The Lesser of Two Weasels

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 15, 2024

 

I have an intuition, which I don’t entirely trust, that anti-Trump conservatives will find it harder to support Kamala Harris than they did Joe Biden.

 

It defies logic (unless you know anything about her record as a senator or state attorney general), as her “blank slate” strategy is designed to make it easier for ideological opponents to convince themselves that she shares their positions. So far that’s paid off with considerably better polling than the president managed and tens of thousands of “Republicans for Harris” participating in virtual events.

 

Partisan conservatives will scoff at the very idea. To them, there’s no difference between a Never Trump right-winger and a garden-variety left-winger; the latter is simply more honest about what they are. As rank-and-file Democrats work themselves into a frenzy for Harris, they’ll insist, rest assured that Romney Republicans will do so too.

 

Maybe. Some will. But on Thursday morning we got our first peek at Harris’ economic agenda and my face has been frozen all day in a Michael-Scott-ian cringe.

 

The vice president’s response to public angst over inflation will reportedly be a proposed federal ban on “corporate price-gouging” of food and groceries. That’s terrible policy, as is usually the case when government starts fiddling with the profit margins of private enterprises. If a business’ costs increase while its revenue is artificially suppressed, guess what happens.

 

It’s also dishonest. “Corporate price-gouging” isn’t why Americans have struggled for three years with the cost of living. Supply-chain problems caused by pandemic shutdowns combined with trillions of dollars in federal stimulus—some of it approved by the Biden-Harris administration—left too much money chasing too few goods. Demagoguery about corporate greed is Harris’ cynical attempt to shift blame away from herself and onto a familiar scapegoat.

 

It’s totally unserious, treating American voters like children who believe the government can lower the cost of living through the brute-force magic of imperious price controls with no ill effects. And it’ll probably work. American voters very much are children when it comes to that.

 

Reaction to the policy among anti-Trump conservatives on Thursday was grim, which was ironic. Joe Biden has also been quite demagogic about price-gouging and many of those same conservatives, like me, were resigned to supporting him against Donald Trump. But Biden had a long (loooong) record as a politician, of which his pandering about price controls was only one small piece. And he had some meaningful accomplishments as president, like supporting Ukraine, that right-wing hawks could warm to.

 

Harris is a cipher. She has run a remarkably vacuous campaign in her first month. Insofar as there’s a common thread in her two runs for the presidency, it’s her eagerness to embrace gimmicky panders with little apparent thought for how well they might function as policy. She may or may not prove to be a good candidate, but there’s little reason so far to believe she’d make a good president. She seems unserious, and anti-Trump right-wingers are deadly serious about the stakes of this election.

 

Biden’s campaign warned that democracy is on the ballot this year. Harris’ campaign crows about “bringing back joy.” Which sounds more in sync with the mood of “Dispatch conservatives” to you?

 

All of this brings us to the point of today’s newsletter. Uncle David and Uncle Jonah are fighting (i.e., very politely disagreeing) over whether there’s a conservative case for voting for Harris this fall. Is there?

 

Not really. But I’m glad someone is trying.

 

The art of persuasion.

 

The tricky thing about David French’s conservative argument for Harris is that most Americans understand conservatism as a suite of policy preferences and that’s not the sense in which he’s using the term.

 

Well, maybe a little. “In many ways, the most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin,” he writes. To Reaganites, conservatism means unapologetic support for the Pax Americana. Is there any doubt that Kamala Harris would be a better bet on that point than this guy?

 

But David’s not pretending that Harris would generally govern more conservatively than Trump. He supports her because he believes, or hopes, that another Trump defeat will be hygienic for the right. Trump fans aren’t going to be persuaded or shamed out of their enthusiasm for a miscreant but they might have it beaten out of them at the polls:

 

I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.

 

The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.

 

I’ve made variations of that argument. You’re not going to turn cult members against their leader through reason. The best you can do to break the spell is to discredit him by showing them, repeatedly if necessary, that he’s not invincible. If Republicans lose enough otherwise eminently winnable races under his leadership, they’ll tire of it—in theory—and conclude that a new direction is needed. And whatever that new direction ends up being, it’ll be healthier and more virtuous than Trumpism.

 

David’s thesis is less a conservative case for Harris than a conservative case against Trump.

 

For two reasons, I’m less sold on his logic than I used to be. First: What, if anything, have we seen from the American right over the last eight years that suggests it’s capable of reforming even if incentivized to do so by election results?

 

Practically everyone capable of providing civic leadership has been drummed out of the party as heretics. David himself has become a bogeyman for populists. It’s possible that, with the benefit of time and distance, Republicans will admit that Trump was a, shall we say, suboptimal candidate, but there’s no future in which people like him or Dispatch staffers will be welcomed back by a contrite right.

 

If anything, Harris thumping Trump at the polls with our support will lead them to resent us more. After someone has been conned, it’s not the con man whom they most hate. It’s the people who knew better and warned them they were being had.

 

All of this assumes that the right will even entertain the argument that Trump lost to Harris legitimately. There’s nothing to suggest that’s true, either. Apart from the now-standard bleats about vote-rigging, he and his fans will spend this winter pointing to the criminal indictments against him and the Biden-Harris switcheroo as evidence of “unfairness.” He’ll almost certainly retain his role as party leader after the election and will guard that status jealously, not wanting to lose his political leverage against being imprisoned. “Rigged election” will become party orthodoxy again.

 

Losing by a landslide could let some of the air out of his “stolen election” balloon, but that won’t happen. Even after the stupendous month Harris has had, Trump is still neck-and-neck with her in surveys. He tends to outperform his polling on Election Day, too, as we know from painful experience. He might lose this election but there will be no emphatic repudiation of him by voters. If anything, the opposite is true: The fact that he won the presidency once and came this close to winning it two more times will strengthen populists’ case that Trumpism, not conservatism, is the path to power. All it’ll take to win is a more disciplined messenger.

 

My other problem with David’s argument is the same as Jonah Goldberg’s problem with it. It’s a darned hard sell.

 

Many Republican voters accept that Trump is a terrible person and a, er, problematic candidate. But since they too tend to think of conservatism in terms of policy, trying to convince them that they would be better served by the victory of a left-wing woman from San Francisco seems too clever by half. Columnist Peter Spiliakos summed up the problem when he snarked about Harris’ price-gouging pander, “To save conservatism from itself, I’m voting for the exhumed corpse of Hugo Chavez.”

 

That’s unfair (funny, but unfair) since it can be to an ideologue’s long-term advantage to have his or her party lose. Look no further than the progressives who were prepared to withhold their votes from “Genocide Joe” Biden over Gaza despite knowing that Trump would benefit—and that his Israel policy would be less to their liking than Biden’s is. Those progressives hoped that punishing Biden with an electoral defeat would force the Democratic Party to take their concerns about Israel more seriously in the future. David’s conservative case for Harris is applying the same logic to the Republican Party, believing that defeat will force it toward a more traditionally conservative outlook.

 

Why, it’s almost as if there’s a hostage crisis on the right, with populists having taken the GOP captive. Too many gutless partisan conservatives have chosen to pay the ransom by continuing to vote Republican even as the party has descended into civic squalor. David French, God love him, is prepared to shoot the hostage.

 

It’s the right strategy. But it’s not persuasive. “Vote Harris if you love conservatism” rings as awkwardly to Republicans as “Vote Trump if you love liberalism” does to Democrats, I’d guess. One could even argue that it does more harm than good to the cause of anti-Trump conservatives by making it easier to dismiss us all as little more than leftists in disguise.

 

Still, I think it’s a case worth making.

 

Permission structures.

 

“I think it’s better to send a different kind of signal than the one David is sending,” Jonah Goldberg responded in his latest G-File.

 

Because people vote for complex and muddled reasons, he went on to say, David should have explained what makes him want to vote for a candidate rather than against one. And if he was intent on doing the latter, he should have left voting out of it and kept it simple: “I think Harris is pretty terrible for a slew of reasons, but a Harris presidency would be the lesser of two evils for the following reasons” would have been a more compelling pitch, Jonah claimed.

 

I agree that the affirmative case for Harris is weak, in case the price-gouging debacle wasn’t evidence enough. My own case for preferring her to Trump runs along the lines Jonah describes. The constitutional order must be defended from postliberalism; the only way to do that in the near term is to defeat an authoritarian; to succeed, the authoritarian’s highly cringeworthy opponent will need every vote she can get. That’s the case for voting for Harris. You can call it a “conservative” case insofar as it aims to conserve classical liberalism but you certainly don’t need to be ideologically conservative to adopt it. And you might confuse people by framing it that way.

 

What I don’t agree with is this: “He’s wrong about voting for Harris, he’s wrong for endorsing Harris, and he’s wrong about writing a column pegged to his vote rather than his endorsement,” Jonah writes of David. David isn’t wrong about any of those things.

 

He’s not wrong about voting for Harris. It may be that writing in Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels, or Ben Sasse would send a “clearer” message about one’s conservative preferences than voting for Harris would, as Jonah maintains, but that clarity would come at an awfully steep price if it ended up getting Trump elected. Imagine him winning by a handful of electoral votes because 50,000 Reaganite conservatives in Pennsylvania insisted on writing in the Gipper instead of voting for Harris.

 

Do we think Donald Trump would react to that outcome with humility, treating the write-in votes as a meaningful reproach by classically liberal right-wingers? Or do we think he’d laugh at them for being suckers who threw away their power to stop him before embarking full throttle on the Project 2025 agenda and his “retribution” program?

 

What would our clarity have gotten us except a grossly unfit president, four years of constitutional crisis, the full normalization of right-wing populism, an heir to Trumpism in J.D. Vance, and no guarantee at all that Trump would mollify those disgruntled Reaganites with policy concessions in his second term?

 

Not a banner day for traditional conservatism. 

 

Jonah goes on to advocate for a write-in vote by claiming that “Democrats and pundits will not read David’s vote as anything other than an endorsement of Harris’ full suite of positions,” but I’m not sure that’s true either. It might be, certainly. There’s little by way of right-wing outreach in Joe Biden’s record as president to suggest that he cared, or even understood, that he received millions of votes from anti-Trump conservatives in 2020.

 

But why should we care if Harris is similarly oblivious? Unlike Biden, she’ll almost certainly be saddled with a Republican Senate majority, preventing her from governing with the sort of liberal pseudo-mandate the president imagined himself to have in his first two years. And maybe she won’t be as oblivious. Between moving toward the center on various policies and organizing events like “Republicans for Harris,” she seems to understand that many critical swing voters do not, in fact, share her instincts on policy.

 

If there’s an upside to her habit of gimmicky panders to important constituencies, in fact, it’s that she might be more likely than her predecessor to consider crossover voters one such constituency and to pander accordingly.

 

As for David’s insistence on endorsing her, the logic of that comes down to two words: permission structure.

 

“Permission structure” is an obnoxious phrase generally and really obnoxious when applied to columnists rather than politicians. It’s the idea that the average voter is so tribal and easily led that they can’t be moved to support a controversial policy unless some political thought leader first grants them “permission” to do so. Think of Barack Obama endorsing gay marriage in 2012. Some Democrats were leery of supporting a position that had been fringy up to that point, but once Obama signed on, the numbers began to move.

 

I’m under no illusion that political columnists (especially me) wield such influence over their readers that their granting “permission” to vote a certain way matters—in isolation. But in an era of embittered hyperpolarized partisanship, an accumulation of “permission” to cross the aisle might. The more conservatives there are in media willing to make the case that Harris is the lesser of two weasels this fall, the more comfortable some reluctant conservative voters might feel about “betraying” their side by voting for her.

 

There’s strength in numbers, right? Well, David French is using his perch at the New York Times to add to those numbers. So am I here at The Dispatch. So are “Republicans for Harris.” Tribal partisanship is such a momentous obstacle to defeating Trump that anything that helps normalize the idea that it’s okay this one time to support a Democrat is useful, I think. David’s op-ed is the strongest form of that appeal: Not only is it okay to cast a vote for Harris, he’s telling Reaganites, you’ll even be a good conservative for doing so.

 

It’s not about “succumbing to … the voter’s desire to feel good about their vote,” as Jonah says of David’s piece at one point, it’s about overcoming that desire in others. Many Republican partisans who know Trump has no business being in office just won’t feel good this fall if they don’t vote for the GOP. David’s trying to reassure them by giving them something to feel good about in supporting Harris too.

 

The whole argument comes down to something Jonah mentioned at the start of his G-File. Explaining that votes are merely snapshots in time rather than grand indicators of the voter’s identity, he writes, “You wouldn’t know it from watching MSNBC, but the people who voted for Trump in November 2020 aren’t responsible for the stuff Trump did in January 2021—because it hadn’t happened yet.” That’s true, but they are now, if they vote for him again. Your vote may not reflect your identity but it certainly does reflect what you do—or don’t—prioritize when deciding how you’d prefer America to be governed.

 

By seeking to return him to the presidency, Trump’s voters inescapably are indicating that coup plots shouldn’t be disqualifying in a candidate. The country as we’ve known it can’t survive if that logic prevails. It must be defeated. Vote Harris.