The Immortal Election: Steelmanning the Never-Trump Position

At the first International Chess Tournament, in London in 1851, during a pause between official tournament matches, renowned Prussian chess player Adolf Anderssen sat down to play a friendly game with Lionel Kieseritzky, a Baltic German (today he would be Estonian or Latvian) chess master.

After a brief exchange of pawns and two dozen moves of what can only be described as perplexing play, Anderssen had managed to lose two of his pawns, a bishop, both rooks, and his queen -- while capturing only three of his opponent's pawns in exchange.

Kieseritzky appeared positioned to win with a mate in two, but never got the chance: In a stunning reversal, Anderssen advanced his bishop for a surprise mate using only the bishop and two knights, his sole remaining major pieces.

The game, dubbed "The Immortal Game" by Austrian chess master Ernst Falkbeer, stands today as a brilliant, if stylistically dated, example of sacrificial play. I was fortunate to see it first demonstrated without knowing its conclusion, and so enjoyed the full effect of the unexpected victory: The sacrifices pile up as if a drunkard were playing -- I was almost embarrassed for the player and his relentlessly mounting losses.

It's a peculiar and risky thing, the gambit, the faux-sacrifice that leads to advantage. There are so many ways it might go wrong and leave the gambler in an impossibly weakened position. In such an extreme example as this, it's tempting to credit luck, but Anderssen was a master of this style of play, one of the greatest, and it seems likely that the game unfolded much as he intended.

I have less confidence in the strategy of those self-described conservatives who make one of what I believe are the two strongest arguments for not supporting Trump in the upcoming election: That the GOP must reform and that Trump being defeated is how we achieve that reform; or that Americans as a whole need to learn how dire is our situation, and four years of Democratic governance at this seemingly precarious point in our history will drive that message home more effectively than anything else possibly could, effectively enough to prompt real change.

Again, I think these are the strongest practical arguments a conservative can make against supporting Trump. I discount personal objections along the lines of "I simply can't cast a vote for that man," because I don't think those are practical, nor even sensible: Barring some extraordinary event, we are going to get President Trump or President Harris, and making no effort to secure the less bad outcome simply because one is personally offended doesn't make sense in any objective way, and seems both self-indulgent and ultimately destructive.

But there are those two arguments: That it really is in America's best interest to let Trump lose, because then we'll learn one of two important things. We'll either learn that men like Trump should never be nominated, and so the GOP will do better and the nation will prosper as a result. Or Americans will learn just how bad it can get under Democratic rule, and will insist that we change course, and -- again -- the nation will prosper as a result.

Either strikes me as an enormous gamble, a sacrifice -- of a candidate with a known history of relatively conservative governance and a professed desire to pursue the essential dismantling of the overweening state -- in exchange for the hope that a lesson, the right lesson, might be learned through that sacrifice. It's a dangerous gamble for two reasons. First, the damage that might be done by a Harris presidency is, I think, potentially lasting and significant. Second, I see no strong reason to believe that the desired lesson will in fact be learned, either by the GOP or by the American people.

Indeed, it's easy to imagine that the GOP might learn a very different lesson: That we need candidates who are not combative, who don't buck the conventional wisdom or challenge the press, who want to compromise with the Democrats in order to get work done. Or that millions of GOP voters will conclude that it doesn't matter whom they support, because the establishment isn't going to let them elect their preferred candidate anyway. Those outcomes seem as plausible to me as the more beneficial outcomes imagined by the never-Trumpers.

Similarly, it's easy to imagine that the American people would, after four years of economic and social upheaval, be even more dependent on government for relief, even more encouraging of an expansion of government handouts we simply can't afford, but which a Harris administration will drive us deeper into debt to provide.

The world has never witnessed the financial collapse of the American government, nor anything like it. It strikes me as an extraordinarily risky strategy to knowingly hasten that in hopes that we will come to our senses, that in that moment (as Dean Acheson said in a different context), "Cooler heads will prevail."

Better not to get to that point at all and, while there's no sure way to avoid it, common sense suggests we should do our best to avoid it for as long as possible.

That's the point: There's no sure thing here. We don't know if a Trump defeat will strengthen the Republican Party or render it fragmented and irrelevant. We don't know if four more years of Democratic Party governance will leave us with a broken Supreme Court, a wrecked economy, a weakened military facing strong adversaries, a compromised electoral system, restricted speech, and ravaged institutions -- in short, in a situation from which normal Americans simply can not achieve, through the ballot box, a return to political sanity.

That seems to me to be what's at stake. We aren't playing a chess game, and we can't afford to make a huge strategic sacrifice and then lose. Those who argue that a Trump defeat will strengthen us have no evidence to support that, whereas the evidence that a Trump presidency will be objectively superior, from a conservative perspective, to a Harris presidency is ample and compelling.

To those who think these arguments -- again the best arguments I've heard for opposing Trump despite them still not being very good -- are convincing, I suggest you acknowledge the gamble you're taking, and not pretend to have an insight into the future that none of us possess. You're making the immediately poorer choice based on a theory, a hypothesis, an unsubstantiated hope of a happy outcome.

And to those who hide behind seemingly serious arguments to justify their personal detestation of Trump, I say be an adult. Put the nation ahead of your own indignation, and do what's best for America.