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Trump, Conservatism, and Me
Greetings, Gentlemen and Gentle Ladies of Ricochet. I’ve been away for a while, I know.
Some of you wrote to the editors to ask what happened to me and whether they should be worried. I was touched by that. You’ve heard, then, that I’ve been working on my book, which is coming along well. But in truth, that’s not the only reason I’ve been away.
About a week ago, the Blue Yeti, who also noticed my absence, sent me a message to ask if I was okay. I was on the verge of writing, “Oh, yes, I’m fine, I’m just working on my book,” but then I stopped myself and thought, “Why not tell him the truth? It is, after all, the truth.” And so I did.
I wrote back and said that I was horrified by Trump. That I’m heartbroken for my country and for what I thought were our ideals, our decency. That it seemed to me the United States was experiencing the political equivalent of a psychotic break, one that has at best turned America into the punchline of a joke, and at worst will end the American experiment altogether. That I was exhausted from arguing about Trump. That I’ve already lived through this presidency once, in Turkey — although it took years for Erdoğan to sound the way Trump already does — and didn’t want to chronicle this story twice in my life.
“I’m outraged by Trump and what’s become of conservatism,” I wrote,
I’m depressed by all of it and sad that I’ve devoted so much of my life to a political ideology that in the end looks as corrupt to me as socialism. This hasn’t seemed like an appropriate thing to share with our entire membership, so I’ve been keeping quiet before saying anything rash — either to our members or to you. But I’ve been feeling this way now for long enough that I probably just need to say it.
So the answer, really, is that I’m not so okay. I’m quite depressed. A large part of it is an overdue reflection about my role in all of this, and a realization that whatever I believe about politics, it has no place in the conservative movement as it now exists.
The Yeti asked if he could call me. We spoke for a while. He started by trying to reassure me that I wasn’t responsible for Donald Trump’s election. This on the one hand is obviously true; but on the other, I’m not sure I can escape the responsibility for this disaster that every American shares, whether or not we supported him or voted for him. We’ve all, together, created — or failed to do enough to prevent — the conditions such that a phenomenon like this might emerge. We all share some part of the blame for allowing our country to descend into nihilism and despair; we all contributed, in some way, to the hollowing out of civic virtue, to the eradication of gravitas and dignity from the public sphere, to the conflation of reality television with reality, to the dumbing-down and the commercialization of everything, to mindless and unprincipled partisanship, to the cultivation of the imperial presidency. We are all all in some part responsible, even if our only contribution was doing too little to prevent it.
And in my case, the contribution was greater. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Ricochet, after all, was part of a gullible media that offered Trump five billion dollars’ worth of free advertising because we assumed his candidacy was just a terrific joke and great for site traffic. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Les Moonves said. I can’t say our editorial approach was more foresighted.
I’m not so full of my own sense of importance as to believe what I write has much influence over anything, but it’s a fact that for the past few decades I’ve supported myself by writing by writing about, and for, politicians and audiences who called themselves conservatives. I believed I shared a set of assumptions and values with conservative readers, or at least, I believed their assumptions and values closer to mine than those of the American left. But it turns out that a substantial cohort of those people did not share my assumptions and values. And a significant number of them are now given over to isolationism, protectionism, nativism, authoritarianism, and sheer craziness. Or outright nihilism. Not to mention opportunism. I want no part of that.
Newt Gingrich, arguing that Margaret Thatcher was the model for the Trump presidency, recently buttressed this claim by allusion to my book about Thatcher, which made me cringe. As I replied in the American Interest, the idea is utterly unserious; that he could assert this is profoundly disturbing for what it says about how little the truth matters to anyone in this perfervid political climate:
I was glad to see my largely forgotten book mentioned, but at the same time I was baffled—because the comparison is ludicrous. Readers who doubt this may consult the online Thatcher archives, which contain every known statement made by Margaret Thatcher between 1945 and 1990; or take my word for it for $12.10 on Amazon. They will find nothing to suggest that Thatcher and Trump are similar in any relevant aspect, be it their political ideals, beliefs, moral values, temperament, style, experience, intellect, competence, decorum, or probity.
What does it mean, then, when a respected senior American politician makes this argument in a respected American newspaper? We’re not, after all, talking about an archaic figure known to us only through a disputed Delphic verse. Margaret Thatcher is very nearly a contemporary. She died in 2013. What she believed is as well known as the formula for the area of a triangle. It would be one thing if the newly Trumpesque Gingrich had in his article renounced Margaret Thatcher and her ideals. That would have been surprising, to be sure, but it would have at least made sense. But this is not what he did: He instead made his actual memories of Thatcher vanish in an act of mental thaumaturgy, and returned from his underground dungeon lair with a shape-changed new version of history.
I told the Blue Yeti all about this, and told him that basically, I’d prefer never to write about politics again. I’m exhausted with it, growingly cynical, and deeply pessimistic. When I finished, I expected him to say that he was sorry to hear it, and to accept my resignation.
But instead, he asked me to write about what I’d just told him, all of it. He said I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, and told me that more people than I realized shared my sentiments. I don’t quite remember what he said next, except that he seemed sincere in thinking I should write about this, and adamant that my point of view was one that should still be represented here. He said that if the Trump presidency implodes, or explodes, someone will have to make the case for classical liberalism and the vigorous virtues, since the conservatives who’ve eagerly hopped in bed with the Id in the White House won’t seem particularly credible after that. He suggested — kindly — that I pull myself together.
I figured he was probably right. “Pull yourself together and get back to work” is, usually, good general advice.
So, are there any more of you out there who are feeling like me? Or will I have to do this single-handedly? I will, I guess, if I have to, but it would be nice to know I’m not alone.
Published in General
I respect this position the most. The only thing that drives me crazy about some Trump supporters is the assertion that Trump is something he is not: a conservative (or savior of the world ;) ). I hate the label being attached to him at all. It is like calling a dog a cat. And he has far surpassed what I expected, too, in these early days. I’m willing to see how it all turns out.
I also work in academia. Without tenure. As an adjunct. Soooo, you know. I am very, very, very quiet. I feel, however, that Trump’s election has made my own job security worse, not better. I did not vote for Trump, but if I did, I honestly feel as if I could not say so where I work without severe risk of never getting a section again. This is truly disturbing to me. There is very little free thought or real tolerance in higher education, it seems, and that is one thing that needs to be fixed if we are to remain a free society, whoever is in the White House.
Claire, I suggest you take a look at Victor Davis Hanson’s fine piece on the metaphysics of Trump, and then contemplate Giulio Meotti on the Islamization of France. The West has tried in a less-than-half-hearted way to deal with those who wish its destruction both from within and without. We are now stuck with a head-on battle, and it ain’t pretty, but some of us are relieved at least that we are no longer waving the white flag.
Claire, please come back. Give us more of the sort of measured responses you’ve been tweeting, like when you called me stupid because I said I lent more credence to Scott Adams than I did to you.
I’m a big fan Claire, and, FWIW, a backer of your book funding. But I gotta tell ya, this post is nothing but an ego trip. I can’t stand the president’s financial and economic policies, and, yes, he is way embarrassing. But far more socio-economic factors are at play here than one writer’s obsessive navel gazing, and the extent to which it does pertain is so infinitesimal as to be always misunderstood and nothing but misery making.
Does it ever feel, Ricochet, as though we are all talking past one another?
We weight different aspects of the Trump administration so differently that “Trump” has completely different definitions for each one of us. And in trying to understand one another, it seems awfully common that we frame everyone’s opposition or support in relation to the Trump that we ourselves see, rather than examining their definition.
The Left takes this to extremes. They believe in a fantasy Trump, who was set up by a grand conspiracy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin. They believe that Trump is calling up hordes of klansmen to patrol the streets of the nation, hunting minorities. Consequently, they react insanely.
But I think that most of the Trump-supporting and Trump-skeptical people at Ricochet are still in touch with reality – just different parts of it.
The first three words or phrases you think of when you think “Trump” might be, “Gorsuch, deregulation, not Hillary”. Or, they might be “lout, narcissistic, bully”. They might be “protectionist, anti-Iraq, courts racists”. They could be something completely different.
The thing is, Trump is all of these things in varying degrees, and we differ in how much we weight his various aspects. I am not going to denounce Claire as being insufficiently pleased with Neil Gorsuch, nor am I going to slam the pro-Trumpers here as being insufficiently appalled by Trump’s personal behavior.
I am trying my best to see all the perspectives. It is tough.
There are things to be pleased with about the Trump administration. There are things to be repelled by, too. We may never agree fully on whether his administration is concerning or not, but we should take care to examine which Trump the other person is talking about before we make inferences about their character or their commitment to principles. I suspect that we are all people of good will here. Let’s let one another off the hook if one person fixates on a part of Trump that we ignore, or ignores something that we can’t look past.
Trump is an unorthodox, controversial, and contradictory figure, and we’re all doing the best we can.
Berkeley, California a few years back:
Ms. Schweng is now principal of 3000+ student Berkeley High School.
She is a typical product of the teacher training system in the U.S. She led her students in public activism promoting a Big Lie which was promulgated by the President of the United States, the Department of Justice, and which was and is the favored narrative of the “Democrat Party activists with bylines” from the NYT down. And the activists with teaching credentials – and well over 90% of the non-STEM college faculty nationwide.
I wonder how much of @claire‘s perceptions are colored by a failure to realize the enormity of the consequences of the information/propaganda bubble. Trump is the only Republican candidate of the last three election cycles to break out of that bubble.
“All of the above”
Plus . . . “a little surreal.”
Also, the day after the election I’d have inserted “can’t stop giggling-” in front of “not Hillary.”
I’m sorry @Hypatia—I realized, belatedly, that the “tone” of that remark was going to sound snarky. I didn’t mean it to. I just meant: Please don’t think I’m dumping on Trump. I’ve been really pleased (surprised and pleased) and grateful for quite a lot of what Trump has done already. And I’ve been humbly aware that you and the other Trump supporters saw something that I didn’t see. Which is why I’ve been actively giving him the benefit of the doubt.
I take your point: calls for “civility” can indeed be used to silence necessary and appropriate debate, and the leftists in my own life are often so breathtakingly, unthinkingly uncivil that I find myself thinking, angrily, “nope. Not going to let you call me a racist and then tell me I’m uncivil because I’m offended.”
Especially given the levels of political violence on the left—this is really important.
Aryeh Neier, who with his family fled Nazi Germany as a child and went on to be one of the lawyers who defended the American Nazis right to march in a Jewish neighborhood of Skokie, Illinois, declared that “the history of [Germany] does not support the views of those who say that [evil people] must be forbidden to express their [opinions]. The lesson is that a free society cannot be established and maintained if it will not vigorously and forcefully punish political violence.” (ital. mine) If nothing else, I want my progressive lefty-friends and relatives to recognize that the violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by their side, and that it is absolutely wrong and must be vigorously denounced.
True that!
You may wish to visit some form of a health practitioner.
What has President Trump done that is beyond the pale?
I don’t trust him either. But he has appointed the most conservative Cabinet in a generation or more, got people talking about tax cuts and executive agency reductions on a scale not seen in my lifetime, and nominated a conservative for the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders in Congress had nothing prepared for him to sign. Paul Ryan apparently spouted sone nonsense about focusing on reversal of Obama’s executive orders, as if anything done but executive order couldn’t be undone by the same authority.
Your fears are unfounded, Claire. Turn your cynicism on that leftwing dribble you like to read. Verbally assaulting a press corp is not suppression. Exercising the same executive authority that was present before President Obama is not an Erdogan-like power grab. Trump’s sympathies for Putin — not echoed by his foreign policy secretary — are insignificant unless or until manifested in policy.
Plenty of Ricochet members and Republicans are prepared to condemn any actions by Trump which cross a line. There is already ample criticism of his vague talk about infrastructure spending, tariffs (which the GOP apparently favored for half-a-century), and his immoderate manner. You’re welcome to join that criticism, but at least wait until there are actual policies or executive actions to complain about before crying armageddon.
I’m only on page 81 – I’ve read several similar books lately, very intense, and I know what you mean about the nightmares. Just finished Book of Honor on the CIA Wall of Stars, A Night of Watching about the 8,000 Jews who escaped from Denmark, by Elliott Arnold, and The Main Enemy – An Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB by Milt Bearden and James Risen (I guess it wasn’t the final showdown).
I’m going to read a book about lemons next…..I’ve got to take a break. It’s called Driving Over Lemons – An Optimist in Andalusia by Chris Stewart (drummer for Genesis)…..on my back porch while I watch spring appear :-)
I am glad you ended your message with a question, so I would feel more comfortable answering.
If you had decided to leave your Presidential vote blank, or even voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, you would not have lost my respect.
Instead, you voted to put back in power the most corrupt Presidential duo in the history of the United States. Everyone on this site (except you) understands the depth of depravity and evil held by those two monsters. A cloud of corruption followed them everywhere they went, from Whitewater in the 1980’s through the thoroughly corrupt Clinton Foundation in the 2010’s, and all the horror in between, including Travelgate, FBI Files, Chinagate, Monicagate, and on and on and on. These two people, and the disgusting crooks who surrounded them, never once – not one time – showed any respect for the law of the United States Of America.
And yet you voted to put them back into power. Because you were mad.
Your diatribe up there sounded like the ladies in the Women’s March. You don’t know why you’re mad, you’re just mad because… he won.
Donald Trump won because the MSM decided that he would be easiest to be beaten by Hillary. So, they gave Trump nothing but good press, and non-stop trashed the other candidates. Trump was also helped because votes that might have gone to Cruz (my candidate) instead went to Christie and Paul and Rubio and Huckabee, and on and on. Many of those folks had no place running (although they had every right to run and that’s fine) and should have dropped out a lot sooner, which would have made the choice much easier for Conservatives. Nobody should win the nomination with 40% of the vote, but that’s how we are set up and so, Trump won.
And that’s it. No evil cabal, no Russians, just a system that allowed it to happen.
Trump won on November 8th because the Clinton façade was torn down piece by piece, mostly by their own doing – the #DNCLeaks, the Podesta goldmine, the faceplant in the street on 9-11, the hiding from the news media, the hiding from Americans by using private email and servers. That’s it. No Russians, no vote-fixing, just a really awful Democrat candidate for whom nobody wanted to vote.
Now I ask you a question. No answers allowed for things that happened after November 8, please. What specific details about Trump can you give us that filled you with so much hate that you decided to vote for Hillary?
This is why I’m especially glad that I’m not a journalist. A journalist makes her living by writing, even when there’s not much pleasant to write about. Writing is my hobby, but it’s your profession.
I don’t particularly like, and I certainly don’t trust Trump. I’m impressed with Mattis, and if Gorsuch stays originalist, I’m delighted with that. But the blanket refusal to address entitlements scares me, and I’m going to hate the trillion-dollar infrastructure stimulus. Until Trump started running for office, Trump was a New York social liberal who specialized in manipulating the liberal environment to his personal advantage. So, that stimulus bill scares me. The refusal to tackle entitlements scares me. For all the bombast about how Trump will disrupt the status quo, the glaring refusal to threaten the most destructive status quo is revealing.
But I’m not a journalist. I’m not paid to write. For the last month or so, I’ve found nothing compelling to goad me to write anything – neither in the world in general, nor on Ricochet in particular. Maybe I’m just bored with all of it, and I’m giving myself some time to refresh. But you’re a journalist. You signed up for this. You don’t have the luxury of writing only when you feel like it.
Remember the scene in Ben Hur when they drum the rowers to go faster? Let’s go, girl!
Claire,
I agree with every word and have been avoiding Ricochet for many of the same reasons. The tribal chest-thumping which makes up so much of the discourse on the right today has become impossible to bear. I don’t know how many friends and allies we can hope to get back when this is all over, but if any of your words were able to get through, the number will be higher than it now appears. I was glad to see your byline back on these digital pages.
Was this well written? Good scholarship? I’m always reading something new, and I teach history. I can’t escape the past. ;)
@claire. One recommendation. Stop believing the news. You may want to stop reading or listening to it. The journalists have finally flipped out since the could not get their guy in and are making everything sound far worse than it is. Example. The First Lady went to a children hospital where she read some books with the children and toured a garden dedicated to America First Ladies. While in the garden she said something about nature’s role in healing. All fairly nice fluff stuff.
on the other hand the articles I have read about this event discuss. Melania preaching about nature being better than medicine while her misogynistic science denying husband is destroying the medical system to leave these children to die.
Or how her smile is plastered to her head as a Stockholm prisoner who’s pu–y grabbing White Racist heterosexual alpha male husband is taking away womyn rights to their bodies.
Seriously, Trump has named Fake News but many in this country had come to the conclusion that the clown show calling itself news was over the top way before Trump pushed back.
I now read science fiction stories that have more truth in them than the daily paper.
This is also worth noting. The way in which the truth is twisted into bizarre and unrecognizable shapes is astonishing.
If Trump went to a children’s hospital and chuckled at a joke a kid made, the headlines the next day would read:
DONALD TRUMP WALKS INTO 8 YEAR OLD LEUKEMIA PATIENT’S HOSPITAL ROOM AND LAUGHS
It’s good to see you back, Claire, although I have to confess that I don’t always read your very long pieces–it’s a time thing.
You motivated me to write a post to talk about the overriding issue that I think is plaguing all of us. All of us–even Trump fans–are in mourning. I don’t know if anyone doesn’t feel some sense of loss regarding our hopes about the country that we live in, and the kind of country it has become–above and beyond Trump. Grief is ugly. It’s much easier to point fingers at each other then to acknowledge how desperate or angry we feel in these times. But even if we feel a huge sense of loss for whatever reasons, we must, at the same time, not get stuck in those perceptions. They will not let us heal or move forward. Some of us are not ready to let go of our anger and disappointment. That’s how grief works. But eventually, others of us get tired of our “stuckness” and begin to move forward, step-by-step. That’s what I’m trying to do.
Uh, he did, didn’t he? Am I wrong that he made a Broadcast for Hanoi? I don’t want to get into this again, except, tell me if that is not true.
If it is true, but you and others want to make the point that of course he was under duress, I get, and accept, that.
The bigger point to me, for limited purposes of discussing Trump’s comment, is that GOP opponents said the same thing about him in ’08.
Bingo.
Did they? I don’t remember that. All I remember was that somebody brought up that his shoulders were different heights or something from being beaten so many times.
Also, McCain was given a shot at early release because he was the son of an admiral. He turned it down precisely because he didn’t wish to be a pawn.
Uh-oh. That was a Ricochet member?
I am so sorry. I confused you with someone who’d been trolling me for ages. Please accept my apologies.
As far is I am aware he signed a confession after months maybe years of torture. I am not aware of any broadcast, but his confession may have been read on the radio at the time.
As someone who just finished 8 years of gut wrenching panic, I have to weigh in and say this does not apply to me.
After the election – and even still occasionally – my attitude was such that I felt discombobulated. It had been so long since I’d felt any optimism I didn’t recognize it while I was feeling it
I know you’re a Trump fan, Annefy, and that’s fine. But you don’t have any grief about the state of the country itself? If so, I envy you.
Really, really tired of people saying “we” put Trump where he is. That’s like saying “we” put Obama where he was.
I think it’s quite possible that no one man, woman, or party can stop this train from rolling right off the tracks. A small uptick in interest rates means debt service will eclipse defense spending as a percentage of the overall budget.
Let’s think about that for a second. We’ll be spending more paying for spending than we do on servicemen and women, and the materiel they need to perform their duties protecting us and everything we care about.
Barry was the college kid with dad’s credit card, was very popular with everyone because he always had something to fall back on, and had the killer apartment and the easy undergrad coursework to allow a lot of free time to run his mouth on, well, everything. How could one not fall in love with oneself?
Trump is the reaction to not being heard, not once, by a Barry, a Barry that bats away the concerns of constituencies he disdains in a way that only elitists can do, while simultaneously holding up a mirror to adjust the awesomeness of their own perfectly manicured smile.
It strikes me as odd that Claire doesn’t like the America she sees through Trump’s election, but is quite fine, thank you, with the America she anticipated seeing through a Hillary presidency.
That, in itself, doesn’t sound like conservatism at all. It sounds, again, like elitism.
Sure, the press and education in particular are nothing like when I was young. But I was keeping things in the context of Trump as president.
I’ve been grieving and worrying for years. And I feel A Lot better now
edited to add: What’s with the “that’s fine”?
This reflects an utter lack of self-awareness.
Your (much of the rest of the GOP establishment and “conservative” commentariat) greater contributions were (and continue to be) twofold:
Regarding the second, I’ll ignore your Trump as Erdogan (you could have said he is worse than Hitler) foolishness and address something more pedestrian.
Consider trade. Here, as with many issues, Trump has been all over the map: occasionally sounding like an actual protectionist for protectionism’s sake person; but often sounding like a free-trader who regards protectionism as a deterrent weapon. In your rage of calling him the former, you fail to realize that you are more likely to actually push him in that direction. Even if he does have tendencies toward the former, a better approach would be to treat him like he was advocating the latter and get behind him.
The whole freaking point of Trump’s psychology is that if you take an adversarial tone he pushes back no matter what and if you take a praising tone he buys in. That’s one of the ways the press manipulates him to get him to say stupid things.