A Political Testimony

By Jay Nordlinger

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

 

The world shifts, and politics along with it. You know this when you are young, from books. Later in life, you may see it for yourself, firsthand. This is both interesting and unsettling. Dislocating.

 

I always had conservative inclinations, I suppose. When I was in college, they took political expression. I entered college in 1982. I became a convinced conservative, of the Reagan stripe. Through reading, sure — but also through the observation of events.

 

“The facts of life are conservative,” said Margaret Thatcher.

 

What does that mean, “conservative”? It means different things to different people. I have a speech on this — about 6,500 words. (I will spare you this speech now.)

 

About 20 years ago, Michael K. Deaver, the longtime Reagan aide, asked some of us to contribute to a book to be called “Why I Am a Conservative.” In my own contribution, I took pains to say that I was a Reagan conservative, in acknowledgement of other stripes. I would not want to offend, say, Wendell Berry.

 

When the book came out, it was titled “Why I Am a Reagan Conservative.” Because of my little essay? I never asked.

 

Anyway, as I was saying: In college, and thereafter, I followed events very closely: events national and international. But there was reading, too — a lot of it.

 

Very important to me were William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. And Robert L. Bartley’s editorial and op-ed pages at the Wall Street Journal.

 

George F. Will, Thomas Sowell, William Safire, Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer — I read these men, in their various publications, day after day.

 

Paul Johnson, David Pryce-Jones, Robert Conquest — I learned about the world from them. History and its lessons. Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert — they, among others, taught me about the Holocaust.

 

I read lots of prison memoirs. Fear No Evil, by Natan Sharansky. Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares. Solzhenitsyn, of course. Simon Leys taught me a lot about China. I read about Vietnam and the boat people.

 

There was Milton Friedman, and Michael Novak. Could capitalism be moral? Oh, yes. Edward C. Banfield, James Q. Wilson, Charles Murray — I learned a lot about society from them.

 

Who else? Bill Buckley used to say, “Inclusio unius est exclusio alterius.” To include one is to exclude others. I owe so many debts — to Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel; Jeane Kirkpatrick and Mark Helprin; Richard Pipes and Bernard Lewis; Walter Berns and Donald Kagan.

 

These people are with me, mentally, every day. Amazingly, I got to know many of them — most of them, in fact — later in life. The last words Kagan said to me, in an e-mail, were “Long may you wave.”

 

Long may they wave.

 

What are my political beliefs, in brief? I will jot a list. Feel free to sing along.

 

Limited government. The rule of law. Constitutionalism. Individual rights. Civil society. Free enterprise. International trade. Equality under the law. Equality of opportunity. Federalism. Military preparedness. American leadership in the world (in the nation’s own interest). Colorblindness. E pluribus unum (versus identity politics or Balkanization). And so on and so forth.

 

Liberal democracy is a precious thing, in need of protection — vigilant protection. In need of conservation. Authoritarians of various hues are always trying to upend it.

 

Something else: We conservatives laid great stress on character — character in office, character in life. Peggy Noonan wrote a book called “When Character Was King.” It was about Reagan. Bill Buckley gave a speech titled “When Character Counted: The Importance of Ronald Reagan.”

 

“Character” was on our lips constantly during the Clinton years — especially during that president’s second term. Were we opportunistic? That question is purely rhetorical, as you know.

 

Regardless, we were right.

 

***

 

I was a Republican — big-time. I once wrote a piece about myself with a slightly self-mocking title: “A Hopeless R.” I cast my first vote in 1982 — for the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, Richard Headlee. (He lost to the Democrat, Jim Blanchard.)

 

Bill Rusher used to say that a philosophy, or political outlook, needed a vessel. “Think of conservatism as the wine,” he would say. “The Republican Party is the bottle.”

 

(For 30 years, Bill Rusher — William A. Rusher, or “WAR” — was the publisher of National Review.)

 

In 2016, I thought the Republican presidential field was splendid — a bouquet of conservative goodness, by and large. I was for my friend Ted Cruz. But I admired many others: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina. Just about the only ones I could not accept were Rand Paul and, especially, Donald Trump.

 

Trump won the nomination going away. He clinched it on May 3, in the Indiana primary. I withdrew from the Republican Party that day. I explained myself in the next issue of National Review.

 

There had been a hashtag on Twitter — a trend: “ExGOP.” My piece in NR was titled “ExGOP: The shock of disaffiliation.” It was a shock indeed, to me. I had been a Republican for a lot longer than Trump had.

 

Here are two sentences from my piece:

 

In my view, Trump is grossly unfit to be president, in both mind and character — especially the latter. Even if I agreed with him on the issues — even if I thought his worldview sound — I would balk at supporting him, owing to the issue of character.

 

This was a common view among conservatives at the time. Only later was it a dissenting, if not a heretical, one.

 

Shortly after Trump clinched the nomination, I ran into an eminent Republican at a gathering. “How are you?” he asked. I answered, “Unsettled, frankly. I’ve left the Republican Party. Can you believe it?” The Republican looked at me meaningfully, gravely, and said, “You didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left you.”

 

That man remained a Republican. He spoke at the convention two months later. Nonetheless, I appreciated his remark to me (and felt it to be true).

 

About Trump’s term in office — first term? — there are countless things to say. Did he nominate Federalist Society judges? Yes. Did he move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Yes.

 

Good, good. But . . . will mention just a few other things, perhaps standing for the whole.

 

There is a theory — deriving from the QAnon movement, apparently — that goes like this: President Obama and Vice President Biden conspired with Iran to fake the death of Osama bin Laden. Then Biden, specifically, had members of SEAL Team Six killed, in order to cover up the conspiracy.

 

In October 2020, someone on Twitter tweeted this theory around. The tweeter called himself “Oscar the Midnight Rider 1111.” Donald Trump retweeted Oscar the Midnight Rider 1111.

 

Trump, remember, was president of the United States.

 

In a televised “townhall,” he was asked about this. “I know nothing about it,” said the president. “That was a retweet. That was an opinion of somebody, and that was a retweet. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don’t take a position.”

 

This is not my idea of a president, or a leader, or a man.

 

On May 18, 2019, Joe Biden launched his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the course of his remarks, he said, “Are we a nation that embraces dictators and tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong-un?”

 

Four days later, on the 22nd, North Korea’s official “news agency” issued a broadside against Biden, calling him, among other things, a “fool of low IQ.”

 

On May 25, President Trump issued a tweet:

 

North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Bidan a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?

 

Concerning the firing off of “small weapons”: These missile launches may have been trivial to Donald Trump. But they were not so trivial to the South Koreans and Japanese. The president’s advisers were right to be “disturbed.” (One of those advisers was John Bolton.)

 

Concerning “Swampman Joe Bidan,” etc.: The conservatives I knew, pre-2016, would have been aghast at what Trump did. You may not like Democrats. But to chortle with a murderous, anti-American dictator over a former vice president . . .

 

Throughout his presidency, Trump fawned over such dictators. In October 2020, I wrote a long and detailed piece on this subject. Here are a few highlights (or lowlights):

 

About Kim: “A great leader. Very honorable.”

 

About Putin: “a great guy,” “a good person,” “a terrific person.”

 

About Xi Jinping: “A great leader. He’s a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man. He loves China, I can tell you. He loves China. He wants to do what’s right for China.”

 

In a bitter twist of fate, Trump made these remarks about Xi on the day that Liu Xiaobo died. Liu was a political prisoner in China. He received the Nobel Peace Prize (in absentia, of course). He was a man who really loved China, and wanted to do what was right for China. He paid for it with his life.

 

“How come you don’t support Trump?” people ask me. How could I possibly do so? He is antithetical to many of the things I have always valued in the public arena, and the private one, too.

 

Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden. But he did not concede it. He has not conceded it yet. And he did everything he could to overturn the election.

 

When the secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, refused to falsify the vote, Trump said, “He’s an enemy of the people.” He said this in the White House on Thanksgiving Day.

 

On January 6, a mob of Trump supporters, whipped up by the president himself, attacked the Congress for the purpose of stopping a constitutional process — which they succeeded in doing, for some hours. All the while, the president was watching the mayhem unfold on television.

 

We all have different ideas of leadership.

 

One of the Republican senators, Lindsey Graham, said, “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough.”

 

A few weeks later, Graham was back at Trump’s side, in Palm Beach. In 2024, the Republicans nominated Trump for president for the third time in a row. Never before had the GOP nominated anyone for president three times in a row.

 

***

 

Earlier this year, I was in Alabama, giving some talks about William F. Buckley Jr. After one of them, a man came up to tell me about a formative experience in his life. When he was in college, he saw WFB debate Governor George Wallace. He decided that he was a Buckley conservative, not a Wallace populist.

 

I said to him, “Wallace won, didn’t he?” The man nodded soberly: “Yes.” He has won for now, at least.

 

Trump and his movement combine aspects of both George Wallace and Henry Wallace. I say this because of the considerable sympathy for Vladimir Putin and the sneering hostility to the Ukrainian people and their struggle to keep their country.

 

Last week, I wrote a piece about how today’s Right has come to sound like the Left we knew — especially in foreign policy, but not only so. Representative of this phenomenon is JD Vance, the GOP’s nominee for vice president.

 

Talking to Steve Bannon in December 2023, he said, “There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”

 

That is straight Kremlin propaganda: the claim, the lie, that President Zelensky’s cabinet ministers have stolen U.S. aid to purchase yachts for themselves. The BBC ran a sad, telling, and vexing report: “How pro-Russian ‘yacht’ propaganda influenced U.S. debate over Ukraine aid.”

 

Also, what Vance said about would-be Social Security reformers and the impoverishment of grandparents: That has been a Democratic talking-point for decades. And to hear it from the mouths of people thought of as “conservative Republicans” . . .

 

But back to Putin and Russia. The last essay Charles Krauthammer ever wrote, he wrote in the summer of 2017. “The Authoritarian Temptation,” he called it. (He adapted his title from Jean-François Revel, who in 1976 published his book The Totalitarian Temptation.)

 

Krauthammer was concerned — alarmed, even — by “a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias.” This affinity was “most pronounced on the right,” he said. He found it “jarring,” “head-snapping.”

 

On the campaign trail this year, Donald Trump has let it all hang out. He does not merely criticize illegal immigration, and pledge to curb it. He demonizes immigrants. He makes a collective bogeyman out of them. “They are poisoning the blood of our country,” he keeps saying. “They are poisoning the blood of our country.”

 

Like most conservatives, I am a “restrictionist” on immigration. Anyone who is not for open borders is a restrictionist. But “poisoning the blood of our country”? This is not the way conservatives talk, I think — I mean, American conservatives. Rightists elsewhere are a different story.

 

Reagan spoke of this matter of “blood.” Addressing the United Nations in 1985, he said,

 

America is committed to the world because so much of the world is inside America. After all, only a few miles from this very room is our Statue of Liberty, past which life began anew for millions, where the peoples from nearly every country in this hall joined to build these United States.

 

The blood of each nation courses through the American vein and feeds the spirit that compels us to involve ourselves in the fate of this good earth.

 

An earlier Republican president, Lincoln, spoke of “blood” as well. Actually, he did so in 1858, before he became president. Immigrants are “our equals in all things,” he said. They have no connection to the Founders “by blood,” but they certainly have a connection to the truths enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. They can claim these truths “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that declaration.”

 

Between Lincoln and Reagan, there is an affinity. That third Republican president is entirely different.

 

Trump is a name-caller, inveterately. Elaine Chao, who served as his transportation secretary, is “Coco Chow.” Nikki Haley is “Birdbrain.” And so on. “He’s got the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen,” Trump said. He was talking about Senator Jon Tester. “He’s got the smallest neck I’ve ever seen.” He was talking about Congressman Adam Schiff.

 

We all have our own tastes, when it comes to political style and everything else.

 

Mike Pence is not supporting Donald Trump this year. Pence was his running mate two elections in a row. He was Trump’s vice president. His life was endangered on January 6. Pence did an important thing, obeying the Constitution rather than Trump.

 

Lots of Republicans and conservatives are refusing to support Trump this year. These include two of his former defense secretaries, two of his former national security advisers, and one of his former chiefs of staff. (In addition to his former vice president, of course.)

 

Over and over, Donald Trump has described the rioters or insurrectionists of January 6 as “patriots,” “political prisoners,” and “hostages.” He did not start describing them as “hostages” until after October 7 (2023), when Hamas attacked Israel.

 

Yet there is a view on the right that January 6 was the work, not of Trump-supporting “patriots,” but of Antifa, or Black Lives Matter, or “the Deep State.” On social media, there is a meme showing the storming of the Capitol and saying, “January 6 will go down in history as the day the government staged a riot.”

 

You know who has circulated that meme? Donald Trump.

 

***

 

Since the summer of 2015, there has been a simple and basic question: Is Trump fit to be president, in mind and character? Tens of millions say yes, tens of millions say no.

 

The rule of law is fundamental. Our national norms are important. My bet is this: If Kamala Harris loses the election, she will concede, and she will also attend the inauguration as the outgoing vice president. That is what Americans do. If Donald Trump loses the election — things will be very different.

 

He did not attend the inauguration of his successor, remember. But the outgoing vice president, Pence, did. In my eyes, he acted like an American both on January 6 and on Inauguration Day.

 

I began my piece today by saying, “The world shifts, and politics along with it.” Some of this shifting is justified (though it will happen regardless). We citizens ought to take fresh looks, and alter our views where necessary or desirable. Jimmy Carter liked to quote a high-school teacher of his, Miss Julia Coleman: “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

 

People like me are often accused of “Reagan nostalgia” or “zombie Reaganism.” The principles and values we espouse long pre-dated Reagan and they will outlive all mortals. They are sometimes popular, sometimes unpopular. But they are right and true, in the eyes of those of us who hold them.

 

A few years ago, a friend of mine spoke at an event. Afterward, a woman went up to him to engage him in conversation. My friend related the conversation to me, at length. I will give the nub of it.

 

This lady expressed her antipathy to me. “I used to love him, but he’s changed so much.” “Oh?” said my friend. “He seems to me one of the few who have not changed. He’s the same thinker, writer, and person he always was. Solid as a rock.”

 

“Yes,” said the lady, “but when the rest of us changed, he stayed the same. Therefore, he’s the one who changed.” “Madam,” said my friend, “I cannot argue with that.”

 

It is natural to change, I suppose, and I hope I have changed in fitting ways. We want to be broader, deeper. We may find ourselves “sadder but wiser.” When it comes to the essential things, however, I can report this: What struck me as true when I was young, still does.

 

Early on in my piece, I quoted Margaret Thatcher, and will do so again (making me a “zombie Thatcherite”?): “You turn if you want to.”

 

I like a slogan from a motel chain. Indeed, I love it, not just as a slogan but also as a thought, a concept, a decision, a practice: “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Yes. Leave the light on. Let it shine, all through the night, year after year. That is the best one can do.