Conservatism’s Sad and Ugly Transformation into Trumpism

Source: National Review | August 3, 2016 | Ben Shapiro

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These conservatives are now under heavy pressure to pull the lever for Trump. There are two main arguments advanced by Trump voters: first, that Trump will be better than Hillary Clinton; second, that anyone who refuses to vote for Trump bears moral responsibility for Hillary Clinton’s subsequent presidency.

Both of these arguments fall short.

The first argument seems deceptively simple: There are two candidates, and Trump will not be as awful a president as Hillary.

There is some truth to this. We know Hillary will be a terrible, hard-core ideological leftist; there is probably a 75 percent chance that Trump would govern less badly than Hillary. There is also a 25 percent chance that Trump would do something so catastrophically awful that he seriously harmed the country in ways Hillary wouldn’t dream of. His trade policy alone could cast America back into recession; his foreign policy is a shambles. Any talk of him listening to advisers must be based on conjecture — so far, Trump hasn’t just been a bull in a china shop, he’s been a tank in a glass factory.

Any attempts to rein in Trump have failed miserably. His supposed commitment to appoint a Supreme Court justice in the mold of Justice Scalia means little or nothing — he knows nothing about the Constitution, what he does know isn’t so, and he’s not going to stake political capital on a losing fight against a Democratic filibuster. He’d probably make his first pick somebody palatable to conservatives, get shot down by Democrats, and then come back with a stealth candidate who turns out to be a David Souter or an Anthony Kennedy or a Sandra Day O’Connor. Trump is a man who says openly he wouldn’t mind much losing the Republican Senate majority — a rather disquieting sentiment for those who believe he’s going to be strong on justices.

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That brings us to the real reason to oppose Trump’s candidacy: the attempt to turn the conservative movement into a nationalist populist one, complete with shilling for Trump’s incomprehensible decisions and statements. If you believe that the only solution to America’s problems is true conservatism, your greatest fear is not a Hillary presidency: It’s the perversion of the conservative movement itself, the corruption of conservatism in favor of power. Hillary Clinton’s presidency does not snuff out conservatism, even though it provides a serious danger to the republic. Trump’s presidency does.

Why? Because conservatives are already tailoring their morality, decency, and political sense to fit Trumpism. We’ve already seen supposed conservative “thought leaders” go silent when Trump does something unthinkable; ….

That’s to be expected. But I’ve watched conservatives I respect justifying Trump’s latest moral and political atrocities with alacrity. They downplay his enormous heresies and his moral failings — because, after all, Hillary Clinton delenda est.

In short, too many conservatives seem perfectly willing not only to pull the lever for Trump — understandable — but to lie for him, to justify his foolishness and ignorance and instability and overall insanity. That’s why the second justification for voting Trump — that if you don’t vote Trump, you’ll be responsible for Hillary’s presidency — destroys the first rationale: It suggests that anything that harms Trump, including honesty, must be morally deficient.

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Conservatives do not owe their vote to anyone. But more important, my vote simply isn’t that important. The argument that if you don’t vote Trump, you’re electing Hillary is logically flawed: If I don’t vote for Hillary, am I electing Trump? It also ignores the fact that each individual vote counts in America for nearly nothing. If you’re a conservative living in California, as I am, it actually does count for nothing.

And yet those of us who won’t vote for Trump keep hearing that constant refrain: your vote means everything. Today, once again, Trump trotted out that tortured logic to attack Senator Ted Cruz, who committed the grave sin of not explicitly endorsing Trump while doing everything short of giving such an endorsement at the Republican National Convention.

What Trump supporters really mean when they say that failure to vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary is that anything we do that doesn’t help Trump harms him. In other words, we are only morally decent if we turn into full-scale Trump defenders. It’s no longer sufficient to call things as we see them — we must become Trumpkins. If we point out that Trump’s attack on the Kahn family is both stupid and morally debased, that puts us in league with Hillary. If we state that Trump ought to spend less time cozying up to Vladimir Putin and more time standing up to him, that means that we’re Clinton-philes.

This is the danger. And it’s becoming reality right now.

The moral framework of conservatism is based on honesty and decency. Trump is neither honest nor decent. Barack Obama has taken America toward a cliff at 100 mph; Hillary will press the accelerator further, so that we’ll be moving at 120 mph; Trump would presumably press the accelerator only slightly, so that we’d be cruising toward that cliff at 110 mph. The difference: Trump will force his conservative passengers to rip out the reverse gear in order to justify him. Conservatism will become Trumpism. Conservatives will prioritize winning over truth.

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But Trump asks something more — your political soul. Political flaws existed in McCain and Romney, to be sure, but Trump is one giant flaw. It is easier to name Trump’s non-leftist positions than his leftist ones, because he’s more leftist than not; it’s easier to name his personal qualities than to describe his moral shortcomings, since the former are few and the latter nearly infinite. And Trump supporters expect everyone to get on the train.

Human beings have a rough time with cognitive dissonance — the possibility of voting for Trump while also speaking honestly about him is too much of a burden for many conservatives. But conservatives had better get comfortable with such dissonance or dump Trump. If they embrace him, his stink will be on them and the conservative movement for generations to come.

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