Once again an article that traces a few more lines through the landscape. This time we cut across a wider section of time and political spectrum, but still propelled by the same turbulence that follows Trump’s own noisy signals. Let him be categorised, but he refuses to adhere to categories himself.
Some thinkers attempt to tie him in with the autocrats. Some denounce his conservatism. Some lean on his strong-man act.
Before getting started, let’s postulate:
The left-right spectrum is closer to a two-dimensional chart.
On top of the chart we find the theoretically savvy writers. Near the bottom are those voters whose perception of politics have been strung together from patches of information loose enough that we cannot classify the strains as any particular school of thought.
There are just as many clashes between left and right as there are between upper and lower layers. In fact, if we imagined a well-educated liberal and a high brow conservative as well as a clueless Democratic voter and likewise a redneck Republican voter (to speak bluntly and in terms that elicit the maximum amount of mental imagery), there will be 6 possible pairs (4 choose 2), so six very unique flavours if political discussions.
And for each of those 4 vantage points, the relation between two others can be described in ways very unique to that vantage point.
The National Review readership and writers occupy the upper echelons on the conservative side. They are strongly opinionated on values.
(Not) a conservative
In 2016 National Review initially denounced Trump as the polar opposite of a real conservative. No less than 22 participants have submitted their contribution to the issue themed “Against Trump”.
Several of them argues that Trump in 2016 was so freshly turned conservative that it hardly was trustworthy. Picks:
GLENN BECK
three policies provided the fuel that lit the tea-party fire: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, and the bank bailouts.
Barack Obama supported all three. So did Donald Trump.
L. BRENT BOZELL III
[…] he was too distracted publicly raising money for liberals such as the Clintons; championing Planned Parenthood, tax increases, and single-payer health coverage; and demonstrating his allegiance to the Democratic party.
MARK HELPRIN
And forget trying to determine whether he’s a conservative. Given that, at the suggestion of Bill Clinton, he has like a tapeworm invaded the schismatically weakened body of the Republican party, it’s a pointless question, because, like Allah in Islamic theology, he is whatever he pleases to be at the moment, the only principle being the triumph of his will.
His style is more than anything a barrier to acceptance in these altitudes.
WILLIAM KRISTOL
Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity?
MICHAEL MEDVED
Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.
RUSSEL MOORE
Can conservatives really believe that, if elected, Trump would care about protecting the family’s place in society when his own life is — unapologetically — what conservatives used to recognize as decadent?
Trump as a president would violate the foundation of the GOP.
DAVID BOAZ
Trump’s greatest offenses against American tradition and our founding principles are his nativism and his promise of one-man rule.
He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat. It’s a vision to make the last 16 years of executive abuse of power seem modest.
MONA CHAREN
Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government. The two cannot mix.
STEVEN F. HAYWARD
[…] his inclination to understand our problems as being managerial rather than political suggests he might well set back the conservative cause if he is elected
RUSSELL MOORE
Under withering assault in the Obama years, social conservatives have maintained, consistent with the beliefs of the Founders, that religious freedom is a natural right […]
Trump’s willingness to ban Muslims, even temporarily, from entering the country simply because of their religious affiliation would make Jefferson spin in his grave.
KATIE PAVLICH
In short, do our principles still matter? A vote for Trump indicates the answer is “No.”
Different voices entered the publication when they noticed that Trump made good on some of his conservative intentions. But the stark difference between upper and lower right part of the spectrum - with Trump solidly belonging to the unphilosophical hordes - remained over the years.
To his defence came e.g. Victor Davis Hanson in another 2018 National Review article
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede.
Victor elaborated on a lot of the dynamics that explained the voter mood swings over 2016-2024.
On the one hand, Trump’s anemic approval ratings might suggest the media are winning in their 24/7 efforts to portray Trump as a Russian colluder, rank profiteer, distracted golfer, tax cheat, sexual predator, trigger-happy warmonger, or senile septuagenarian.
But will just being not-Trump make Democrats preferable?
… As it turns out in 2020, just barely. Four years later, the voters had learned to regret.
We observe how the National Review writers internally argues two things. One is the fundamental question of conservative values. The pro-Trump camp relies less on unassailable virtues whereas the anti-Trump arguments were most poignant whenever the author felt alarm bells ringing. And Trump can really shake the belfry of any dogmatic church. The schism then becomes:
Can we survive without a moral compass?
We need theology and principle to blind us. Facts are useless collections of statements that serves to prove anything. All the articles quoted here rely on heaps of facts, scoreboards and tallies of achievements and blunders, successes and failures, to prove just about anything. Facts can either serve a narrative or they can serve a methodology.
The problem with facts of course is the liberal way the minute details can be weighted.
But ideology provides an escape hatch: Catastrophe will befall us if we even consider straying from the core ideals.
Not a democrat
Now we move on our imaginative chart towards the left, still at a certain altitude. Educated and skilled in the impossible art of predicting development in sociological entities called democracies, the sentinels ties the US general election into a global democratic backsliding.
Yale professor Beverly Gage in a 2024 piece in Foreign Affairs providers a little philosophising and later hands over the microphone to Jacob Heilbrunn of The National Interest.
BEVERLY GAGE
Still, many people assumed that certain ideas—explicit racism, “America first” nativism—had forever been relegated to the political fringe. That’s part of why Donald Trump caught liberals off guard;
I would avoid the term racism except as device useful in stepping off the thought train. Thought patterns are either something you live inside, in which case they have no name, or you jump off and view them from outside.
Racism is a (bad) character trait. Reasons for wanting to deporting illegal aliens is a political stance. Name calling rarely changes the outcome and can even harden a determination to stay true to the (as yet) unchallenged line of reasoning.
Jacob Heilbrunn, cited by Beverly Cage:
Once Trump arrived, however, Heilbrunn recognized the type. “The longer I’ve listened to conservatives today talk about Hungary, Russia, ‘wokeness,’ ‘the deep state,’ abortion, immigration, and media bias, the more I’ve become convinced that many of their arguments are not novel,”
Heilbrunn could be on to something, or he could be a man with a hammer having just bashed a number of nails.
People have called Biden Hitler and Trump Hitler. I’m not likely to be scared that easily. Show me the smouldering death camps, then we can talk.
And one thing is certain: Heilbrunn have not found those conservatives in either the Senate, the House, National Review or anywhere we find people with equal conservative values. Perhaps it is a prejudice. The conservatives I have read, seem to hold Orban and Putin in as little regard as anybody on the liberal end of the spectrum. Amazing they cannot unite against a common foe.
The Oath
The last perspective on the future this time comes from Stanford’s Larry Diamond writing in his 2024 article in Foreign Affairs, where he reminds us that autocracy is on the rise world wide and that the number of true democracies are strangely reminiscent of melting ice caps.
He dissects the election outcome like this:
Economic concerns especially drove his astonishing inroads with young and minority voters. These kinds of policy concerns were so powerful that, among the majority of all voters who said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, one in ten voted for him anyway. And of the near majority of voters who said they were “very concerned” that a Trump presidency would “bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism,” a tenth of them also voted for him anyway.
As a sociologists, Diamond of course have to have a keen eye on the voters who can be found anywhere on our chart.
May democracy - in the name of free and fair elections - dismantle its own constitution? Are voters allowed to elect a man who may clean out the unelected professionals (basically fire them)?
the United States will see the most intense assault on checks and balances and civil liberties in its peacetime history. This will be a much more carefully strategized, comprehensive, and relentless assault on the country’s democratic norms and institutions than anything in Trump’s first term, save for the January 6, 2021 riot.
The rift between the country that the electorate want and the plans of the establishment seems to be an almost permanent one. In 2024, once again, voters opted out of well-intentioned principles to sail into dark and murky waters. Does the future belong to a man of action or a man of principle? Or will action become its own principle due to a strange self-apotheosis that political sciences have no clue about?
for liberal democracy to survive this challenge, citizens in positions of responsibility, civilian and military, must honor the oath they have sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It is an oath to a principle, not a leader or a party.
Ideology is a course. We can drift aimlessly at sea or set a course early on. Some change their course several times in life.
But others wing it as they go along. We can accuse them of an equal blindness when a new situation arises: They don’t know what to make of it, because they have no school of thought to dissect the strange animal with. However, the same can be said of ideology: It quickly encounters something not included in its philosophy.
And sometimes we can decide to devote our loyal attention to an inner voice that defies ideology, even battles against it at times.
We don’t lack direction or compass. We set sail.
•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•