By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, August 10, 2015
A plague is sweeping the land, gathering victims of all
shapes and sizes and turning them into fools. Its name — for now — is Trumpism.
The Trump virus’s primary effect is twofold: First, it
implants in its hosts the unshakable conviction that one of the most execrable
clowns in the history of these United States is a hero who deserves to be
elevated to the White House; then, having inculcated the conceit, it removes
the faculties that are necessary for its removal. The results are ruinous. As
might the partisans of a deliberately unfalsifiable conspiracy theory, those
who have been stricken soon come to believe in earnest that there is no such
thing as a fair-minded or legitimate criticism of their swashbuckling charge,
and that all embarrassments, mistakes, and inadequacies are in fact signs of
imminent victory. To converse at length with a committed Trumpite is, in
consequence, akin in nature to conversing at length with a moon-landing denier:
Every protestation is taken as a clear indication of complicity in the
cover-up; distinctions between matters of minor and major import are disintegrated
at will; run-of-the-mill inquiries are received as telltale signs of “fear” or
of “hatred”; and bluster and the turning of rhetorical tables (“so who do you
like: Jeb?”) substitute for patience and for forthrightness. There is a certain
irony in this. By their own insistence, Trump’s devotees consider themselves to
be the rebels at the gates; by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior,
they resemble binary and nuancless drones, as might be found in a novel by
Aldous Huxley or Yevgeny Zamyatin.
In parallel, the Trump virus yields a second — and
equally potent — symptom: It provokes otherwise intelligent people into an ugly
form of civil confusion. Because the Trumpite has invariably arrived at his
conclusion before he has considered his premises, he is prone to disastrous
conflation when pressed to explain himself. Thus does he mistake boorishness
and vapidity for courage and the common touch. Thus does he muddle together
self-interest and public spiritedness. Thus, ultimately, does he come to
believe that fatal weaknesses should be conceived as dazzling strengths. In a
sane world it would be abundantly clear to anybody whose research skills extend
to the casual use of Wikipedia that Donald Trump not only lacks crucial
government experience but that, insofar as he has hitherto connected with that
world, his behavior has been appalling. And yet, because Washington is a mess
and a plague o’ both your houses! tendency currently obtains, the Trumpite is
prone to assert without evidence or reason that these clear deficiencies are in
fact a remedy for its ills. In the main, such gymnastics are roundly comical —
comparable, perhaps, to a person’s choosing a disabled man to run in a marathon
because he is especially bombastic. “But he can’t even walk,” the naysayers
might observe. “That’s the point!” would come the inexplicable reply. “He’s not
like the others!”
Alas, difference is soon taken as a virtue in and of
itself. To any moderately informed observer of the present political scene, it
is evident that Donald Trump is not in fact a conservative, and that his
political instincts tend more often than not in precisely the opposite
direction. For those who describe themselves as “conservatives,” this should
present something of a problem. But, because he does not operate within the
same world as the much-loathed Mitch McConnell — and because he cannot
therefore be judged on the basis of anything concrete — the man’s ideological
indiscretions are being steadfastly ignored. For decades now, our friends on
the progressive left have wondered in vain what it might take to convince a
sizable portion of America’s rightward-leaning dissenters to embrace
single-payer health care, advocate stricter gun control, propose higher taxes on
the wealthy, endorse the broad use of eminent domain, defend protectionism in
trade, affirm the pro-choice cause, and cozy up warmly to the likes of Hillary
Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Today, they have their answer: It takes a general
dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the cheapest of P. T. Barnum knockoffs
to exploit it.
For both the friends and the foes of conservatism, it
will be tempting to conclude that the root cause of the Trump phenomenon is the
rank stupidity of the voting public. This, though, would be a mistake. In
truth, the Trump surge is being caused by an unwillingness on the part of his
champions to distinguish between the illness that they seek to remedy and that
remedy itself. Livid at the stagnation and discord of the Obama years, appalled
by the dysfunction and hollowness of Washington, D.C., and dismayed by the
immediate-term prospects for recovery, a number of conservatives have arrived
at a reasonable prescription: that something, somewhere, needs to change in
their movement, and that it may take radical action in order to provoke an
alteration. Alas, in an attempt to expedite reform, many have hitched their
wagons to the first sign of disruption that has come along. Given the scale of
the disappointment that so many feel, one can grasp the temptation. But a virus
is a virus is a virus — even when the patient is actually ill.
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