By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Sure, it matters that Donald Trump owns a historically
low favorability rating. Then again, disliking the president isn’t exactly a
courageous act. Plenty of Americans — many of whom supported the president
during the general election — don’t like
Donald Trump. They do realize that politics is a tradeoff. A more revealing
question pollsters might ask people is: But do you “like” any better Chuck
Schumer or Elizabeth Warren, pussy-hatted marchers griping about the
patriarchy, or the totalitarians blocking Education Secretary Betsy Devos from
walking into a public school?
That’s the choice #TheResistance — whose mantra, let’s
face it, has synched with the national Democratic Party — has created for many
moderate Republicans, right-leaning independents, and movement conservatives
concerned about Trump. Which is to say, they offer no choice whatsoever. They
offer plenty of hysteria, hypocrisy, and conflating of conservatism with
Trumpism for political gain.
For pundits on the Left, the idea that conservatives can
judge the presidency issue by issue is completely unacceptable. As important as
attacking Trump is, depicting conservatives as fellow travelers who enable
fascism confirms every preconceived notion they harbor about the Right. As
Scott Adams put it not that long ago:
But lately I get the feeling that
Trump’s critics have evolved from expecting Trump to be Hitler to preferring
it. Obviously they don’t prefer it in a conscious way. But the alternative to
Trump becoming Hitler is that they have to live out the rest of their lives as
confirmed morons.
In a recent Atlantic
piece titled “The Anti-Anti-Trump Right,” by Peter Beinart, the subheadline
reads: “For conservative publications, the business model is opposing the left.
And that means opposing the people who oppose Trump.” As is customary these
days, the Left, much like Trump, questions the motives of political foes rather
than addressing their arguments. Beinart goes on to name the two only honorable
conservatives in the entire country (according to Democrats), David Frum and
David Brooks. For them, Beinart contends, conservatism is “prudence, inherited
wisdom, and a government that first does no harm.” Sure it is. Everyone else is
a moral coward and a hypocrite for failing to support liberals in their fight
to …
… in their fight to do what, exactly?
It’s true that Trump doesn’t exhibit prudence, reliance,
or inherited wisdom. Yet — and I know this is exceedingly difficult for
Democrats to comprehend —neither does the alternative. If liberals were serious
about convincing Republicans to abandon Trump in toto, they’d have something better to offer than Donald Trump.
What seems to most vex critics of the anti-anti-Trump
contingent (and I am mentioned in the Atlantic
piece) is that conservatives aren’t appropriately agitated about the world that
liberals see — a world that has turned out to be far less apocalyptic in the
early going than they imagine. But if it’s a zero-sum choice they’re offering,
that includes picking Neil Gorsuch over Planned Parenthood; tax cuts over
teachers unions; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Iran’s
Holocaust deniers; deregulation of the bureaucratic state over legislation, or
forcing progressive cultural mores on everyone. And so on.
As Matt Lewis pointed out today, for example, many former
free traders are now embracing the protectionist, big-government policies of
Trumpism. This is the kind of capitulation many fiscal conservatives feared.
Again, the problem is that for free traders, Democrats are as just bad. In
fact, the popularity of protectionism among populist movements on left and
right is so strong, there’s a good argument that the only way to possibly
counteract it is by electing more conservatives to Congress.
The average Resistance fighter might dislike Trump. They
hate conservatism. By treating even the most milquetoast, run-of-the-mill
cabinet nominee as Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened to America, The
Resistance gives conservatives the space to defend long-standing political
positions such as school choice, immigration enforcement, and deregulation. I
imagine many Republicans would happily hand over the scalp of more Michael
Flynns if it meant creating a more stable and experienced administration. But
they also understand that people who treat DeVos like a bigger threat to the
republic than Steve Bannon will never be placated. Those who spend weeks after
the election acting like the Electoral College was some kind trick pulled on
the country are not interested in “rule of law.” They’re interested in
Democrats.
Last week, when the president tactlessly attacked the
Ninth Circuit Court on Twitter, the mantra was “Trump doesn’t respect the law!”
— even though Democrats had spent eight years attacking the Supreme Court over Citizens United. By Monday, when we
learned that there was a deportation uptick (there probably wasn’t) of illegal
immigrants, the mantra had changed to “Trump is upholding the law!” (Do
Democrats believe enforcing the law horrifies most voters? Do they really
believe a temporary ban on refugees from Muslim-majority countries that are terror-producing
nations is as cut and dry an issue as it looks on their Twitter feeds?) These
days, “the law” means “policy positions liberals like.”
As Thomas Sowell says, there are no ideal solutions, only
tradeoffs. Trump brings an array of obvious and problematic issues with him to
the presidency that may one day make his presidency untenable for Republicans.
The Resistance, though, offers them absolutely nothing.
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