By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Like Hammurabi, I am trying to organize my laws.
Here’s what I have so far:
Williamson’s First Law: Everything is simple, if you
don’t know a f***ing thing about it.
Williamson’s Second Law: When Democrats are in power,
they act like they’ll never be out; when Republicans are out of power, they act
like they’ll never be in.
Williamson’s Third Law: Candidates who aren’t with us on
abortion really aren’t with us at all. The
Romney Addendum: Be very, very suspicious of anybody who changes his
mind about abortion — in either direction — after the age of 40 or so.
“I am very pro-choice,” Donald Trump said until about
five minutes before he decided he wanted to make a run for the Republican
presidential nomination, when somebody with a soothing voice and a fresh new coloring
book explained to him that he wouldn’t get far embracing the same position on
abortion as Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Before descending that escalator in 2015,
Trump had also been a long-time advocate of anti-constitutional gun-control
measures, confiscatory wealth taxes, and a whole lot of other bad ideas he
shared with former allies such as Chuck Schumer.) Moving the other
direction, Mitt Romney was firmly pro-choice when he was engaged in
Massachusetts and then told a story — a preposterous story —
about having his mind changed during the stem-cell debate. There is good reason
to expect Romney to continue to be on the right side of the abortion debate now
that he has found it: For one thing, it’s pretty obvious that the pro-choice
Romney was the phony Romney, and, for another thing, there’s no juice in
flip-flopping on that issue now that the honorable gentleman from La Jolla is
pretending to be a Utah guy. But there’s always a mental asterisk there for
those of us who remember.
One of the problems with the weird little gaggle of Peter Thiel–cultivated tech bros operating in contemporary
Republican politics, Blake Masters prominent among them, is that they are
typically pretty smart, at least in terms of raw intellectual horsepower, and
so they come to believe — mistakenly — that Williamson’s First Law doesn’t
apply to them. They think that politics is simple, that it is a kind of
algorithm: Get a couple of smart guys into a room to figure out the most
important variables and the rubes will salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time
you get a hit on Fox News. But voters aren’t schnauzers (except in
Philadelphia). What they do have in common with that noble pooch is a sense of
smell that is keener than you might expect it to be. The clever people who
think that cleverness is all you need are going to be the death of us all.
Masters is pretty clearly a guy who has never given any serious
thought to the issue of abortion. It seems that he was, at one point, as shallow and thoughtless
a pro-choicer as he later was a gutless and uncommitted pro-lifer. He knows
— or thinks he knows, or thought he knew until the issue blew up in his face —
that the current Republican base is not very interested in nuance, moderation,
or compromise: The people who decide who gets the nominations in the GOP today
are maximalists who think that Fox News and social media are the real world,
that getting retweets and getting votes are more or less the same thing. And so
Masters embraced the maximalist position on abortion, declaring himself 100
percent pro-life, advocated a federal fetal-personhood law, a constitutional
amendment prohibiting abortion, etc. It is likely that he did this in the
belief that abortion was only going to be an issue for the angry base voters
who demand maximum confrontation from Republicans.
But, after Dobbs, abortion took on a renewed
salience, and swing voters in Arizona started to make noises indicating that
Masters’s maximalism was not what they wanted. And so Masters scrubbed his
website, rewriting or deleting five of his six statements of his views on abortion,
and then ran ads pretending that he was interested in regulating only those
grisly late-term abortions about which the overwhelming majority of Americans —
including pro-choice Americans — generally agree.
Maybe Blake Masters never really believed what he said to
Republicans about abortion in the first place, and just said it because it was
what he thought Republicans wanted to hear; maybe his apparent pro-life change
of heart was genuine, and he was just too weak to stick by it when doing so
became difficult. Each of those is possible — and each possibility ought to be
regarded as disqualifying.
As a practical matter, I expect that this line of
criticism will come to nothing, because Republicans at the moment give every
indication that they enjoy being cynically used by
self-seeking amoralists who exploit everything and everyone — including the
most vulnerable among us — in the service of their own banal and tedious
small-ball ambitions, yet another way in which today’s Republicans have come to
resemble yesterday’s Democrats.
Obviously, one does not enter into a relationship with
the Republican Party in 2022 because one is seeking opportunities for the
exercise of honor. But if you are in public life and you aren’t willing to pay
a price for what you believe, then, really: What use are you to anybody?
Scripture advises us not to put our trust in princes.
That goes double for cowards.
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