By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Let’s start with some really good news. Sergeant First
Class Charles Martland will not be discharged for beating the stuffing out of
an Afghan commander who kept a boy chained up as a sex slave. Martland and
Special Forces captain Dan Quinn smacked
the guy around because, as it says in the Torah, “It is good to smack
around degenerates who rape boys.”
I’m probably paraphrasing and maybe it’s not in there,
but we can all agree that it should be.
A few months ago, I wrote about this case in a “Happy
Warrior” magazine column about civilizational confidence. It called to mind one
of my favorite stories about the British Empire, which I’ve written about
several times. When General Charles Napier was running the show in
British-controlled India, he was told by all the local muckety-mucks and
diplomatic cookie pushers that he simply couldn’t hang men who burned widows
alive. It was an Indian tradition with a long history of existence, they
explained. Napier replied:
Be it so. This burning of widows is
your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When
men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My
carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when
the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
One needn’t celebrate imperialism to appreciate the
point. Some of our customs are non-negotiable. Here’s how I put it:
Of course, the Pashtun fondness for
buggering young boys is well known. Kandahar’s reputation as the pederasty
capital of South Asia — worst tourist slogan ever! — goes back centuries. The
practice, called bacha bazi, is a kind of Veblenesque “conspicuous
consumption.” Rich and powerful men — chiefly warlords — take on sex slaves as
a status symbol. The unpopularity of the practice helped fuel the rise of the
Taliban, which banned it. Local village elders complained to Quinn and others
about how predatory the militias had become. So beating the child rapist can be
understood as an improvisational effort to win the hearts and minds of the
locals. But even if not, it was the right thing to do.
I’m no wild-eyed idealist. If we
absolutely need to ally ourselves with scummy, backward people in furtherance
of a broader strategic imperative, so be it. But you know what? Tolerance is a
two-way street. Our troops are taught to adhere to many local customs around
the world as a sign of respect. Take off your shoes when you enter their homes.
Eat from the communal bowl with your right hand only. Etc.
Well, in return, our allies should
be expected to meet the minimum requirements of our culture. And way up high on
the list of good manners in the West — much higher, in fact, than the proper
use of salad forks or covering your mouth when you cough — is: Do Not Rape
Young Boys When You Are a Guest of the Americans. An important follow-up in the
etiquette manual would state: “If you wish to follow your own customs in this
matter, take note: It is an American custom to beat the stuffing out of men who
chain up and rape young boys.”
The Limits of
Wrongness
The merry pranksters at the Washington Free Beacon put together this super-cut of Joe
Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski gloating over and over again about how they
were right about the Trump phenomenon when so many others were wrong. It’s
fairly nauseating to watch.
Scarborough insists on air and off that he’s not in the
tank for Donald Trump. Rather, he says that he and Mika are “in the tank for .
. . truth!” He claims the reason so many think he’s pro-Trump boils down to
professional jealousy. I should say that after conducting a vigorous personal
inventory of my motives, jealousy of Scarborough’s foresight really doesn’t
play much of a role in my own annoyance with his obvious Trump-boosterism. Nor
have I talked with any Trump critic who’s said, “You know, the thing that
really burns my ass about Scarborough’s Trump man-crush is, he called this so
early.”
(This also assumes that Scarborough’s “predictions” were
based on dispassionate analysis rather than an investment in Trump boosterism
that simply paid off.)
Is vs. Ought
But this gloat-a-thon does raise a larger point. Trump’s
candidacy has ignited a riot of question-begging and non sequiturs across the
land. Every day I hear from scores of people who insist that because I was
wrong about Trump’s chances to win the nomination, I must be wrong not only
about his chances in the general election, but
also about his qualifications to be president at all.
I should say, it is entirely fair to doubt my
prognostication skills on how Trump will perform in the general given how wrong
I was in the primaries. Of course, failure to predict black swans — or in this
case, Creamsicle-orange ones — is not necessarily as damning as some think. It
was utterly reasonable to predict that Trump wouldn’t do this well, just as
it’s entirely reasonable to say, “There will be no zombie apocalypse.” But, if
the dead do rise from their graves,
such assurances will look pretty stupid. And while the zombie-preppers in our
midst will surely have the last laugh, I’m not sure I have to concede they’re
all geniuses, even when a reanimated Abe Vigoda is munching on my larynx.
I honestly believe that Trump would crash in the general
election like so much blue ice from an Aeroflot jetliner. I don’t think he can
flip any of the states in the Democratic “blue wall,” and I think there’s a
strong likelihood he’d fail to hold on to some of the states in the Republican
“red wall.” Talk to political handicappers in Arizona and Utah, for instance,
and they will tell you he’s very likely to lose there and take other Republican
candidates down with him. For example, Trump boosters point to his blow-out win
in New York as evidence he can flip the state. I agree with Ross Douthat: This
is delusional. Bush got more votes than Trump in the New York primary in 2000 —
when that primary didn’t even matter — and still lost the state in the general
by 15 points. Both Sanders and Clinton got a lot more votes than Trump.
Trump loves to cite how he “won” with Hispanics in
Nevada, leaving out that he was talking about a statistical handful of
self-identified Republican Hispanics
in a caucus. Among Hispanics generally, Trump polls only slightly better than
ass cancer. His numbers are somewhat better with women, but still within sight
of ass-cancer margins. Yes, Trump does well with white men, but he’d have to do
roughly ten points better than Reagan in his 1984 landslide (the high water
mark for white-male turnout) to even be competitive. His boosters point to
Hillary’s undeniable vulnerabilities, while leaving out that Trump’s negatives
are much worse.
Still, I could be wrong about all of this. There’s no
disputing Trump is a disrupter, that he overturns many of the rules that we
mistakenly thought were binding. Good for him. So maybe he’ll keep defying
expectations. Reasonable people can debate that point.
Less reasonable is the claim that because I was wrong
about Trump’s chances, I must therefore be wrong about Trump’s qualifications
and character. If you predicted in 2006 that Obama would be the Democratic
nominee, congrats! That, however, is not an argument for why he should have been the nominee or the
president. It’s a confusion of “is” and “ought” and I see it everywhere.
While my opposition to Trump is not primarily an argument
about electability, I’ve been focusing on that angle lately because the
establishment opportunists, quislings, sell-outs, pragmatists, and harlots are
more persuadable on these grounds than arguments over principle. People open to
principled arguments against Trump have already been persuaded. The John
Boehner and K Street caucus on the other hand has made peace with Trump because
they understand he’s a guy they can “cut deals” with. They hate Ted Cruz
because they know or fear he isn’t. I’m not saying that everyone who supports
Trump isn’t a conservative or isn’t principled. I am saying I think they’re
wrong.
Let the Precriminations
Begin!
I’ll make one last point on all this. I think it’s
fascinating how so many people are already pre-blaming a Trump loss on the
#NeverTrumpers. My old friend John Nolte seems blinded with rage at all of us,
tweeting, “If Trump loses to Hillary . . . I will forever blame #NeverTrump.”
Herman Cain is on Fox every five minutes ranting and bullying Trump opponents
as fools and de facto Hillary supporters. I am beset by Lilliputian trolls on
Twitter insisting I am pro-Hillary (a strange case to make if you read my
chapter on her in Liberal Fascism —
or quite literally anything I’ve ever
written about her).
To the extent this stuff isn’t simply stupid, it amounts
to coercion. Get on the bandwagon! Or else. Indeed, every day I get a half
dozen threats along these lines:
Now, I get it. I don’t want Hillary to be president
either. And in politics sometimes people feel like they have to crack the whip
to get the stragglers back in the herd. Also, it’s clear to me that as Ian
Tuttle wrote this week, a major motivation of Trumpsters isn’t winning, it’s
vengeance. John Nolte says that the “GOP’s needed an enema for a long time.” In
this case, I actually agree with John’s apt comparison of his dashboard saint
to an anal douche.
But let’s go back to the claim that Trump will win in the
general election by flipping blue states in a populist tsunami. If that
analysis is even remotely plausible, why should #NeverTrumpers matter? Indeed,
if you take Trumpian rhetoric from his talk-radio and other cheerleaders seriously,
the anti-Trump forces are a negligible bunch of eggheads, pinheads, and
finger-sniffing shut-ins completely disconnected from the authentic and
volcanically powerful volksgemeinschaft.
If Trump has any chance of flipping New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, we shouldn’t matter at all. And yet,
according to the increasingly shrill and whining bleats from his supporters, we
will be to blame if he doesn’t win. Well which is it? Is this a revolutionary
populist movement that will sweep aside ink knights like me or not?
I think several things are going on here. I think some
pro-Trump forces actually realize that their guy will lose no matter what.
Rather than face the fact that blame for Trump’s likely inevitable loss will
rest entirely with Trump and his followers, they want to preserve the claim
that Trump was “stabbed in the back.” Tactically, this isn’t dumb. The
consolation prize for the Trump movement is to complete the hostile takeover of
the GOP the way conservatives did after Goldwater’s loss in 1964.
Psychologically, it also makes sense. No one ever wants to look squarely into
the abyss of their own failure. But empirically, this argument is inane. If or
when Trump loses it will be because of Trump’s own myriad and manifest
shortcomings. Blaming us for honestly pointing out that those shortcomings are
as short as the digits of Trump’s puppy-fur gloves may be cathartic, but it
won’t be honest or accurate.
Pundits of Babylon
Speaking of honesty, my column today was nominally about
Ed Schultz, who has become a willing mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda
ministry. Schultz used to mock Putin, demonize Trump, and lionize Hillary
Clinton. He’s reversed all three positions because he works for Russia Today.
I actually don’t care about Ed Schultz, because I’m a
fairly normal and level-headed person. But I focused on him for two reasons.
First, I think that the connections between Russia and Trump have been
outrageously underreported. (How funny would it be if after all the fevered
intimations that Obama was some kind of Manchurian candidate, it turned out the
title better fit Donald Trump?) But more importantly, I was trying to highlight
Schultz as a case study for a much wider phenomenon.
Look, if you’re a plumber or a dentist, you probably have
no professional political track record or other obligation to remain
politically consistent. If you like Donald Trump, there’s no immediate reason
to question your sincerity. I can’t yell at the dentist, “But you used to do
root canals! How dare you support Trump!?”
It’s different for opinion journalists, intellectuals,
academics, and the like. They’re still allowed to change their minds of course.
But when they do, they should feel obliged to explain their course corrections
with facts and logic. A lot of people who fit this job category have suddenly
discovered that they’re okay with a grandiloquently dishonest and narcissistic
thrice-married adulterer and Christian of convenience who has little to no
regard for the Constitution and limited government. No doubt some of these
people are sincere. We are all prone to errors in judgment, confirmation bias,
and magical thinking. But for some of these people, this is clearly not the
case.
Power-worship is coursing through the veins of the Right
these days. I’ll put it this way: If Donald Trump were in John Kasich’s
position, I sincerely doubt many of the prominent people praising Donald
Trump’s foreign-policy speech this week would be offering the same analysis.
Some would, I’m sure. I think Laura Ingraham would. Ann Coulter, too. They’ve
been banging these drums for a long time now. But I can’t think of too many
others now singing hosannas to Trump’s foreign-policy acumen and insight who
wouldn’t be castigating him for embracing the term “America First” and all that
it implies if Trump stood little chance of winning the nomination.
Again, if you’ve been railing about the importance of
conservative principles — on economic, constitutional or social issues — for
years or decades, and now you’re swooning for Trump, you owe people an
explanation that doesn’t rely on North Korean–style celebrations of Trump’s
magical powers. And if you don’t offer such explanations, a fair observer can
be forgiven for not only doubting your sudden change of heart, but also any
claim that you were sincere in the past.
Punditry has a bad name these days, but in my book at
least, the job description is an honorable one. It boils down to telling the
truth as you see it. Dick Morris was rightly fired from Fox because he admitted
he lied to viewers. Ed Schultz, as far as I’ve been able to discover, has
offered no explanation whatsoever. And by my lights if you knowingly say things
you don’t believe for personal gain or glory while pretending to be an honest,
albeit opinionated, broker, you don’t deserve the title pundit. But you are in
the running for the label “whore.”
I’m open to the charge of cowardice in singling out a
left-wing meathead like Ed Schultz instead of training fire on my friends and
colleagues on the right by name. And maybe that’s part of it. But I also hope
that I can persuade some people, and calling them out by name is more likely to
make them harden their positions than move off them.
No comments:
Post a Comment