To Los Angeles and Back
There’s nothing like a couple of cross-country flights to give one time to ponder what bad shape the Republican party, the conservative movement, and the American republic is in. On the other hand, you can decide after pondering all of the above for the first half hour or so of the flight to have a drink and watch the new (well, not-so-new) James Bond movie on the little screen in front of you. Which is what I did.
So I won’t dwell here on the political situation we face. I’ll simply call your attention to Noemie Emery’s excellent cover piece in the new issue, “What Would Hamilton Do?” Speaking of Hamilton, one has to be encouraged by the current surge in appreciation for that great Founder, Alexander Hamilton, as reflected in the Broadway musical (do re-read the two interesting appreciations we have published) and in the fact that Americans are now apparently rediscovering and visiting his burial site in lower Manhattan. With respect to Trump, You can also take a look at my editorial, “The Horror,” and at my short contribution to a Sunday Washington Post symposium on Donald Trump and the GOP. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, you can also take a look at my attempt to make the case against Trump on the roundtable of ABC’s This Week.
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So you can see why I was happy to have a break in Southern California last week from all things Trump. I was there primarily for a seminar hosted by the Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College, in which a small group of us discussed an essay by Leo Strauss (“How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws“). I was by a long shot the least knowledgeable person at the seminar, but it was good to listen to some intelligent and penetrating thinkers and try to think about bigger issues than Donald Trump. I also had the great pleasure of moderating a session for students at Claremont’s Atheneum with the entrepreneur and thinker, Peter Thiel, which was very stimulating. All of this, I’d like to think, gave me some perspective on our current challenges, and gave me some confidence that we’ll survive and overcome them.
While out in the Los Angeles area, I also did the Bill Maher show, in an attempt to introduce The Weekly Standard to viewers who perhaps don’t watch This Week with George Stephanopoulos or Special Report on Fox. It wasn’t perhaps my most articulate performance ever–but it was worth doing for the look on Bill’s face when I began the panel by launching into an over-the-top defense of Dick Cheney, whom Bill had derided in passing in his monologue. And I was slightly cheered up by the flight attendant Saturday who’d seen it and commented that “you held your own” (which I’ll acknowledge is fairly faint praise, but you take what you can).
As you watch the returns from the primaries tomorrow night, do have at hand John McCormack’s post, a very good summary of where the race stands. And we’ll have posts up late Tuesday evening, and probably a podcast as well, analyzing the results. We’ll know much more then about where we stand, and where things might be going in this wild and woolly year.
One last reading recommendation: our friend Jonah Goldberg, who is surely the master of the newsletter genre, has a particularly fine one this week, which you can read here. Jonah addresses the Trump defenders and enablers among our conservative friends with I think an appropriate mix of understanding for where they’re coming from and rebuke for where they’ve chosen to go. It’s a must-read.
Meanwhile, I don’t have anything fresh to say that I didn’t write in my editorial in the new issue. So I’ll close by taking the liberty of reproducing the last few paragraphs:
It need not be. Republicans still have it in their power to save the country from this choice. As of this writing, more than half the GOP delegates have yet to be selected; even after the Ides of March, about 45 percent of the delegates will remain to be chosen. There is time to defeat Trump.
If time runs out, and Trump prevails in the Republican contest, many of us will rally behind an independent Republican candidate to save the honor of the party, and to offer a decent alternative to the American people. Edmund Burke, the founder both of party government and of modern conservatism, wrote, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
If offered a truly bad choice by our two parties, many of us will choose not to go gently into the night as unpitied sacrifices in a contemptible struggle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But it would be better not to have it come to this. Republicans still have a chance to associate in a good cause. They still have a chance to do their party and their country the signal service of denying Donald Trump the nomination of a party which, for all its flaws and deficiencies, has never failed so horrifyingly nor permitted itself to stoop so low.
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Onward!
Bill Kristol
