By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, April 08, 2017
Well, this’ll be interesting.
After Thursday night’s attack on Syria, the conventional
wisdom congealed faster than the chalupa sauce in Michael Moore’s chest hair.
Sorry, this isn’t really a topic for strident juvenilia,
but I know that’s one of the things that puts digital asses in the virtual
seats.
Let me start over.
I think Thursday night’s attacks are both less and more
important than the rapidly forming conventional wisdom holds. This is a
convoluted way of saying I see it a bit differently from some folks. And since
I’m on a tight schedule, let me do it bullet-point style:
• I think the foreign-policy consequences of the strike
are likely to be less consequential than the domestic ones. Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson has already said, quite emphatically, that the strikes don’t
suggest any change in our overall strategy:
“I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a
change in our policy or posture relative to our military activities in Syria
today. There has been no change in that status,” [Tillerson] added. “I think it
does demonstrate that President Trump is willing to act when governments and
actors cross the line and cross the line on violating commitments they’ve made
and cross the line in the most heinous of ways.”
As we put it in our National
Review editorial Friday morning:
If it is a one-off, this strike is
the very definition of a symbolic pinprick. It was launched with highly precise
weapons against the airfield from which the Syrian chemical attack emanated.
According to reports, we apprised Russian personnel at the base beforehand,
meaning the Syrians effectively had advance warning as well.
In other words, if this is all that we have in store for
Bashar al-Assad, President Trump’s dismayed anti-interventionists don’t have that much to worry about and
interventionists have less to celebrate than think (more about them in a
moment). Assad can go on killing women and children — he will simply have to
use less efficient and more conventional weapons to do it. What a massive moral
victory for the West!
• Look, I get why — morally, strategically, and legally —
chemical weapons are different than conventional ones. But if my entire family
and village were wiped out with bullets and bombs rather than chemical weapons,
I wouldn’t draw much solace from any of these distinctions.
Those who wanted us meddling in the
Middle East voted for other candidates.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April
7, 2017
Laura Ingraham is right too:
Missiles flying. Rubio’s happy.
McCain ecstatic. Hillary’s on board. A complete policy change in 48 hrs.
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle)
April 7, 2017
Now I favor the strikes (though I have questions about
their legality and I think Daniel Pipes makes some excellent points against the
strike, here).
But there is literally nothing to justify it in the past speeches, campaign
promises, and tweets (!) of Donald Trump, going back four years.
If the U.S. attacks Syria and hits
the wrong targets, killing civilians, there will be worldwide hell to pay. Stay
away and fix broken U.S.
— Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2013
Donald Trump didn’t oppose the Iraq War from the
beginning, but he likes to claim he did. Regardless, let’s recall that Saddam
Hussein killed orders of magnitude more people — including babies — with
chemical weapons, and yet Trump never considered this even a partial justification
for getting rid of Saddam or the war. But forget Iraq, which, admittedly, was a
different thing on a number of fronts. Assad’s attack on Ghouta in 2013 killed
more people than this week’s gas attack, and we had pictures of dead children
then, too.
But Trump opposed enforcing Obama’s red line back then,
nevertheless. The difference, as Trump admirably admitted from the Rose Garden,
is that he’s president now and that changes your perspective on things. It’s
always easy to throw brick-bats when you have no responsibility (one of the
guiding tenets of this “news”letter by the way). Now he’s looking at the
prospect of being the president who, in effect, sanctioned the use of chemical
weapons, a violation of international law. As he put it in his statement
Thursday night:
It is in this vital
national-security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread
and use of deadly chemical weapons.
There can be no dispute that Syria
used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical
Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council.
• That is a sound argument. But it was just as sound in
2013. Trump’s real motivation seems to be the fact that babies were “choked
out” and that he saw it on TV. And it is this apparent fact that should give
everyone — supporters and critics alike — the most cause for concern. Ann
Coulter wrote a whole book called In
Trump We Trust, which, in its own cartoonish way, was a brilliant title in
that it conveyed the unshakable, almost religious faith many of his most ardent
supporters had in his will and his strength and his commitment to bucking the
“establishment.”
Now:
Trump campaigned on not getting
involved in Mideast. Said it always helps our enemies & creates more
refugees. Then he saw a picture on TV.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April
7, 2017
• Donald Trump is a charismatic political figure. I don’t
mean that in the conventional sense that he’s “charming.” I mean it in the
sociological and political-science sense. Max Weber delineated three kinds of
authority — legal, traditional, and charismatic. Charismatic authority rests
“on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an
individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained
by him.” Charismatic leaders get people to write books called In Trump We Trust.
But the problem with charismatic leaders is that they are
often a kind of Rorschach test. People project onto them what they want to see.
I’ve lost count of how many conversations I’ve had with hardcore Trump fans
who’ve described wildly different Donald Trumps — not simply different from the
man I see, but different from each other. As a matter of logic, not all of
these assessments can be right.
But logic also dictates that all of them can be wrong. Earlier this week I wrote
a column about how the core problem with Trump’s presidency so far isn’t his
lack of an agenda or his tweeting or any of that. It’s Trump’s own character.
Many angry readers came at me saying that I was just refusing to get over my
Never Trumpism (they’re wrong about that by the way). Others suggested I was
just a sucker for the mainstream media’s “fake news.” I’m not a political
reporter, but I do talk to a lot of people in and around the Trump
administration. And the simple fact is that the chaos in the Trump White House
is an outgrowth of the president’s personality. He’s mercurial. He cares more
about status, saving face, respect, “winning,” etc. than he does about any
public policy. That’s not to say he doesn’t care about public policy at all. I
think he’s sincere in his views about immigration, trade, excessive regulation,
etc. But they take a back seat to Trump’s desire to maintain his charismatic
status (which is why we’ve seen so many stories about how he gets mad at
staffers who get good press — a really bizarre attitude for a manager when you
think about it).
As Rich put it the other day, writing about the (first)
push for Trumpcare:
Trump, for his part, has lacked the
knowledge, focus or interest to translate his populism into legislative form.
He deferred to others on legislative priorities and strategies at the outset of
his administration, and his abiding passion in the health-care debate was, by
all accounts, simply getting to a signing ceremony.
The strike on Syria is the single best proof that Trump
has no overriding commitment to any ideological position. And I say this,
again, as someone who supports the strike. Ramesh likes to say that we
sometimes make too big a deal of it when politicians flip-flop. Conservatives
should want politicians to flip or
flop (not sure of the usage here) if it means they abandon their wrong
positions and agree with us. So, sure, I’m happy to celebrate his change of
heart. I’m also delighted to watch the Cernovich crowd freak out. But there’s a
larger lesson here. If Trump can abandon his position on this — all because of
some horrific pictures on TV — what position is safe?
• This is why I am actually encouraged by the response
from the Coulter crowd. Until now, the standard response to Trump’s
indefensible or indecipherable statements and outbursts was to say, “He knows
more than us.” Or “This is what got him elected.” Or “He’s playing three-dimensional
chess!” Or, simply, “I trust him.” As I put it in a column in February:
When a political leader replaces
fixed principles and clear ideological platforms with his own instincts and
judgment, he gives his supporters no substantive arguments to rely on.
Eventually, the argument to just say, “Have faith” in our leader, he knows
best, is the only safe harbor.
And that’s not what conservatism is
about — nor, for that matter, democracy.
The fact that some in the Trump-can-do-no-wrong crowd are
setting their collective hair on fire over the Syria strikes is a sign of
ideological health (even if, again, I disagree with the substance of their
complaint).
What continues to stun me is how shocked they are that
this wasn’t in the cards all along.
• Right now, there’s a lot of talk about how both Steve
Bannon and Reince Priebus may be on the way out at the White House. In general,
I’d shed no tears at Bannon’s defenestration, but it’s worth noting that Bannon
and Priebus now form an unlikely coalition against Jared Kushner, a lifelong
liberal Democrat. By all accounts Kushner is a smart and serious guy. He also
has the ace up his sleeve of being married to the president’s (also liberal)
daughter. I have grave disagreements with Bannon, but in this fight I think I’m
on his side:
One senior Trump aide said that
Bannon was also frustrated with Kushner “continuing to bring in [Obamacare
architect] Zeke Emanuel to discuss health care options,” for instance. The aide
said Emanuel has had three White House meetings, including one with Trump.
But the idea that the chaos in the White House is a
function of bad staff is grossly unfair, even to Bannon. The chaos isn’t a bug
in the Trump program — it is the program.
It’s how he likes to run things. He could bring in a whole new roster of
people, the result will likely be the same.
• I’ll close with this. Some defenders have argued that
Trump is merely a pragmatist. Don’t worry, I won’t rehash all my
anti-pragmatism stuff. But I will say that this defense often makes a profound
moral, political, and ideological error. Pragmatism (conventionally defined)
about means is generally fine, within limits of course. But pragmatism about ends isn’t pragmatism at all, it’s
Nietzschean nihilism. If your goals are made slaves to your desire to seem like
a winner, then the question of what you “win” at becomes entirely negotiable.
Conceptually, this is the difference between a knight and a mercenary. A knight
fights for certain lofty ideals; a mercenary fights to win and reap the
rewards. Politically, this is the lesson of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
governorship. He decided that he’d rather be a successful liberal governor than
a failed conservative one.
If I were Coulter, Ingraham, or Sean Hannity I’d make a
lot more money fighting the “establishment” than I do allegedly defending it,
but that’s not important right now. If I were them, I’d be terrified by the
reaction to the strike. Trump is getting good press. He’s being hailed as a
strong and decisive leader. He’s got heart. John McCain and Marco Rubio are
praising him, as are a host of foreign leaders. This would scare me for two
reasons. First, if I were a committed America Firster like Coulter and
Ingraham, I’d see this for what it is: incredibly positive reinforcement for a
politician who responds to flattery more than most. But, second, I’d recognize
that the lesson Trump might learn from this is that your poll numbers and press
clippings get better when you throw your biggest fans under the bus and listen
to the establishment, Jared Kushner, or Lord knows who else.
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