Still never
A Republican who likes many of Trump’s policies and actions nevertheless would prefer Clinton to have the job. The surprise there is only that there aren’t more like him.
And want to preserve your own republican institutions? Then pay attention to the character of your leaders, the culture of governance and the political health of the public. It matters a lot more than lowering the top marginal income tax rate by a couple of percentage points.
This is the fatal mistake of conservatives who’ve decided the best way to deal with Trump’s personality — the lying, narcissism, bullying, bigotry, crassness, name calling, ignorance, paranoia, incompetence and pettiness — is to pretend it doesn’t matter. “Character Doesn’t Count” has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. “Virtue Doesn’t Matter” might be another.
But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.
It’s not even a contest.
Trump demands testimonials from his cabinet, servility from Republican politicians and worship from conservative media. To serve in this White House isn’t to be elevated to public service. It’s to be debased into toadyism, which probably explains the record-setting staff turnover of 34 percent, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.
In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches or town halls, we have Trump’s demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN. In place of a president who defends the honor and integrity of his own officers and agencies, we have one who humiliates his attorney general, denigrates the F.B.I. and compares our intelligence agencies to the Gestapo.
Not worth it, is it.
For the majority of the Republican lawmakers, it is worth it. There are several things they are getting – tax cuts, gutting the social safety net they have hated for so long, removing those regulations they hate…oh, and sticking it to the liberals. Sticking it to people like you and me, people they do not consider true Americans®. For a lot of the Republicans I know, they would rather die than have a Democrat leading them…no matter what the policies of the Democrat might be. My father and I once voted for the same candidate for governor – a Republican – because my father would never vote for “that liberal” – never mind that the Republican was far more liberal than the Democrat, the mere D after his name made him the enemy.
And that’s where a lot of this comes in – if you see the opposite party as “the enemy”, then the enemy of your enemy must be your friend.
President Clinton would have made for a glorious 4-8 years of moaning and crying from the right, able to pick on every peccadillo and declaim about the moral superiority of the Republican Party who – they’d be happy to say – ultimately rejected Trump while the Democrats embraced Her Satanic Majesty. So yeah, it’s not that expensive being a Never Trumper from the op-ed pages.
Still – I don’t believe I can take fully seriously the complaints about Trump’s character combined with the delight in his policies. Bullying, pettiness, aggressive ignorance – these are the same things that will underlie the preferred conservative society of “ordered classes”, people “knowing their place”, and the eager trampling of every protection against well-understood environmental threats. Crassness, bigotry – again, where else do you suppose the dismantling of minority protections comes from? Toadyism as the form of public service – this is what comes of the tireless elevation of business culture as the model of efficiency to which government should aspire, and setting the lobbyists to work drafting the regulations for their industries.
There could be conservative political virtues. There’s a lot to be said for preserving working institutions and reforming them carefully, rather than replacing them wholesale; for insisting on genuine character in leaders and for acknowledging it respectfully regardless of policy differences; for regarding society as an organism more than a mechanism and treating governance as more the work of a doctor than an engineer.
Bret Stephens really could have had all of that with a President Hillary Clinton. He wouldn’t have the policies he’s crowing about, precisely because those come from the vices he supposedly condemns.
[…] a comment by Jeff Engel on Still […]
I dunno, guys like Bret Stephens seem to want to split the difference between neoliberalism and whatever is calling itself conservatism these days (or maybe he is actually into Buckley?). Ross Douthat is constantly crowing about some weird hybrid working class conservatism populism that seems utterly unworkable.
Who knows? They’re smart guys, they mostly write well, and I’ll take them as battlefield proximity associates any day.
If they ever write anything that can be some part of a solution rather than the problem, I’d be thrilled that Stevens or Douthat got that published. And if they articulate something that can drag any voters out of the Trumpist fold, that would have a hard time being for the worse.
They both seem to want conservative politics that people of good faith could respect, and to recognize that they’re not ever going to get that under Trump’s banner. Well and good. What they’re not getting is that the policies they quite enjoy aren’t accidentally associated with an ignorant thug leading the executive and partisan sociopaths leading the legislature – they flow from the very attitudes that these politicians embody and their voters prize. A conservatism with a conscience isn’t going to lose just this leadership or these tactics – it’d lose most or all of these policies.
When they’re ready to admit that, I’ll be cheering them on. Until then, they’ve got too much learning to do.