By Tom Nichols
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
I have been thinking about Peter Wehner’s piece in the New York Times yesterday, in which he
talks about the sadness of losing friends over Donald Trump’s candidacy. I have
not—yet—lost any friends over Trump, but it’s possible. Unlike Wehner, I am
less concerned about it. The Trump campaign is a test of character, and many
Americans are failing it.
Put another way, if my opposition to Trump is going to
cost me friends, then all I can say is: So be it.
I know people who are voting for Trump, including members
of my family. I do not immediately find myself opposed to anyone who would vote
for Trump; to the contrary, I find a lot of fertile ground for discussion and
argument with conservative friends who disagree with me only about the lengths
to which the “never Trump” movement should go. They might not be comfortable
with Trump, but they will do anything to stop Hillary Clinton, and I understand
that position.
By Now, You Know
What You’re Getting
But I find almost nothing to say to people who are
full-throated, enthusiastic Trump supporters, especially now. Back in August, I
could console myself that most Trump supporters just didn’t know what they were
getting into, and that they would return to their senses and regain their
decency once they got a look at the unhinged huckster onto whom they’d signed.
As Jonathan Last noted recently, an attorney and blogger
who calls himself “Thomas Crown” summed up this kind of voter in a recent
article. Crown discussed one of his clients, a pseudonymous “Mrs. Martin” who
was supporting a Trump she mostly knew through bits and pieces of information,
none of them too close to the truth about the actual man. “Mrs. Martin” seems a
decent sort, even if I’m having a bit of trouble believing that she’s as
untouched by Trump’s reality as she claims.
All these months later, however, the pretense has to
stop. Trump’s supporters are voracious consumers of his public and television
appearances, and they now know what kind of man he is. With my friends and
family who still cling to Trump, I never waver from my insistence, directly and
firmly, that they are making a terrible mistake, and that Trump is making them
worse people for being involved in his message. I still love them, and they
still love me. (I think.)
Friendship With
Political Opponents Is Possible
In a lifetime spent in and around politics, I actually
haven’t lost many friends over political disagreements. In my academic life, I
have always been part of a political minority; I once did a campus radio show
with a colleague who admitted happily that during the 1960s he had denounced
his father as a class enemy on national television. (He settled into being
somewhat more of a conventional liberal 30 years later.) I doubt that being a
conservative helped my early career, but few of the people I knew in those days
broke even a casual friendship with me.
I also have liberal friends from my days working in
politics. We stayed friends even as they and I worked for opposite sides, and
while I wrote articles (and speeches for a GOP senator) excoriating their ideas
and their party. Much like the sheepdog and the coyote in the old Warner
Brothers’ cartoon, we would fight each other during the day, punch the clock,
then go out and enjoy a friendship based in a common interest in politics, even
if from different sides of the field.
But Trump’s candidacy isn’t really about politics, which
is why it divides people so deeply. Trump and his views are ghastly in a way
that goes beyond politics. They challenge our human decency and patriotism.
That’s why they test not only our political associations but our friendships.
A Rant Is Not a
Policy
Yes, fellow conservatives: Trump is worse than Hillary
Clinton or Barack Obama. Their policies are liberal, even leftist, often
motivated by cheap politics, ego, and political grandstanding. But they are policies, understandable as such and
opposable by political means.
Trump’s various rants, by contrast, do not amount to
policies. They are ignorant tone poems, bad haikus, streams of words whose
content has no real meaning. They’re not positions available either to the GOP
or Democrats, because they do not contain a vision of the future over which
those parties can fight.
In fact, Trump’s policies are not policies. They’re just
feverish revenge fantasies. Trump, a scam artist whose entire career has been
based on victimizing the working class, should be the target of that anger.
Instead, he is encouraging Americans to turn their hostility away from him and
against their fellow citizens, inviting us into a war of all against all over
which he will preside as an amused dictator.
The division between Trump’s supporters and the rest of
us is not about reconciling our political differences. It is not about opposing
policies we hate. (Most of Trump’s policies are actually quite liberal, but
that is irrelevant.) There are no real principles on the table here, only
Trump’s demagogic stoking of incoherent and even paranoid rage.
Revenge Destroys
Friendships
This is what destroys friendships. Trump’s supporters are
now like roaring drunks in a bar fight, people who you might have tried to
reason with five drinks earlier but now are just lashing out at everyone in
every direction. Pumped up on talk radio conspiracies, overdosing on the venom
of Sean Hannity and Judge Jeannine, comatose with irrational fury, they are no
longer part of any sensible political debate in America.
This blind madness puts both political and emotional
distance between Trump supporters and the rest of us. Most conservatives have
already told Trump that we will not sell our character as Americans, and indeed
our very souls, just to feel the pleasure of resentful anger for a few months.
All we can do is to keep trying to talk our friends out of making that very
mistake, or at best to hope that buyer’s remorse will set in.
Still, if anyone who knows me really believes I am now a
traitor to my country because of the way I’m going to vote, then I can do
without their friendship. If they end their relationship with me because Donald
Trump has identified people like me as the source of their problems, then maybe
we were not that close in the first place.
In the end, I can only say it again: if I lose a friend
only because I am opposed to man who is, in my view, a mortal enemy of
everything American, then so be it.
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