By Ben Shapiro
Thursday, October 27, 2016
With Donald Trump flailing in the polls just under two
weeks from the presidential election, an open conflict has broken out between
many of those Republicans voting for Trump and those who see him as a moral and
political bridge too far for the Republican party.
For most, that conflict is not based on disagreements
about principle. Most Never Trumpers despise Hillary Clinton and will not vote
for her; most Never Trumpers even feel significant sympathy for the “vote for
Trump to stop Hillary” argument. They believe that Trump fails to meet the most
basic standard of morality and conservatism and that supporting him damages
Republicans politically now and in the future. So they will vote for neither
candidate.
By contrast, most Trump voters despise Hillary Clinton
and will vote against her. Most Trump voters are voting for Trump as the lesser
of two evils, not because they support his agenda on trade or trust him as a
thoughtful foreign-policy sage. Most Trump voters aren’t Laura Ingraham or Bill
Mitchell or Sean Hannity. That’s been true since May. Most Trump voters will
vote for Trump because they believe that the overriding priority is to stop
Hillary from entering the White House, and to that end, they are willing to
overlook Trump’s myriad flaws.
So, why are the two sides of this debate at each other’s
throat? Because they’ve projected bad motives onto the other side.
On the one hand, some Never Trumpers have accused Trump
voters of high-handedness.
The most vocal Trump supporters have spent nearly the
entirety of this general-election cycle focused not on helping Trump win but on
blaming Never Trumpers if he loses. They stated first that Never Trumpers were
unimportant to the debate because they’re so few and far between; then they
stated that Never Trumpers were the only thing standing between Trump and the
White House. They’ve argued that all Never Trumpers secretly want Hillary to be
president (absurd) or don’t care about her corruption (idiotic) or are in the
pay of nefarious forces (ridiculous — the only people who have benefitted
monetarily from this election are those who have boosted their careers through
their pro-Trump sycophancy). These vocal Trump supporters have engaged in the
most crass moral preening: Those who disagree about Trump are pure evil,
saboteurs, and sell-outs.
Some Never Trumpers have made the mistake of attributing
the rhetoric and feelings of the people who make these disingenuous, scurrilous
arguments — the ardent base of Trump support — to those who are voting for
Trump reluctantly. Feeling assaulted, many Never Trumpers fail to hear the
distinction between intelligent conservatives voting Trump as a last resort, to
stop Hillary, and Trump cheerleaders who want Trump to be a bludgeon against
the “cuckservative establishment.”
Meanwhile, on the other hand, many reluctant Trump
supporters have accused Never Trumpers of high-handedness. They believe that
Never Trumpers are sneering down at them, riding their high horses. They refuse
to acknowledge decent rationales, either moral or political, for not voting
Trump. They don’t say that Never Trumpers are in the pay of international
bankers or secretly pray at Hillary shrines, but they claim that Never Trumpers
are whiners who won’t get their hands dirty and simply want to virtue-signal by
refusing to vote for Trump.
This misattribution of motives on both sides is far more
likely to spell the death of the Republican party than Trumpism is.
After the election, which Trump is almost sure to lose,
most Republicans will grieve. Never Trumpers will grieve at the lost opportunity
to stop Hillary Clinton and at paving her way by nominating a man eminently
unfit and pathologically incapable of running even a half-decent campaign;
they’ll lament the damage done to the party by spending months snorting at
sexual-assault allegations and shrugging at playing footsie with the despicable
alt-right. Reluctant Trump voters will grieve at the Trump loss generally —
they’ll lament both his win in the primaries and his loss in the general but
will generally acknowledge that he failed his supporters.
This will provide the opportunity for a healing — so long
as each side recognizes the genuineness of the other side’s grief. Never
Trumpers must acknowledge that reluctant Trump voters felt that they had to do
what they did and that they do not bear the stain of his sins for taking a
lesser-of-two-evils path, even if Never Trumpers believe that was wrong.
Reluctant Trump voters must acknowledge that Never Trumpers felt they had to do
what they did not out of a misguided attempt to show their moral superiority
but out of a real belief that the only way to preserve conservatism and the
Republican party was to dissociate from the political electrical fire Trump
represented. No conservative or Republican of decency will be celebrating on
November 9. Both Never Trumpers and reluctant Trump voters should recognize
this.
The only way to rebuild a Republican party based on
conservative principle is to acknowledge the good motivations of those who
disagree about Trump.
But there’s a real possibility that such a rapprochement
won’t happen. That’s because Trump and his campaign deeply desire a civil war.
They want reluctant Trump voters to
fight with Never Trumpers. They want to excise the conservatives who wouldn’t
back Trump, and they want to co-opt the conservatives who would. That’s why in
the waning days of the campaign, Trump spends his time ripping Speaker of the
House Paul Ryan — a Trump endorser! — and blaming other Republicans for his own
failures. Trump’s team, including political arsonists such as former-and-future
Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon, want
the Right to burn itself out, making way for a resurgent nationalist populism
that dispenses with constitutional conservatism altogether. Trump has an active rooting interest in initiating a
civil war, for both financial and political gain. He’s planning and promoting
that civil war now. To that end, Trump himself stokes the absolute lie that
Republicans who won’t vote for him are traitors to conservatism who are hell-bent
on belittling those who vote Trump.
The only way to rebuild a Republican party based on
conservative principle is to acknowledge the good motives of those who disagree
about Trump. We all want to stop Hillary Clinton and her vile agenda. We all want
to reverse decades of Democratic policy on immigration and government growth,
on social leftism and leftist race-baiting. If Trump loses, we’ll have to get
over our differences about him to do that. We all had sincere positions on
Trump. It wasn’t just preening. It wasn’t unearned moral superiority. We had
serious disagreements, but we agree on basic principles. If we can agree on all
of that, there’s a future for conservatism.
If Trump succeeds, however, in his post-election plan to
divide conservatives between those who were loyal to him and those who were
not, he’ll have told his biggest lie and, on the basis of that, won his
greatest victory. And the conservative movement’s collapse will be the final
step in the political Armageddon he and his advisers so desire.
No comments:
Post a Comment