Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
-Edmund Burke
I don’t want to deal much with Viceroy Trump anymore, because there’s not much new to say, and the subject is just depressing. And not just because of the Right, but because of the whole two-party dynamic. As the House Judiciary Committee passed two Articles of Impeachment Friday, some people were sending signals that some Democrats in pro-Trump states were willing to compromise by suggesting that censure would be preferable to impeachment. In fact one Democrat who refused to consider impeachment, New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew, is deciding to join the Republican Party. But there was another thing that happened during the case earlier in the week. On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a press conference with Adam Schiff and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler to announce the two articles of impeachment, but about an hour later she came to the cameras again to announce that Congress had agreed to the updated US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (or as the Administration calls it, USMCA).
Republicans have been whining all this time that Democrats have hated Trump from Day One, which is certainly true, and that they’ve been plotting to impeach him from Day One, which is not necessarily true. If legislation like the trade deal was more the rule than the exception, impeachment might not have happened at all. After all, Democrats really hated George W. Bush for his Electoral College victory, but they worked with him. They even authorized his war in Iraq. And that’s because they didn’t want to be seen as going against the president. Which only points up the fact that whatever you think of W, he at least tried to be the President of the United States, and not the unilateral boss of a Trump Organization that happens to include a government.
The other factor in this is that under Bush the two parties were actually cooperating to a certain extent on legislation, as opposed to Trump, who goes back on deals simply because he can, and because he actually thinks that the definition of ‘fair deal’ is “I get everything I want, and you get nothing.”
With the USMCA, 75 percent of automobiles sold in North America must be produced in the region, and 40 percent of cars must be made in factories that pay workers at least $16 an hour. The Trump Administration got the deal it wanted, but also made these concessions to Democrats and labor unions. Democrats also got the removal of a provision protecting the property protections of big pharmaceutical companies. At the same time the Administration got the Democrats to lift their demand to remove liability protections for Facebook and Twitter. Legislation got accomplished because each side got at least a little bit accomplished. Some of you might be too young to know this, but that is how the two elected branches of government used to work.
You’re not going to see that kind of compromise on impeachment. A censure resolution would have been the sensible bipartisan compromise, but if the two factions of the duopoly were still capable of such, we wouldn’t be here. It is true that some squish Democrats would like to have a censure instead of an impeachment, but their political future is not endangered if they go one way or the other. Whereas for a censure resolution to pass, Republicans would have to join it, and the entire Party has staked its entire identity on the defense that their sweet little boy never ever ever ever ever did anything wrong. Even a censure would undermine that defense, and any Republican who voted for such would be branded a RINO, and all the redcaps would be, perhaps literally, screaming for their blood, and trying to primary them out of the Party with anybody they can get, even if it’s just a mannequin with a tape recorder of Trump’s speeches inside it.
You know, like Matt Gaetz.
The fact is that the likely result is the best and most practical compromise that’s going to happen: The Democrats in the House will have a party-line vote to impeach, the Republicans in the Senate will have a party-line vote to acquit, the Democrats will get to tar Trump going into his re-election campaign and the Republicans will still get to have their little boy as King. Plus which, if getting legislation accomplished under a Republican President is apparently a liability for Democrats, then the last thing they should want is to let Mike Pence complete Trump’s term, because he might get more negotiation accomplished since he does a better imitation of a human being.
You got a compromise on the North American trade deal because both parties could get something out of it. You will not get a compromise on impeachment because Republicans will not get anything out of it and Democrats have no incentive to back off. And you have to consider, Democrats: if you’re asking Republicans to agree with your position that a sleazy pathological liar is morally unfit to be president, (a position, as with white supremacy, where your two parties seem to have switched places) I have to ask why they would. Republicans do not agree with you on taxation or redistribution of capital. They do not agree with you on abortion. They do not agree with your “diversity” and social agenda. And you are asking them to help you remove the best advocate they have.
I nevertheless have to ask Republicans: Best advocate for what?
On December 10, paleoconservative website The American Conservative published a piece by Daniel Larison, simply titled “The Case For Impeachment Is Overwhelming.”
Larison says, “The case for Trump’s impeachment seemed quite strong more than two months ago, and the evidence provided to the House’s impeachment inquiry has strengthened it further. The president’s abuse of power is not in dispute. It is clear that he used the powers of his office in an attempt to extract a corrupt favor for his personal benefit, and this is precisely the sort of offense that impeachment was designed to keep in check. It doesn’t matter if the attempt succeeded. All that matters is that the attempt was made. It is also undeniable that he has sought to impede the investigation into his misconduct. The president has committed the offenses he is accused of committing, and the House should approve both articles of impeachment. ” He then says, “The president doesn’t have a credible line of defense left. That is why his apologists in Congress and elsewhere have been reduced to making increasingly absurd and desperate claims. The president’s defenders want to distract attention from the fact that the president abused his power, violated the public’s trust, and broke his oath of office, but these distractions are irrelevant. “
That doesn’t stop them from trying, even in this magazine. In reaction to the Conservative victory in British elections, American Conservative writer and senior editor Rod Dreher looked at the liberal media culture in this country that rooted for Labour, and said “these NYT clowns are just daring me to vote for Trump”. He earlier said, in reference to an internal debate within conservative Christianity, that “While some Evangelical leaders have gone way, way over the top with their Trump enthusiasm, it is an inconvenient truth that the short-fingered vulgarian from Queens, who has given no evidence of being a Christian in anything but name only, is the only major Republican figure who seems willing to side with us deplorable Bible-thumpers on these matters. “
A while ago, after a vacation in Spain, Dreher did an analysis of the state of Christianity there, finding it to be a hollow shell in a secularized social-democrat culture (like the rest of Europe) and reviewed it in terms of how it got to that point, only a few decades after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Dreher examines the Spanish Civil War largely in terms of how awful the Socialists were, but concludes not only that “had Franco not won, Spain would almost certainly have fallen under left-wing dictatorship, and been no better off — and perhaps worse off” but “Franco was not a good man, and that there’s really no way for Christians to get around that fact.” In reviewing a Franco biography by Peter Hitchens, Dreher grapples with Hitchens’ question: “How do we defend what we love without making false alliances with cynical powers?” Even then, Dreher says after returning from Spain, “We have already seen, in the example of Trump, that conservative Christians will embrace politically a bad man, not because they have any love for him but because unlike left-wing leaders, he doesn’t despise them, and seek to demonize them.” (Of course, simply because you’re exploited for your votes rather than demonized doesn’t mean that your manipulator doesn’t despise you, and I’m not sure Dreher admits this to himself.) And that while Dreher would prefer not to choose a “lesser evil” in such a way that it leads to something like the Spanish Civil War, and seems to blame the Left for letting things get to this point, “I also deeply wish that American Christians would recognize that our strength in American culture, political and otherwise, is superficial, and politics alone cannot sustain what has decayed from within.”
TAC writer Grayson Quay reaches a similar conclusion: “After all that bloodshed, repression, and censorship, the best that can be said is that what would have happened in the ’60s happened instead 20 years later with a slightly more punk-rock flavor. In fact, he may have done more harm than good. To this day, Spanish Catholicism and conservatism are, in the minds of many Spaniards, tainted by Franco’s legacy. … At the time of Franco’s burial, the unmistakable message of the basilica that served as his tomb was that Satan’s minions had been vanquished and the Caudillo could enter eternal rest secure in the knowledge that he had saved Catholic Spain. After his exhumation (in October), the message for us is that the Christendom that endured from Constantine until the middle of the 20th century cannot be preserved, certainly not by force. If we try, we’ll only make things worse. “
If we are to agree that Francisco Franco was not a fascist, but simply a pragmatic right-winger who took extreme but necessary actions against radical socialism, and we are to interpret Trump on the same lines, then by Dreher’s own analogy, the best-case scenario is one where the public abandons traditional religion and embraces hard-socialist politics within a generation after the death of El Caudillo. Again: that’s the BEST case scenario, because Franco was actually competent. For one thing, just because Hitler helped him get to power, Franco didn’t feel obligated to become his puppet in foreign affairs. Trump is another story.
I know that Pat Buchanan and maybe Rod Dreher would prefer Francisco Franco to Barack Obama, but Trump is not General Franco. He’s Archie Bunker without the intellectual depth.
So on one hand you have a respected hard-right website where one of the senior columnists says that even if conservatives should prefer Trump to a Democrat opponent, the case for impeachment is overwhelming. And then you have an editor at that site saying essentially, “to hell with the facts, I have faith.” And then he laments that the next generation considers faith to be morally inadequate.
I quote Rod Dreher this much not just because he is probably the most articulate advocate for the “trad” position in political writing, but as a writer who touches on politics as much as religion and culture – because of course they are all related – he is also one of the more articulate advocates for what I call the Trump rationalization. Unlike outright Trumpniks who embrace malice and anti-logic, Dreher presents his case from the view of a principled man who feels forced into his current alignment by the impression that the only other path in the political system would be far more immoral – which is of course the same presentation as a lot of other conservatives who use a lot less theology to get there. But this presentation is based on the critical error of assuming that Trump is like Franco in being a ruthless pragmatist in defense of what could be seen as a greater cultural crusade. Trump only cares about his own self-preservation and indulgence, and was very much a part of the secular culture he now aligns against. He only picked up with “conservatives” because he shares many of the same prejudices. He is lying to them in the same way that pre-Trump Republicans lied to libertarians, only with far greater consequences, not just because of numbers because traditionalists and populists are far more inclined to use government to punish the people they hate. And Dreher repeatedly brings up how Franco’s ruthlessness in defense of the Church only served to taint the Church by association. When Trump is gone – or if he ends up losing the next year and taking the Senate with him – Dreher and other traditionalists will be in the same position as Trump’s Atlantic City creditors, along with his two-and-counting ex-wives.
Dreher may think the popular culture hates people like him now, but before 2017, there wasn’t that much rationale for such hatred. But when you push a bill to re-implant an ectopic pregnancy when all medical knowledge says that’s impossible, it makes people think you don’t actually care about the welfare of the unborn. And when you wail about the precedent set by Bill Clinton’s perjury and adultery and wish to absolve Donald Trump of far worse, it makes people think you weren’t serious about morality and precedent the first time. It’s almost as if Christians DON’T believe that there is a supernatural authority that judges us in the afterlife, because they sure don’t act like it.
Dreher is correct when he says leftists would hate people like him regardless, but that just means that all you can control is your own actions. Apart from supernatural revelation, the only way you can judge the morality of Christians is by their actions. And just as Dreher himself left the Catholic Church over its corruption, many people have judged that religion is not a moral guide and is in fact destructive to moral growth. And just as the Church tainted itself by association with the authoritarian Franco, professional Christians are creating a better advertisement for socialism than the socialists themselves could accomplish with their limited imaginations. It doesn’t help when “conservatism” has embraced all the intellectual vices that both conservatives and Objectivists had observed in the Left.
Republicans were so obsessed with their hatred of Clinton Democrats that they decided that the only way to beat them was to become them. Not just in the sense that they worship a slick, superficial salesman, but that they offer the exact same excuses in his defense, such as “you can’t impeach a president who’s committed no real crime when the economy is good!” They were so jealous of the success of postmodernism that they embraced it (‘truth isn’t truth‘). And they were so obsessed with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that they embraced its amoral pragmatism as a how-to guide, so that any trick is fair as long as you win (‘The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical’) and that the opposition must be not simply opposed but literally demonized (‘[Christ] allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other’).
But if there is any sentiment in the “conservative” movement that combines secular error with magical thinking, it’s a certain flimsy New Age-y pop philosophy that “only the present is real.”
While one could make a case in philosophy that the present is the only reality, this has never been a conservative argument. G.K. Chesterton was famously quoted as saying “tradition is the democracy of the dead.” Edmund Burke is counted as the father of conservatism in the Anglosphere, and he is quoted as saying “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” (He is also quoted as saying: ‘the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’) But more broadly, a disregard for the past is a disregard for how things got to a certain point, a disregard for the idea that actions have consequences, and a disregard for the very concept of causality. Forget Judgment Day: To act as though Republicans themselves had not impeached a president for far less than Trump’s acts is to deny the precedent they set (just as Democrats ignore the precedent they set in enabling Clinton’s criminality). It is to deny their very agency in the matter. It is to act as though we are not setting an additional precedent and that by sheer stubbornness and will, we can stay in the present moment forever. As such, Republicans are not simply Donald Trump’s defense team, but his co-conspirators.
And if conservatives persist in defending the unlimited powers of Donald Trump, as if the office were only synonymous with him, and that is a legal precedent that stands by their actions, then when a future Democrat President signs executive orders jacking the top tax rate to 95 percent, or mandating federal funding of abortions, then the eternal present for conservatives will be full of tears, and very, very long indeed.