This is in response to Robert W. Merry’s column at The American Conservative on August 29, “Why Trump’s Approval Numbers Won’t Budge.”
To Mr. Merry:
In your August 29 piece, you wrote about how the Monday polls from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News showed that Donald Trump’s poll numbers were 44% approval, as opposed to 46% before Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen were convicted of tax crimes. (Your piece was of course written before the Washington Post-ABC News poll.) And you asked the reader, “Why?”
“Because this isn’t about the fate of Trump so much as the future of America. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism. “
Uh, no.
This is just my theory, but I believe what we are seeing is analogous to 2016, when liberals would wail that the election of Donald Trump would mean the end of Western Civilization, even as they fake-acknowledged their candidate’s issues by saying things like “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” And yet, for all the Chicken Littles saying the sky would fall, not that many of them could be arsed to go out and vote for Clinton. And who could blame them? At least she was actually on the ballot, though.
Continued support for Trump in the polls is a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, just as the entire “conservative” movement is now a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, a mindset in which pronouncing “Mexico will pay for the wall” or “we repealed the Johnson Amendment” magically makes it so. But what of the rest of us still living in the real world?
In that world, Republicans have been threatened in special elections, many of which were only necessary because of the number of incumbents who decided to (or had to) retire early. In Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, Troy Balderson was only this week declared the winner of the August 7 special election, in a district that was “R+14” for Trump in 2016. Most general election races are in districts where the margin was not that favorable to Republicans. This is why I think such base that Trump has is not as tough as it appears, and later in your column, you seem to admit this.
“For those committed to the new world envisioned by the coalition of the ascendant, it is easy to see Trump, with all of his crudeness and vulgarity, as evil. After all, he’s personally distasteful and he wants to destroy the America of their dreams. But for Trump supporters, he represents their last hope for preserving the old America. These people view the stakes as so high that the president’s personal indecency and civic brutishness simply don’t register as problems. They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause. “
That’s dodging the point. Indeed, for much of Trump’s audience (as opposed to the respectable cloth-coat Republicans he pushed aside in the primaries) Trump’s crudeness and vulgarity are features. And if you’re liberal or libertarian, or at least libertine, crudeness and vulgarity are not themselves evil. Rather, the crudeness and vulgarity are incidental to actual evil, which the rest of us are focusing on and Trumpniks are desperately seeking to rationalize. What is it, Mr. Perry, that you think conservatives are getting from this Administration?
In your own website this week, one of your authors points out that the Trump Administration policy of unilaterally siding with Israel on the Palestine issue denies what little right to self-determination Palestinians have, forcing the burden of Palestinian refugees on neighboring Arab states even as the Administration refuses to let Syrian refugees into this country.
And your most prolific blogger, Christian conservative Rod Dreher, has been doggedly focused on the corruption of the Catholic Church, which is not entirely sexual, and may even be at its core financial. In a column written the same day as your piece, Dreher mentioned his attempts years ago to unearth the earlier pedophilia scandal: “I am reminded of the conservative Catholic men who, I was told, was part of a group of laity who flew to Rome in or around 2000, to warn officials at the Vatican not to name McCarrick to Washington, because he was a sexual predator. When I phoned in 2002 to ask one of the men, he told me he indeed went on that trip, but refused to talk about it. When I phoned the second man on my list to ask about it, he answered, ‘If that were true, I wouldn’t tell you for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.’ Well, it’s all out in the open now, and McCarrick’s foulness has tainted two more popes. If those men had cared more about the truth in 2002 than about protecting the image of the Church by covering up for a wicked cardinal, perhaps the McCarrick boil would have been lanced, and Church wouldn’t be facing such a grave crisis today. There is a lesson here for everyone, not just Catholics, and not just Christians. ‘Live not by lies,’ said Solzhenitsyn.”
But never mind that stuff, because obviously it has no analogy to the political situation.
Right now you have Trump telling Evangelicals that Democrats are a threat to “your religion” (not his) at the same time it’s been revealed that the government is refusing to acknowledge the passports of Hispanic citizens. In that regard, do you want people to focus on the lurid immorality that doesn’t affect them, or do you want them to focus on the lurid immorality that affects public policy?
It’s one thing for leftist propagandists to call right-wingers racist, authoritarian theocrats, but it’s another thing for “conservatives” to actively justify such opinion and spread it even among those who were neutral to or hostile to the Left. And you’re on track to lose a historic number of House seats because your only real achievement was a tax cut that doesn’t benefit most voters and actually kills deductions for people in a lot of crucial states. On policy, you were still going down the spiral, but you at least had the image of morality to pull you back up to public esteem eventually. Now that’s gone. Your moral capital is at a net negative. As Dreher said in another column this week, “People will not take you seriously as a proclaimer of Truth if their aesthetic and moral senses tell them otherwise.” Which is why it does no good to make pronouncements on “evil” or cast the culture war in apocalyptic terms when you are eagerly racing to become the very thing you swore to destroy.
As for “They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause” – dare I suggest, maybe you’ve become too repellent for your pick of candidates? Heck, Condoleeza Rice would be a more wholesome leader for the conservative movement than your precious little boy, and I can think of at least two reasons why y’all wouldn’t want her.
“All of this supports the view, which I have posited in the past, that while Trump may have been brilliant in crafting a successful electoral coalition in 2016, he hasn’t managed to turn that into a governing coalition. This can be seen in part by his lack of any apparent inclination to talk to Americans who aren’t already part of his base. “
Well… yeah.
Trump was brilliant at identifying Americans’ grievances, but since his only concern was self-aggrandizement, he had no plan to address them. Nevertheless, people were so fed up with the status quo under Democrats and establishment Republicans that Trump won just enough votes for the Electoral College. Likewise, if people are mad enough at the status quo, it doesn’t matter whether or not Democrats have any constructive ideas, what matters is flushing out the status quo.
This is what happens when you hitch your star to somebody who doesn’t share your long-term goals or even have any long-term goals at all besides staying one step ahead of investigators and lawyers.
Even you guys in the Pat Buchanan camp, and the various corporate sponsors, the kind of people who could in theory craft a competent version of American authoritarianism, are in practice acting emotionally and reactively and refusing to admit that your Great Helmsman has all the concentration and direction sense of a squirrel on meth.
But if you actually had an idea how to accomplish all those “new directions” like re-assessing immigration priorities (as opposed to simply targeting brown people) or rebuilding our manufacturing base (as opposed to simply pandering to coal country while jobs continue to go overseas), then you would have been able to sell those ideas without Trump. You need him for the same reason that you obey him: because you’ve got nothing else to sell.
There is no greater purpose than Donald Trump to defend, because the “conservative movement” has nothing to offer even the people who should be attracted to it. The modern Republican Party is a beast that can no longer exist in the wild. It is a fantastic chimera, with two squabbling heads, one Christian fundamentalist and one fiscal libertarian, trying to pull a body composed of working class populists who could care less about either of them but just want to save their jobs. Those are the people who actually vote for the Republicans, as opposed to the people who fund them or write the policy agendas, and after Trump, the folks have figured out that they don’t need those guys anymore. Of course, the joke is on them, sort of. They don’t care about free markets, and Trump doesn’t either, and they don’t care about Jesus, and Trump doesn’t either. They do care about coal and steel – and Trump doesn’t. But he acts like he does, and that’s more than “flyover country” had gotten from the two parties before.
Now even in optimal circumstances, Democrats will never get 67 Senators to vote for an impeachment. So we’re all stuck with Trump for two more years. And in those two years, you will all be saying to yourselves, over and over and over and over and over and over again, “Neil Gorsuch was SO TOTALLY WORTH IT.” Because I predict that things will get a lot worse for your party in the next two years. And I bet that you think so too.
The now born-again Christian Blackie Lawless likes to tell a story about his time with the shock rock band W.A.S.P., most famous for the song “F*ck Like A Beast.” Blackie would pose on posters with a spandex costume and a codpiece with a buzzsaw blade coming out of it, and on stage, he would frequently arm the codpiece with various explosive rockets so that they would fire off of his groin during the set. Well, one show, the explosive charges misfired and exploded inside the codpiece, leaving Blackie with screaming pain and a seriously burned crotch, as happens in these situations. And his bandmates came to visit him in the hospital, with the bandages on his crotch, and his guitarist told him, “y’know, Blackie, we wouldn’t have to do these gimmicks if we could just write better songs.”
That’s kind of how I feel about the Republican Party.
And before your anodyne conclusion, “This has been a resilient nation over its 230-year history. It will need all the resiliency it can muster as we move forward”, you theorize: “The country is split down the seams, and some kind of Hegelian synthesis will eventually have to emerge that incorporates elements of the two competing visions of America that today are roiling national politics—and which seem irreconcilable. “
Oh, so an integration of America’s generically liberal political idealism with the practical considerations of culture, economics and national security. Yeah, Robert, I remember when such a synthesis still existed. It was called conservatism. You mind telling me what happened to it?