Flyover Country, Ep. 71: Conservatism with Tom Meyer

 

Terry and Ryan are joined by Tom Meyer, former Editor at Ricochet.com and all-around smart guy. He is given an opportunity to respond to last week’s anti-anti podcast, briefly (and would like to remind everyone that anybody who disagrees with him on the topic of Trump is ugly, bad, and lacking in sexual prowess). However, the bulk of the podcast is devoted to an upcoming series of podcasts designed to discuss conservatism in general. We take questions from liberal friends and hope to create a basic understanding of what exactly it is that we believe. We encourage any and all feedback or disagreement. Please comment in the comment section at Ricochet, and email any questions to flyoverpodcast@outlook.com.

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  1. A-Squared Inactive
    A-Squared
    @ASquared

    A-Squared (View Comment):
    You made a comment that Jonah Goldberg said that evangelicals have said adultery is ok with them and you argued it was more (to use Tom’s phrase) transactional, i.e., they balanced the negatives of Trump’s infidelity against the positives he brought.

    As it happened, I listened to the Nov 16 Remnant podcast today.  In it, Jonah mentioned a statistic that in 2011, white evangelical Christians were the demographic most likely to hold immoral personal conduct, only 30% of that demographic said they could look past personal immoral conduct.   In 2016, 72% of white evangelical Christians said they could look past personal immoral conduct by a politician, making them the demographic most willing to overlook personal immoral conduct in a politician.

    They are not saying they are ok with it, but it is clearly matters a lot less to them in a  Republican than it does in a Democrat.  Do you think that stat would have similar movement absent a Trump candidacy?

    He said that stat was from a Brookings PRI poll.  Will have to see if I can find the poll, it is not in the show notes.

     

     

    • #31
  2. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    TJSnapp, Multi Pass holder (View Comment):
    Moral character was THE consideration. No compromise. Twenty years ago Donald Trump wouldn’t have garnered a single vote from evangelicals (edit: in the primaries is what I was thinking, in the general I’m sure some percentage would have held their noses and done it), I have no problem saying this. The idea of a man who writes books and brags about his exploits with women would have been unconscionable. Let alone his lax positions on homosexuality and abortion.

    I didn’t get the Evangelical vote either until Mike Pence got in trouble for not drinking with women alone. His entirely reasonable position was attacked as the worst superstition and bigotry. Then Pervnado hit and but no cultural Marxist rethought their position.

    Trump campaigned as hard as he could as being an anti-leftist and leftists are the people that want to knock the Bibles out of the hands of Evangelicals.

    • #32
  3. Flyover Country Member
    Flyover Country
    @FlyoverCountry

    A-Squared (View Comment):

    A-Squared (View Comment):
    You made a comment that Jonah Goldberg said that evangelicals have said adultery is ok with them and you argued it was more (to use Tom’s phrase) transactional, i.e., they balanced the negatives of Trump’s infidelity against the positives he brought.

    As it happened, I listened to the Nov 16 Remnant podcast today. In it, Jonah mentioned a statistic that in 2011, white evangelical Christians were the demographic most likely to hold immoral personal conduct, only 30% of that demographic said they could look past personal immoral conduct. In 2016, 72% of white evangelical Christians said they could look past personal immoral conduct by a politician, making them the demographic most willing to overlook personal immoral conduct in a politician.

    They are not saying they are ok with it, but it is clearly matters a lot less to them in a Republican than it does in a Democrat. Do you think that stat would have similar movement absent a Trump candidacy?

    He said that stat was from a Brookings PRI poll. Will have to see if I can find the poll, it is not in the show notes.

    I’m going to copy and paste my response from elsewhere, for the purposes of this thread, if you don’t mind:

    Here:

    “No, I don’t think it is an abandonment of core principles at all. I think a better metric of that would be to do some sort of study regarding how likely a particular demographic is to behave in a certain manner. When you have a poll that asks about holding personal conduct against a politician, you’re not really getting any meaningful information apart from whether the polled individual supports the politician in question. In this case, we know that they are more likely to hold it against someone like Obama and less likely to hold it against Trump. Does that mean that their values have changed? No, it only means that they are (or they think they are) answering the question behind the question. It is important to consider the context surrounding the question – even if it is a perfectly neutral question, there is a social and political context. So, if I get a call like that when the news is blowing up over some Tweet from Trump, I may very well interpret that as a question regarding whether I still support this president. Same goes in reverse. That’s the big problem with those sorts of statistics. Evangelical Christians are more likely than not to support Trump. That’s something I _totally_ understand. They are well aware of his past, and somewhat likely to get defensive about being constantly asked those sorts of questions… Does this mean that they’ve abandoned those core principles? No, it doesn’t mean that at all.”

    • #33
  4. Flyover Country Member
    Flyover Country
    @FlyoverCountry

    and here:

    “People are willing to say to a pollster that XYZ is disqualifying when they’ve got a politician in mind who is already pre-disqualified. But chances are, if you sat down and talked with those same people, you’d find them admitting that their position is a lot more complicated than that. So, if you believed that X-principle, during Obama, was of primary importance, and you note that it doesn’t seem to be of primary importance during Trump, what you’re really finding out is that the situation was always more complicated. I’d bet that X-principle has not changed in any way. More realistically, all of the other factors that may not have been relevant before are now suddenly more relevant. But that is the problem with that sort of polling, which is why I say it is largely meaningless.”

    and here:

    “See, that’s where I think you’re being overly simplistic about things that aren’t at all simple. There are a lot of illustrations of difficult (or impossible) scenarios, so I don’t think we need to get into whether you save the boat or the train because you can only pick one… So let’s just use Trump as an example. Say “marriage” is a “core principle.” What is important about marriage? You have Hillary and you have Trump. Both of them are pretty sketchy on the issue of marriage, so if you’re voting based on a candidate’s personal virtue, the choice isn’t clear. But even there, you’re supposing that the most important iteration of that principle is a candidate’s personal virtue. But a president’s role is a lot more than simply as a personal example. Do you vote for the guy who cheated on his wife if you think he might nominate a supreme court justice who will protect religious freedom and marriage? Let’s suppose that the opponent was personally virtuous and promised another far-left justice? Which “core principle” are you throwing away? In that instance, you have the same principle in different iterations, each competing with one another.”

    • #34
  5. Flyover Country Member
    Flyover Country
    @FlyoverCountry

    And lastly, Here:

    “I think that many conservative evangelical Christians voted for Trump because they believed that he would do more to protect their core virtues, regardless of whether he had personally demonstrated an adherence to those same virtues. In that sense, they might answer that personal virtue is less important to them. It’s not because they abandoned that virtue, but because they felt that this individual would do the best job of protecting it.
    Whereas, with Obama, you’ve already got a guy who you know isn’t going to protect that virtue. So you can say that his personal behavior is very important to you.
    In reality, I don’t believe that it is – but that’s just the way polls work. They ask specific questions, but those specific questions don’t really have yes/no answers.”

    I’m a little disappointed with Jonah for reading into those polls something that they simply don’t say.

    • #35
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