the suburban vote-I need to wait and see whether demographic change or the loss of voters like my mother were more responsible for the worrisome losses in Gwinnett and Cobb County, Georgia, for example). And I will not give him a pass on anti-conservative policies (the type that would “make conservatives howl”, as I believe Bannon put it).
That said, I will support Trump when his goals align with mine, which to some degree should happen far more often than not, as we have mutual enemies and his fanbase is non-progressive. And I do appreciate the willingness to grasp the olive branch Mike Lee extended, there needs to be more of that going forward from all sides, much like the rapprochement between Ben Shapiro and John Nolte.
True to some extent, though the Imperial Presidency he inherited is still dangerous. That said, he can be managed much easier than a Hillary Imperial Presidency with a activist Supreme Court and bureaucratic shadow government at her side. If Scalia was alive, I might have been NeverTrump, but I just don’t think we could’ve recovered from a Hillary Presidency at this juncture.
Yes, the Trump victory came from the Democrats scoring a pretty massive own-goal when they nominated Hillary, decided to ignore working class voters, and concentrate on critical issues like making sure that men could use women’s bathrooms. That caused a bunch of areas that went for Obama twice to flip to Trump which was enough to cost Herself the election even if she won the popular vote.
They’ll be back and the American left still controls the commanding heights of the media and the culture. There are also still some pretty looming demographic problems that the GOP hasn’t solved yet.
I’m seeing an immense amount of over-confidence and taking a brief moment in time and then extrapolating forward unrealistically. I did this same thing in 1994 so I’ve been there, done that, and suffered the bitter disappointment already.
I think the best part of not voting for Trump this time around is that I have this sneaking suspicion that I might be more pleased with his administration after four years than some of his most enthusiastic backers. I suspect that if he doesn’t jack me on life, guns, and he keeps the ravaging Canadian hordes from invading, I’ll probably be reasonably happy with the administration especially compared to whatever horror I know the Democrats will nominate in 2020.
Oh, agreed. But what I’m seeing in Trump’s behavior thus far is that he needs the Party and he knows it. He won where Republicans do not win and can take full credit for that, but he also lost or was weak where Republicans cannot afford to be — where he likely cannot afford to be in four years. He won in spite of everyone and everything, but he also could not have won without Reince Preibus and Paul Ryan and a bunch of conservative Senators.
The presidency is a lot less imperial when you’re not quite on the same page with your own party.
I agree with that.
But then one can come up with all sorts of hypothetical match-ups not including either candidate, and some of them are hard to predict. (Biden vs. Rubio? Warren vs. Cruz?) My basic sense of this election, though, is that this year Generic Republican would beat Generic Democrat.
This bodes well for the potential for Trump to be a successful president. Sheer force of will isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how the legislative process works. If you are going to push major legislation, you need good policy and a broad consensus to get it enacted into law. You still need 60 votes to get anything done legislatively in the Senate.
Barack Obama quickly torpedoed the domestic aspect of his presidency very quickly into it’s existence by ramming through his wretchedly crafted health care bill. It cost him Congress and the ability to get anything substantially done legislatively for the rest of his time in office. That takes some spectacular political incompetency, but he put forth the effort and got it done.
Why are you excusing the failures of the Democrats? The issues you cited are at the very core of their ideology. The “massive own-goal” problem is a problem inherent to today’s Democrat party. How are they going to fix that when a large chunk of their electoral support derives directly from their advocacy of those policies?
Yes, and the notion that Trump seeks imperial control is unfounded.
Let’s just say that the Dems have a very difficult road back to power. Ross Douthat (by no means a pro-Trumper) explains here.
53% and 51% respectively. Apparently the threshold for landslide has gotten a lot smaller.
It is a good article, and I hope it is the case that Democrats will have a long arduous time in the wilderness before regaining the might they once had. But even in my relatively short time here on earth I’ve noticed the regular pendulum swing between the parties in this country, and have more than once in the past heard premature declarations of one political party’s death only to see that party make a comeback not too long after.