By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Well, here we go.
National Review’s “Against Trump” editorial and symposium
came out Thursday night and the fecal matter hit the rotor blades.
That’s a bad turn of phrase, since we’re neither sh** nor
fan. We’re more like a lighthouse amidst the crap-storm, or at least we try to
be.
This seems lost on a lot of people these days. I keep
hearing from folks who seem to think that if Donald Trump is popular or the
front-runner, then National Review — and yours truly — must bow to the popular
will. Get with the program, they say. See the writing on the wall. Get out in
front of this.
Instead, we went a different way, and the brickbats are
flying in. We’ve disgraced ourselves, they insist. We’ve gone and read
ourselves out of the conservative movement. Betrayed William F. Buckley.
And that’s the calm and reasonable stuff. If say, you,
offered some of the tantrums I’ve received in person instead of via e-mail and
Twitter, the only reasonable response would be to call for the orderlies and
ask how you slipped out of your restraints.
So before we get into it, let me just say up front that
rather than this being a low point or an epic fail or a betrayal, this is in
fact one of National Review’s finest moments. If it costs us subscribers, or
readers, or advertisers (all of which I doubt), so be it. What is it the
Marines say? “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Well, such losses to National
Review would be like dross being skimmed off freshly forged steel.
The Many Rooms in
the Mansion of Wrong
I should be clear: I don’t think everyone who supports
Donald Trump is dross. Some are even friends of mine. But I do think they,
collectively, are wrong. But they are wrong for different reasons. Indeed,
there’s a remarkable diversity of wrongness out there.
Some people believe there are no gradations of wrong;
that wrong is an absolute state. Not so. There are whole hierarchies of wrong.
If you think 2+2 is 5, you’re a little wrong. If you think 2+2 is a 100-foot
lizard destroying downtown Tokyo, you’re very wrong.
Similarly, there are errors based on different kinds of
thinking. Many of the people lambasting National Review are arguing ad populum. The people — here defined as
a plurality of GOP poll respondents or talk-radio listeners — are for Trump,
therefore Trump is not only the right candidate, but he must be a conservative,
too.
As I mentioned above, my favorite form of this fallacious
argument is that National Review is — or I personally am — required (required!) to support the GOP
front-runner. When Donald Trump signed that pledge to support the GOP nominee a
few months ago, scads of people asked whether I would do likewise. Can they
really not see the category error here? My job — our job — is to write and say the truth as I see it. That’s it. Of
course we can be wrong. It’s happened plenty of times. But to think we should
be wrong on purpose is to confuse
National Review for a press release or a bit of direct-mail marketing.
But the real irony of this “support the front-runner”
nonsense is that it runs completely counter to the usual gripe we get — that
we’re too supportive of the GOP. Which is it? Are we “GOPe” hacks carrying
water for the party? Or are we fools and traitors for not backing the party
front-runner just because he’s the front-runner? Trump is a hero “because he
fights.” We are knaves and traitors because we fight back.
I have another question: Now that the establishment is
rallying to Trump, can I be anti-establishment again if I stay critical of
Trump? That’d be nice.
The point here is that “anti-establishment” is not a
synonym for “conservative,” as I wrote the other day in the Corner. One of the
reasons I can’t stand the use and abuse of the term “establishment” is that
it’s like a three-legged pack mule carrying the load for an entire wagon train
of assumptions.
“Anti-establishment” is almost entirely devoid of any
ideological content whatsoever. An ideological category that can include Donald
Trump, Bernie Sanders, Occupy Wall Street, the tea parties, Ted Cruz, Mark
Levin, Rush Limbaugh, and Ben Carson is not a particularly meaningful one.
Some reply, oh no, it shows that the people are angry! I
hear this all the time. And I agree. And I’m angry too. But you know what?
Being angry is not a frick’n argument. I’m angry that Washington has drowned
the country in debt. I’m angry that Obama has been a failure. I’m also angry
that broccoli doesn’t taste like chicken and that Fox canceled Firefly. Being angry is probably a
necessary condition for fixing a lot of problems, but it isn’t sufficient to
the task. And it isn’t a particularly powerful defense of Donald Trump.
Establishmentarians
to the Left of Me, Establishmentarians to the Right of Me
I listened to Chuck Todd and John Heileman on Morning Joe earlier. They were saying
National Review damaged Ted Cruz with our “Against Trump” issue because it
muddied Cruz’s argument that the establishment was rallying to Trump against
Cruz. National Review undermined that argument, they explained. If that’s true,
as a political matter, that’s a shame. As an intellectual matter, that’s
bat-guano crazy.
There are, in fact, many establishments. One of them —
the one Sarah Palin and many others claim is the most pernicious — is rallying
to Donald Trump. The GOP consultant and K Street crowd is coming around to him,
just like the crony capitalist ethanol lobby in Iowa is coming around.
Robert Costa’s piece in the Washington Post is almost heartbreaking in this regard. Tim
Pawlenty, for instance, has made peace with the wind blowing from Fifth Avenue.
“The light bulb has gone on for a lot of people, and it wasn’t on a couple of
months ago,” Pawlenty explained.
“Even though he’s a billionaire from New York, he sounds
and looks like somebody you’d meet in the heartland who’s ticked off about the
economy and government, and he projects the strength that he’d actually do
something about it,” Pawlenty told the Post.
“He doesn’t look and sound like all the other politicians who yap and yap and
don’t get anything done.”
And here’s Alex Castellanos:
“With Trump, hey, it’s just a deal,” said Alex Castellanos, a longtime
Republican strategist. “The primary’s one deal, that’s done. If he were to be
the nominee, the next deal’s a general [election]. You can see him saying, ‘We
had to do what we had to do to win the primary, but now’s the general, and
we’ve got to beat Hillary.’ You can see him pivot on a dime.
“But with Cruz, oof, you’re looking at a Republican Party that wouldn’t
win the vote of a young person, a young woman or a minority for a generation,”
Castellanos said.
And here’s this from Jonathan Martin’s New York Times article:
If Mr. Cruz were the party’s nominee, said Charles R. Black Jr., a
lobbyist who has worked on numerous Republican presidential campaigns, “what
would happen is a lot of the elected leaders and party elders would try to sit
down and try to help Cruz run a better campaign, but he may not listen. Trump
is another matter.”
“You can coach Donald,” Mr. Black said. “If he got nominated, he’d be
scared to death. That’s the point he would call people in the party and say, ‘I
just want to talk to you.’”
And finally, also from Martin’s piece:
“We can live with Trump,” said
Richard F. Hohlt, a veteran lobbyist, reflecting his colleagues’ sentiment at a
Republican National Committee meeting last week in Charleston, S.C. “Do they
all love Trump? No. But there’s a feeling that he is not going to layer over
the party or install his own person. Whereas Cruz will have his own people
there.”
Now, I like some of these people. But if you take a step
back and look, that there is some hardcore, balls-to-the-wall, unalloyed, 100
percent pure, go-with-the-flow, keep-your-options-open,
establishment-weather-vane thinking goingon. They’re like K Street Neville
Chamberlains standing in the door of the Prime Rib, proclaiming that Donald
Trump is a man we can deal with. Or the City Watch in King’s Landing turning on
Ned Stark.
What was it Thomas More said? “Why Richard, it profits a
man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but to have your calls
returned at the Department of Commerce?”
What National
Review Is Not
The idea that National Review should be lumped in with that establishment is the kind of
insight you can only discover after successfully inserting your entire cranium
past your sphincter. The K Street/consultant-class Republican establishment is
conservative, but their conservatism is secondary to their need to make deals,
maintain access, and, to be fair, win elections.
That last bit is important. The Republican party is in
the election-winning business first and foremost. And that’s largely as it should
be. That’s partly why former National Review publisher the late, great Bill
Rusher always used to tell the new hires at NR to be on guard: “Politicians
will always disappoint you.”
The reason politicians will disappoint principled
conservatives — and, for that matter, principled liberals and libertarians — is
that there is always an inherent tradeoff between the purity of principle and
the necessities of electoral politics and the limitations of what can be done
via government action. National Review has always recognized this tension,
which is immortalized in the rule of thumb that we should support “the most
conservative candidate electable.”
Every conservative is supposed to believe that incentives
matter. The incentive for the K Street/consultant establishment is to keep
their influence and their access. The incentives for the ink-and-pixel-stained
wretches who run NR are different. I’m open to the complaint that our
self-interest has driven us to become too invested in an ideology that too few
voters subscribe to. But if that’s the case, the remedy isn’t to abandon all
principle and just join the mob. I’d rather go down with my ship, thank you
very much.
In the Matter of
Cruz vs. Trump
The establishment even wheeled out poor Bob Dole like he
was Deng Xiaoping pulled from obscurity in order to clarify doctrine for the
Beltway apparatchiks. “I question his allegiance to the party,” Dole said of
Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz.
Where are the hidden cameras? We’re being punked, right?
Look, I like Bob Dole, too. He’s a great American who
served his country nobly and with great sacrifice.
And it’s not that I think Ted Cruz is particularly loyal
to the Republican party. I mean nobody thinks that. His penchant for monkey-wrench-hurling and cable-TV
grandstanding makes him something like a right-wing Arlen Specter.
It should be said that Dole’s loyalty to the conservative
movement always took a distant backseat to his loyalty to the GOP. This is the
guy who told conservatives, “I’ll be anything you want me to be; I’ll be Ronald
Reagan if that’s what you want.”
Regardless, in the binary context of Ted Cruz versus
Donald Trump, Cruz is a veritable John C. Fremont. I know, I know, we’re not
supposed to question Donald Trump’s ideological and partisan bona fides
anymore. The fact that he gave so much money to Democrats — and said so many
liberal things — stems from the fact that he was a businessman who had to work
a corrupt system. We’re also, by the way, supposed to forgive the fact that he
was part of that corrupt system, excelled in that corrupt system, and makes no
apologies for being a product of that corrupt system. The argument often goes
something like this:
Trump Booster: “He made his
living saying whatever he had to say and paying whomever he had to pay in order
to get what he wanted. That’s just good business!”
Me: “So why do you think
that, at age 69, he’s completely changed his ways? Isn’t it more reasonable to
assume he’s still saying whatever he has to say to get what he wants?”
Trump Booster: [Long pause]
“Oh, so you want Jeb.”
Look, I’ve never liked the reckless and indiscriminate
way Ted Cruz — and his boosters — talked about the “Washington cartel” and the
establishment. But, again, let’s define our terms. If you define the
establishment as congressional leadership — specifically Mitch McConnell — then
Cruz is objectively an anti-establishment guy. He’s been peeing in Mitch
McConnell’s cornflakes for four years. I have my disagreements with McConnell,
but I think he often gets an unfair rap from his critics. But that’s not the
point.
The congressional establishment, which is very close to —
but not the same as — the K Street/consultant establishment prefers Trump
because with Trump everything is negotiable (and because so many of them hate
Ted Cruz personally). As Dole put it, Trump can “probably work with Congress,
because he’s, you know, he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a
deal-maker.”
Maybe. But whom, exactly, would he deal with? We know
that when he wants to build a casino or plump up the guest list at his wedding,
he has no problem “dealing” with Democrats. Working with Congress in this
context taps into the assumption that getting bad things done is better than
getting nothing done. It’s like those infuriating scorecards showing that
Congress hasn’t been “productive” simply because it hasn’t passed scads of new
laws and regulations. (David Boaz is great at dismantling this Beltway canard.)
I’m not saying Congress doesn’t need to get things done.
We have more problems in this country than Bill Clinton has penicillin
prescriptions. But is there anything in Trump’s persona or record that suggests
he would feel bound to work with conservatives in Congress — or with Congress
at all — if he didn’t get his way? His whole schtick is that he will do whatever it takes to get things done.
The Constitution almost never enters the picture, and when it does, it’s always
something tiny compared to Trump’s bigness.
I think irrational hostility to Ted Cruz is blinding
people to all manner of things, but particularly to how the system works. If
Cruz were elected president, one thing we can be reasonably certain of is that
he would want to be reelected. In order to be reelected, he would need to
appear to have fulfilled at least some of his campaign promises. He would also
need to be a better steward of constitutional norms than his predecessor, given
that constitutionalism is his thing.
Those two facts alone pretty much guarantee he would have
to work with Congress, and not just Congress, but Republicans in Congress. Why?
Because presidents have to work with Congress if they want to get their agenda
implemented. That was true of Obama in his first term. In his second term,
Obama tried to go the other way and has had some (infuriating and
unconstitutional) success. But that other way really isn’t an option for Cruz.
It almost certainly is an option for
Donald Trump.
Ted Cruz isn’t my first choice, mostly because I think he
will have problems getting elected (though claims he’s unelectable go too far).
I’d rather Rubio or Christie. In a two-man race of Cruz vs. Trump, however,
it’s no contest. The whole point of trying to elect the most conservative
candidate possible is premised on the idea that one is choosing among conservatives in the first place. Going
by record and evidence, in that two-candidate sample, there’s only one
conservative to pick.
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