I’m not really in the mood to give Viceroy Trump a political obituary the way I did with Barack Obama. For one thing, The Trump Organization will not actually be dead until it is staked in the coffin, has its head chopped off, then has the coffin blasted to bits in a sealed room so that the ashes cannot escape, at which point the ashes will be collected and shot into the sun. Trump is the anti-Tom Joad. Whenever someone is being a belligerent idiot, he’ll be there. Whenever some businessman is driving a creditor into bankruptcy cause he won’t pay his bills, he’ll be there. Whenever you see a cop beating a guy, he’ll be that cop. Trump is immortal.
But that hasn’t stopped some columnists from doing the same, for example at National Review, whose new motto seems to be “We’re not PRO-Trump, we’ve just got a funny way of showing it.” And as part of the literate Right’s desire to play Schrodinger’s Conservative and have their “benefits” of Trumpism and their “deep concern” too, they’ve given a piece to David L. Bahnsen, who “runs a private-wealth-management firm and is a National Review Institute trustee.” This piece, “A Final Assessment of the Trump Presidency, and the Path Forward” is supposed to be a warts-and-all review of Trump’s presidency, but in its typical desire to rationalize conservative Trump support, reveals a cluelessness surpassing Julianne Hough wearing blackface to the Halloween party. And so I have decided to give this particular column a fisking in order to help sum up the effects of The Trump Organization on our country, and on Republican politics in particular.
Remember, “fisking” is a term that first referred to the point-by-point rebuttal of leftist journalist Robert Fisk, back in the Bush Administration days when some people on the Right still had enough brains to form a philosophy other than “The Trump is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Fisking is not to be confused with “fisting”, even if the intent and result are similar.
In hindsight, I wish I had published this article before the events of January 6 at the Capitol building.
I’ll bet.
My goal in this piece has been important to me for a long time — an objective, thoughtful, and fair assessment of the Trump presidency, complete with some suggestions for the path forward in political life after Trump. The ambitions of this article are not changed by the riots, and in fact some conclusions are reinforced by them. However, the already high volume at which this particular conversation takes place in all circles is now even higher, and when everything is this loud, it seems that nothing gets heard at all. I have never written an article before where I felt such a burden to manage the volume to the end of the takeaways, even if not everything will be found agreeable by all.
That strange and awkward preface is not something I can ever imagine writing for the typical articles I author in the fields of economics, culture, and social thought.
Well, that should tell you your chances of success in this endeavor.
…my intent in this article: to assess the overall presidency of Donald Trump, and to do so with no need for vindication, no axe to grind, and a truly open and humble disposition. The advantage (and burden) of such a piece versus all of the various ad hoc events, policies, tweets, and decisions over the years is that I am now trying to “pull it all together.” There is some finality in this, and that means final conclusions will offend or bother some readers. I hope the offense or bother this piece produces for supporters and critics of the president will be minimal and even pre-forgiven. I write on this subject because I want a path forward.
I do not worry about the offense or bother this piece may or may not cause in the far Left — in those whose efforts at critiquing Donald Trump have been unhinged, unfair, and completely counterproductive. The undeserved martyr-like treatment given to Trump by many of his supporters is mostly the by-product of his treatment by the media, which makes no sense to me. I don’t suggest they did not have material available to them, because they had it in abundance. I am suggesting that rather than critiquing the president with the obvious things right in front of them, a huge portion of the country chose to chase absurd conspiracy theories, wild insinuations of Hitlerian tendencies, and often overt lies that served to create insurmountable distrust when there were truthful criticisms to launch. The “CNN camp” has made the role of presidential critics such as myself almost impossible, lumping us in with the unhinged camp. For purposes of my piece, I ask you to fairly and rightly separate my efforts from that camp, because they do not belong there.
Well, let me go into some detail. First, Mr. Bahnsen, you should not stress over whether your opinions cause any offense on the Left, because they’re going to find something to be offended about no matter what you say. Secondly, it is superficial to say that attacks on Trump are all exaggerated or “Hitlerian.” I personally find such comparisons to be a big insult. To Hitler. After all, Hitler actually volunteered for the army, and he led an economic recovery for more than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody. The thesis of my response is that your very equivocation betrays the problem with presenting an ‘even-handed’ treatment of the subject Mr. Trump. If there are indeed good things about the Trump time in office from a neutral or right-wing perspective, the fact that both the praise and hate for Trump are exaggerated out of proportion to results (I differ as to how exaggerated these opinions are) indicates the problem for the critic who presents himself as even-handed. Not just in that the Left will not hear anything good you have to say about Trump, but more that the Right will not hear any criticism of their Leader. My suspicion borne out by the last four years of observation is that the Right will be a tougher sell for your “path forward”, for that reason.
Many who had the “Never Trump” label ascribed to them sacrificed needed credibility, either early on or, for others, later into the presidency, for a willingness to sacrifice previously held beliefs if it meant being aligned with the president.
There’s a difference between “sacrificing” previously held beliefs just because they’re associated with an individual and changing one’s beliefs because you’ve learned something with experience and perspective. By the same token, if one’s experience causes a person to align against a given individual, that doesn’t necessarily disqualify their opinion just because you want to defend that subject.
And the so-called “Always Trump” camp never found a way to generally support an agenda without an unhealthy, often sycophantic, loyalty to the president. The bipolarity of these two positions has taken over the Right these last four years, leaving some who have genuinely believed that there was not just room for, but the necessity for, a more nuanced position in exile.
Yes, except that bi-polarity implies there are two positions. Those “Never Trumpers” who committed heresy against Our President have in effect excommunicated themselves from the Right, no matter their positions on taxes or abortion or such. Their main opportunities for media exposure are with the Washington Post media, or MSNBC, or one of those other mainstream outlets, which means they will be shut off by Republican listeners just as surely as The Liberal Media deplatforms Republicans and cancels their book contracts. It is not the Never Trumpers who were preventing “a more nuanced position in exile” – they were trying to create it. They could not, because the “Always Trump” position is now dominant in the Republican Party and conservative movement, and nuance is the enemy to them.
I want to say something to the president’s most ardent supporters, the group I fear will be offended by many of the conclusions of this piece. Whether you come out of this reading convinced of this or not, I really do, from the bottom of my heart, understand. I understand the frustrations you feel, the fear you have for what is happening in our country and our culture. I understand the desire for there to be someone who you feel is pushing back or fighting. It makes perfect sense to me why you find the media contemptible, and why you see someone such as President Trump who so often fights with the media as your friend, and maybe even your protector.
Ah, so a riot is the language of the unheard. I get it.
The very heartfelt and rational critiques I offer herein about Donald Trump are not because I disagree with you about those problems; they are because I disagree with you about Trump as the solution.I hope you will find my arguments for such persuasive. …Those who are the most significant critics of Trump on the Right have too often failed to strive for any level of empathy for those identifying as Trump supporters when significant empathy is warranted and even required.
Guy, their favorite slogan was “Fuck Your Feelings.” I wasn’t aware that was a cry for empathy.
And to the extent that I agree with your central point, sir, it’s that the Trump fan club that took over conservatism (to the extent it blends into the Tea Party) had some real points about business-as-usual government (mainly from Democrats but also establishment Republicans) and the fact that they were completely wrong about the solution doesn’t change the fact that there are real issues with pre-Trump government. More’s the pity, because association with Trump means first and foremost that such supposedly conscientious people really cared more about the negative impulses they got to indulge in Trump’s cult of personality. More to the point, the fact that Trump IS identified as “the solution” because he has absorbed the Right and will brook no debate makes it that much less likely that real reform can happen outside “the swamp.” He hasn’t drained it, he has made it stronger, because he has made it look preferable to the alleged solution.
The Good
There are some things that have to be said about the Trump presidency in a “final hour assessment” that are unambiguously good. And I will start with the single greatest achievement of the entire Trump era: He kept Hillary Clinton from ever being our president. For all the other good and bad, I have absolutely no problem rooting this piece in the simple observation that President Donald Trump meant there was no President Hillary Clinton, and that is an unalloyed good. I haven’t compromised a single bit around the case that Hillary Clinton would have been an unfathomable disaster for our country. Her defeat is something I will celebrate forever, regardless of who it was who defeated her. I do not share the belief of some of my friends that in 2016 “only Trump could have beaten her.” What we know is that President Trump did defeat her, to the surprise of many — including myself. This remains the hallmark achievement of the Trump era.
Ehh, almost, but not quite.
The fact that Hillary can inspire (and deserve) such hatred even now, and that both Biden and Obama won clear victories when the Electoral College slipped out of her fingers, indicates in retrospect that almost anybody could have beaten her, and my personal conspiracy theory is that Donnie’s old buddy Bill put Trump up to running against Hillary Clinton as the ultimate wrestling heel as part of the effort to tar the Republican Party for good. They just forgot that people like wrestling heels more than Hillary. And I personally agree with the Clinton camp that James Comey’s revival of the email investigations just days before the election did more to kill her momentum than any thing the Russians did overtly or covertly. Indeed, given how close things were, had Hillary won, the Right might be saying that anybody BUT Trump could have beat her, given that he was the only Republican candidate who approached her negatives with the unconverted.
Another significant policy achievement of the Trump presidency is his three Supreme Court justices.
This is of course, the Right’s go-to justification for everything else.
This is also the crowning achievement of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. For some reason, MAGA hates this man, and I have absolutely no idea why.
Because Mitch has an existence outside Donald Trump.
There are a few other accomplishments often brought up when constructing Trump’s presidential resume. The corporate-tax reform was a needed and important piece of legislation, not as — contrary to popular leftist lies — a support for the rich, but as a support for the job creation, business investment, capex, global competitiveness, repatriation of foreign profits, and reduction of loopholes it fostered. That this accomplishment actually went through a real legislative process makes it even more important — it cannot be reversed so easily, and it was actually done properly in the context of the Constitution.
True. And as you imply, if there was anything good about all this, and it is the sort of thing that any Republican would want, then that implies any Republican president would have pursued it. That begs the question of whether these gains were worth the loss of the Party’s reputation, and your words as a whole provide the answer.
I am glad the president relocated to the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, ended the Iranian nuclear deal, and pulled us out of the Paris accord. These things carry more symbolic than practical significance, but symbolic gestures do matter.
Given liberal Jews’ longstanding support for Israel, the fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to take a similar position has less to do with the wonderful genius of Donald Trump (other than his capacity to push on with an idea no matter who it offends) and more to do with external factors: specifically the fact that Israeli government is even more dominated than American government by a “conservative” government that is even more corrupt and pandering to the fundamentalists than ours is, plus a realization on the Arab states’ part that they never really cared about the Palestinians much anyway, and were willing to trade them for deals with the US and help with containing Shia Iran.
It may seem like small ball to many of you, and with some of the ghastly pardons that are included in his actions, may even rub you the wrong way. But I would include the president’s pardons of Michael Milken and Conrad Black as two of his greatest hits. I’ve written enough about the Milken pardon but will celebrate it long after Trump is gone.
You’re right, David. Pardoning Milken in particular does rub me the wrong way. As a matter of fact, this one paragraph almost invalidates everything you say by itself. At Milken’s sentencing, Judge Kimba Wood told him: “You were willing to commit only crimes that were unlikely to be detected. … When a man of your power in the financial world… repeatedly conspires to violate, and violates, securities and tax business in order to achieve more power and wealth for himself… a significant prison term is required.”
I do not disagree with President Trump’s defenders that he has been one of the most pro-life presidents we have ever had.
I do.
His voice, rhetoric, public support, judicial appointments, and HHS personnel are high up in his report card for this tireless defending of the unborn.
Which is to say, years after he quit attending Jeffrey Epstein parties. Look, Republicans, you have to ask yourself what the endgame is here. If you honestly think abortion is murder at any point in pregnancy, then you can stop with nothing less than not only the repeal of Roe v. Wade but a Human Life Amendment or state laws to either ban abortion or do as good as. And even invalidating Roe v. Wade would mean that all the motivation and momentum leaves your side and goes to the baby-killer side, and if they can’t campaign against your scrubbed, fresh-faced young judges, they’re certainly going to campaign against the Senators that approved them. Your side is already the dog that caught the car. Soon, it’s going to shift in Reverse.
The Bad
Well, I’ve gone over this in extensive detail, but lets’ see what you think.
It is at this time that I regretfully suggest that the presidency has been an abject disaster in so many ways, not generally because of his policies, but because of the character, temperament, ego, and pathology of the president, that time and time again blotted out the good and undermined opportunities for success. Ultimately, it is my position that the things we were told didn’t matter inevitably damaged the things we were told did matter. [my emphasis]
This is my strongest point of agreement.
First, allow me to numerically offer categorical critiques that I believe warrant very little controversy on the Right. There is a certain sequence here, but they are not ranked in an order of importance:
1) “But he fights” is the most universally uttered argument in defense of President Trump, and in this phrase sits the core of my disagreement with MAGA world. “Yes, I know he tweets silly things sometimes, but at least he stands up to the media and cancel culture and the Left.” “I don’t like his temperament either, but he gets things done.” You know the lines to which I am referring, and they are universal from many who have supported President Trump.
Now, I would be happy to rebut the conclusions of this thinking — that because he “gets things done” and “stands up to the Left,” it is easy to tolerate the tweets, insults, conspiracy theories, childish behavior, boorishness, and so forth. I vehemently disagree with that thinking, but I will avoid even that argument, because this one is so much easier, and so much more undermining of that proposition: The temperament and behavior could not be ignored for the greater good, because the greater good to which you refer failed as a result of the temperament and behavior.
I spent four years pleading with people to understand that the president listened to the masses, and if he got pushback on his behavior, his craving for popularity would mean a shift in behavior. Instead of feeling pressured to change, he felt emboldened.
This should not be a surprise to so many people. We are dealing with a symbiosis. I have mentioned more times than I care to recall that Trump’s uncanny bond with his fan club is a case of identity fusion, or as the joke goes, Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump fan would be if they had money. When you’re dealing with pivotal figures, there’s always a debate between the Hegelian position that history is formed by “great men” and the Marxist position that “great men” simply follow the mass and are subject to the same material circumstances. The truth is a little of both. If the “base” saw Trump in themselves, it’s not because they wanted a government that was more informed by F.A. Hayek or Thomas Aquinas. They wanted somebody who would run things the way they would if they got the chance. That’s exactly what happened. You can look at tapes of Donald Trump not that many years ago and see that even if he was no deep intellectual, he was at least articulate. Now all he can do is parrot the same slogans the Republican masses and their representatives have been parroting to each other for years, because a conman plays to the mark. It would be one thing if he were cynically manipulating that mass with lies and hate, but Trump has gotten high on his own supply to the extent that he resembles Al Pacino in the last scene of Scarface. Trump tells his lies to the crowd, and they cheer him on, so he eggs them on even more. They make each other worse.
But allow me to strike at the heart of what cost President Trump reelection: that first debate. I can criticize President Trump for much, but I do not criticize his marketing savvy and even his political instincts. How could I? President Trump either entered that first debate wanting to lose the election, or actually believing that the nation liked and wanted petulance of a variety we have never seen in American presidential history. Any review of the strategy he utilized in the second debate versus how he behaved in the first debate decimates the argument that “you have to let Trump be Trump.” As we saw in the second debate, he is highly capable of reining it in when he believes it will help him pragmatically. His performance in the second debate was masterful, not just because he articulated needed truth about the COVID moment, but because his temperament was sober, respectful, serious, and right. By then, nearly half of voting had already happened. The inability to empirically prove cause and effect does not change what we know instinctively to be true — his conduct at the first debate destroyed his candidacy.
Sir, if you think that Trump’s second debate was “masterful” and that he presented any truth about COVID, that is part of the problem.
But I will use even clearer data to make my case: Do you know that he still enjoyed high levels of approval and support even a month into the COVID moment? Even as death tolls were climbing and his own orders for national lockdown were decimating the economy, the country had not yet blamed President Trump for it. It is in this area that I vehemently disagree with many of my friends on the Right who have been outspoken critics of President Trump: The idea that he “caused the deaths of 300,000 Americans” is absurd. One can do revisionist history on what transpired in January and February of 2020 all they want, but there is very little President Trump could have done or should have done differently. “But he knew it was serious and did nothing.” What was he supposed to do? Shut down the economy before we had experienced a single death over a totally unknown and pre-understood respiratory virus? It’s partisan nonsense, and everyone knows it.
What’s partisan nonsense is dodging the point because it doesn’t fit your thesis. Trump indeed enjoyed high levels of support not only at the start of the COVID “moment” (such a lovely euphemism) but all the way through the election, not so much in Liberal Media opinion polls, but in the only poll that counted, the one taken in November. He just managed to alienate that many more people, or that many more people thought Joe Biden did a better imitation of a human being. No, he didn’t cause the deaths of 300,000 people… he just refused to ban China travel until their virus had already spread to Europe, declared the European travel ban on such short notice that airports were slammed with passengers trying to get back in the country in conditions ideal for spreading a virus, refused to admit there was a crisis in the first two months of the spread, shuffled Alex Azar and Mike Pence in control of the task force and then eventually took over their press conferences so he’d have a national audience for his blame-the-media pity party, belittled Dr. Fauci, belitted Dr. Birx, encouraged the herd immunity theory, and consistently treated masks as though they had cooties on them (which is kind of the point, actually).
TOTALLY NOT the same thing!
I do not know why so many decided that President Trump accusing Ted Cruz’s dad of killing JFK was acceptable or why the mocking statements about the physical appearance of Carly Fiorina and Heidi Cruz were tolerated during the 2016 campaign. But I do know that when the exact same behavior inevitably carried in the COVID moment of 2020, it was unpalatable for many Americans.
Not nearly enough of them.
I am not suggesting that President Trump lost in 2020 because he tweeted that President Obama faked the killing of Osama bin Laden and had Seal Team Six killed. Rather, I am suggesting that he tweeted it because he thought he could. A numbness had built up such that the totally unacceptable became ignored. And in a 40-40-20 country, on the margin, it was political suicide — not merely this tweet, but the entire lot of them.
And that’s what your party hasn’t figured out, David. You were scared of that 40/40/20 margin going the wrong way, and rather than do anything to counter that other 40 or wean the 20 in the middle to your view, you doubled down on stupid. “he tweeted it because he thought he could.” Yes… and who gave him that impression?
2) Those who believe the federal government is too large, should be reined it, should spend less, should extract less money from the private sector, and should seek a greater fiscal responsibility have surrendered any semblance of credibility for years. It has to be said that this is not just because we spent trillions of dollars more than ever thought possible — and this was before the COVID stimulus packages.
I understand there was excessive spending in past Republican and Democratic administrations, but there were always objectors. The Tea Party movement was a response to profligate spending under the Obama administration. And during the Bush Jr. spending years, there was a significant, though inadequate, resistance from the Right in the House and Senate. Trump did not merely spend us into oblivion, he got the “freedom caucus” to spend us into oblivion. He wasn’t hypocritical. Bush Jr. said he favored right-sized government, and then overspent. Trump overspent, and said it was because he didn’t favor right-sized government.
Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.
Thanks for acknowledging that the Republicans never really gave a rat’s tail about government restraint in the first place and certainly didn’t under Trump. As you say, the difference between Trump and the respectable cloth-coat Republicans is that Trump didn’t bother with the hypocrisy. But Hey – he’s authentic!
The various cultural fears I alluded to earlier have been used as an excuse for his entire term in office to ignore the economic recklessness playing out both in deed and word, and yet having ceded the high ground to the leftist argument for size of government, spending, and budget math, we will now face the cultural ramifications of abandoning basic first things. I want to be clear — I am not merely worried that the Left will now call us hypocrites regarding spending; I am worried because it is true. And it is not true because we said one thing and did another.
Faced with a big-spending Republican president who said he wanted negative interest rates, trillions of dollars of deficits, and unlimited budget increases in each category, the GOP House and Senate, either afraid of a mean tweet, a MAGA primary opponent, or perhaps genuinely converted by the intellectual force of the Trumpian argument, capitulated. I cannot imagine what it will take to establish credibility. And when Democratic spending offends us, I cannot imagine what many in MAGA will say. For many, they would be wise to sit that argument out.
In the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” To paraphrase, the things you were told – ahem, the things WE told YOU – did matter were things you thought didn’t matter, and for the sake of your goals, you killed the things you say do matter. Almost as if the venal cult of personality and the chance to “fight back and make liberals cry” mattered to you more than Christian ethics or responsible government, otherwise you wouldn’t have done so much to enable a guy who makes Bill Clinton’s impeachment case look like a parking ticket. Now nobody believes you as a moral authority, and they certainly won’t take you seriously when you look at Joe Biden’s spending agenda and realize that you’re supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. The irony being that your most libertarian, pro-capitalist president EVAR hollowed out small business to such a great extent with the effects of Trump Virus means that we’re actually going to need that massive Keynesian spending to prime the pump. You’re doing more to justify the left-socialist spectrum than anything they could do with their limited imaginations. “I am not merely worried that the Left will now call us hypocrites regarding spending; I am worried because it is true.” As the kids say these days, sounds like a You problem.
3) One of the major premises of the Trump presidency was that he would bring in the competence and get-stuff-done mentality of a businessman to Washington. The results may set back the cause of a private-sector businessman fixing Washington for decades. The constant “palace intrigue” management style of the president (a style that sits at the heart of his business philosophy, too), created the most volatile and unstable White House staff and cabinet in generations.
Several fine patriots of great prestige and competence have come into the administration, and I differ with those Trump critics who believe those patriots had a duty to leave when Trump misbehaved throughout his presidency. I am quite confident that those who were on the “A-team” of the administration represented a superior alternative to the reality TV stars and campaign grifters who could have potentially replaced them.
Well, this is again what you get when you let your projections blind you to the fact that Trump was never a successful billionaire, he just played one on TV. And yes: the results will set back the chance for a similar pitch for decades. We can only hope. As for the ‘A-Team’ giving way to the grifters, what do you expect? Trump doesn’t want competent people, because he’s incompetent, and at core, jealous and insecure because of that. He wants bottom-feeders who look up to him because that treats his insecurity. The results are what we got. Geez Louise, if liberals could figure that out, why couldn’t National Review? It seems erudition and culture aren’t everything.
…It is my humble, gracious, yet unwavering view that what many of the president’s supporters see (and love) as a “won’t back down/fight the Left” attitude, is really a character malady that happens to sometimes align with the Right’s agenda.
Quite.
… Let us dispel of the myth that the only options are the gentlemanly passivity and ineffectualness of a Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, or else the vulgarity and narcissism of Donald Trump. Have we truly come to a place where we do not believe we can engage the cultural and political fights of the day with energy, force, and boldness, yet without the self-defeating traits of ego and childishness that so often defined President Trump? Is this not the falsest dilemma of our time?
David, I think this whole essay is a therapeutic attempt to avoid coming to grips with the fact that you already know the answer to that question, and you don’t want to say it.
Reagan gave us “Morning in America.” Trump gave us “American Carnage.” Literally. That says it all.
Reagan won 49 states in 1984. Trump’s one clear victory was only because certain key states had a margin of “third” party votes exceeding the difference between Trump and Clinton, which liberals never fail to remind me. Reagan didn’t need to come up with ghost stories and fish tales about stolen ballots and landslides, because he earned what he got. Republicans used to be popular. Even with Dubya, they were sorta popular. Not anymore. To go back to Republican budget hypocrisy, I think that’s a lot more consequential than whether Republicans are supposedly racist. For one thing, we all know how many more black and Hispanic votes Trump got this time. For another thing, institutional racism is a problem that will ultimately solve itself as demographics change. The question is what kind of government we have, and if “conservatives” keep screaming about socialism but are just as spendthrift and statist, they have no claim to be an alternative.
Wailing and worrying about association with Trump betrays the point that you followed him because, for one thing, he really was the most popular and competent national politician you had. If you had anybody better, you would have taken them, cause at one point you did have better. For another, just as the “base” influences the leadership, the reverse is also true. I like to say that this was the Party of Trump for years before 2015, Republicans were just waiting for him to show up. For years “Tea Party” people had gone past legitimate skepticism of Big Government to attacks on government per se, and they arranged things so that you had to appeal to their wingnuttery just to win a primary, even though candidates had to tack left and pretend to be moderate to appeal to the general audience. Trump showed them they could get their populism straight from the tap.
The respectable, cloth-coat Republicans, like the ones who work for National Review (or used to) have scared themselves into thinking that rather than challenge the opposition 40 percent or adapt to the middle 20 percent and poach them from the Enemy, they have to stick with the “base” and adopt counter-majoritarian tactics to make sure that’s enough. And since that really isn’t enough, they’re scared to death of losing the once-Tea Party/now-Trumpnik/future-Q people. No one in the Trumpnik movement has ever stopped to think that they would be in that much more of a demographic slide if the respectable conservatives left them instead. I wonder why.
The Way Forward
I agree with those critical of the president that there will likely be a period of reckoning ahead, but I do not agree that we ought to hope for such. Rooting for various dependable conservative Senators to lose for blood-sport because they tried to thread the needle in dealing with Trump these last few years is counter-productive. Seeking to “cancel” those who dared to bring some competence and productivity to the administration is silly, unfair, and wrong.
These are Senators we’re dealing with. Lindsey Graham is fine. Tommy Tuberville is fine. Mitch McConnell is fine. The only way people like that lose in this system is if they’ve made themselves that unpopular, and that takes a lot more than “cancel culture.”
…If I could wave a wand and make it so, we would have a resurgence of fusionism tomorrow — this time juxtaposing a toughness in demeanor, an appeal to disenfranchised working-class voters, and traditional movement conservatives. I see nothing contradictory in any of those three components, and I see no choice of forward progress for our movement (politically) without all three for the time being.
Another assortment of a “Big Tent.” A wise position: Except it has to acknowledge that the last Big Tent of Christianists, libertarians and neocons collapsed because their views are really not that compatible in the end, and the working-class and “traditional” (Christianist) people are even less so. The fact that factions are contradictory doesn’t mean that a coalition can’t be formed – it’s been done before. But that takes not only leadership but intellect. “Toughness”, while necessary, is not synonymous with leadership and it certainly isn’t synonymous with intellect.
The war big tech seems determined to fight against conservatives is not going to make this dynamic any easier. Many will get bogged down by the technical details of Section 230 and big tech’s freedom as private companies. Others still will demand exhaustive regulation and reversals, allowing their desperation to move them from the frying pan to the fire. A Trumpian authoritarianism is more palatable to so many than Silicon Valley authoritarianism, but I prefer neither. When I am asked if I want what we have these last few years, or a Silicon Valley dominance in partnership with a woke Democratic Party, my answer is, “None of the above.” We have every right and every chance to work for an affirmative vision of our movement, now. In fact, we have every duty to do so.
Hey, David, there’s at least one party that’s “None of the above.”
Ultimately, the substantial phenomena of Trump’s personality is what has to fade for conservatives, not merely meaning his personality, but the excessive reliance on personality. All things being equal, I am quite sure the GOP has little chance of winning a presidential election without a candidate of forceful and charismatic personality. But as Matthew Continetti suggests, what is needed now is a “depersonalization of the right.” We will need dynamic and high-character people to deliver, and yes, they will have to be fighters.
A very good point actually. As much as pre-Trump Republicans seemed to worship Reagan, they did not make him a personality cult the way they did Trump. But that again betrays the fact that they’ve got nothing else to work with. Paradoxically, for a political party to depersonalize, it has to have more than one personality.
But if we care about the size of the state, the character of the country, the virtue of the people, the futures of our children, the protection of our Constitution, and a permanent defeat of the forces of socialism and collectivism, we are best advised to fight these evils with less reliance on the mere appeal of a big personality and more commitment to defensible principles.
I want to reiterate my empathy for those who feel we are on the losing side of a culture war and need reinforcements that include the “strength” and “toughness” of Donald Trump. We are in a culture war and a debacle of secular-humanist wokeism, and we will need strength and toughness to prevail.
[much dross follows in conclusion]
For people who go on so much about strength and toughness, you’re more Princess-and-the-Pea than all the social media lefties.
It never seems to have occurred to you that people of a generically conservative temperament ARE the majority in this country – and by ‘conservative’ I mean, keeping the traditions that work, gradually changing the things that don’t, making the system work for everyone and using common sense. I DON’T mean “we hate abortion and gays.” This is why Biden, who differs with his Church on the abortion issue, comes off as more Christian and Middle American than Trump, who has probably paid more for abortions than for building contracts. You’re losing not because the great middle disagrees with you about the Left. They don’t. That’s the only reason you’ve managed to coast this long. The Left is starting to beat you anyway because for all the photos you show of riots and burning in the BLM protests, you’re the ones in charge of the national agenda – right up to January 20, 2021. And you, by your own actions, have made the Democrats and Left look like the sane alternative to you.
You can only get so far on empty promises and propaganda and “no matter how much you hate us, those guys are always worse.” That didn’t work for Hillary Clinton. How long did you think it would work for you?
Don’t try to present yourselves as the sane alternative to the Left until you actually become that. If you want to, that is. To paraphrase from above, “And when Democratic (policy) offends us, I cannot imagine what many in MAGA will say. For many, they would be wise to sit that argument out.”