By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I miss The Wanderer columns by the late Joseph Sobran for many reasons. They were always informative and enlightening. And often surprising. Sobran was a classic example of someone who could think outside the box. He did not march in lockstep with the leadership of the Republican Party and the gurus of the conservative movement. His feud with William F. Buckley on U.S. policy toward Israel is just one example.
What do I think Sobran’s position on Donald Trump would be? I don’t know, of course. But I am intrigued by the thought of whether he would go along with George Will, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, who are leading the charge against Trump for his lack of conservative bona fides.
They argue that if Trump becomes the nominee of the Republican Party he will lose to Hillary Clinton so dramatically that it will cause possibly irreversible damage to the party and the conservative movement. I can’t help but wonder if Sobran would be outside the box on this question, too.
Goldberg recently called Trump the “bane of humanity” in an appearance on Fox News. Krauthammer describes his policy positions as “barstool eruptions.” Lowry calls for conservatives to dismiss his candidacy “out of hand.”
Will has been the toughest critic of all, asking whether “there is a disagreeable human trait that Trump does not have.” He urges Republicans and conservatives to face the fact that their “highest priority must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination” because if they don’t it “would mean the loss of what Taft and then Goldwater made possible — a conservative party as a constant presence in American politics.”
Krauthammer and Goldberg are among my favorite conservative writers on the scene today. I like Will and Lowry just a little less. I don’t entirely disagree with them about Trump. Trump is not a conservative by any traditional definition of the term. I doubt that he has read a page of the early architects of the conservative movement, people such as Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham, for example.
But my hunch is that Trump’s supporters on the right know that. And don’t give a fig. Something else attracts them to Trump, something not necessarily ignoble or unwise.
For the record, I once called Trump “all sizzle and no steak” in this space in The Wanderer. I noted that he never moved beyond self-congratulatory rhetoric about how “smart, really smart” and “tough” he is. I predicted that he would be out of the race by last summer, as the voters became aware of his shortcomings. I was wrong. Trump has become the voice of those who are fed up with politics as usual. And there are a lot of them.
We should keep in mind that, while the leading conservative pundits doubt Trump’s conservatism, the left does not. On December 23, Chauncey DeVega, a columnist for the liberal website Salon, compared Trump’s candidacy with Patrick Buchanan’s. He said both men were “nativist, xenophobic, right-wing populists who understand the allure of white alienation and racial resentment in the post-civil rights era.” DeVega contends they are nothing more than “recent iterations in a long history of right-wing demagoguery and false populism in American politics,” comparable to “George Wallace in the 1960s, the Know-Nothings in the 19 th century, and the Black Legion in the 1930s.” Whew….
I say we should see this reaction to Trump as a good sign. What DeVega calls “nativist and xenophobic” appeals to “white alienation” are policy positions designed to reverse the Obama administration’s determination to transform the demography of the United States in such a way as to guarantee the Democratic Party a near permanent lock-hold on the presidency and the Congress.
Come on: If there is any “racial resentment” at work in the country these days it is not what DeVega describes, but what lies behind Obama’s efforts to further reduce the role in society of those Americans he described at a fund-raiser in San Francisco in 2008 as “clinging to their guns and their religion,” caught up in “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment.” That is the “fundamental transformation” of the country he had in mind when he spoke of his goals in his first run for the presidency.
The bottom line: Goldberg and Krauthammer need not be despondent over Trump’s popularity. There is a way for conservatives serious about the conservative movement and its goals to see the Trump phenomenon in a positive light.
It strikes me that informed conservatives drawn to Trump realize that he is not a movement conservative dedicated to every facet of what William F. Buckley and the old editors of National Review wanted for the country. But they see this as a moment in the country’s history when rebuilding our military, controlling illegal immigration, and ending the hollowing out of our industrial base need to be stressed, even if that means putting the other issues championed by the conservative movement on the back-burner for a while. They think Trump is the man to fight this fight. They are clichés, but they make sense at least some of the time: “We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” “Half a loaf is better than none.”
Trump has proven repeatedly that he will not get a case of the vapors when the media attack him as xenophobic and racist. He confronts head-on those who use those terms against him — and comes out of it standing tall. He also may be the only Republican candidate who will be willing to make an issue of Hillary Clinton’s role in covering up her husband’s sexual abuse of women. There is nothing prudish or close-minded about not wanting a woman who acted this way in the White House. Trump won’t look for a corner to hide in when the commentators accuse him of being sexist and a chauvinist when he points out Hillary’s track record in this matter.
He will also not back away from openly calling her a liar regarding what happened in Benghazi and in the deleted email controversy. In fact, he has done that already. He won’t let the media browbeat him. The other Republican candidates do not show comparable resolve. These things matter.
Maybe it is true that Trump should not be the Republican nominee. But the longer he stays an active presence in this election cycle, raising these issues, the better. If nothing else, it will show the eventual Republican nominee how to take on Hillary Clinton and the liberal establishment that runs interference for her.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress