Cleveland
Spending the week at the Republican convention in Cleveland was at once pleasant and depressing. Let me explain.
First of all, Clevelanders are nice. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. But I’ve always thought (to the extent I’ve thought about it) of Clevelanders as pretty tough rough-and-tumble guys, maybe a bit surly (though needless to say good-hearted underneath!). I’ve associated the ethos of Cleveland with that of other tough cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh. The “nice” Midwesterners I thought resided in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Well, either I was wrong and Clevelanders are nice. Or Clevelanders got a memo telling them to be hospitable for convention week and obeyed it. Or Clevelanders were so moved by the Cavaliers’ great season and comeback victory in the NBA finals that their character was transformed. In any case, they were uniformly–well, almost uniformly–nice. Whenever we had occasion to talk with locals, they went out of their way to welcome me and my colleagues to Cleveland. They offered helpful directions, restaurant recommendations and general encouragement. They were cheerful and upbeat. They told me the staff wifi password at Bloom Bakery (which I highly recommend) when the general customer wifi conked out. And when Mike Warren and I stopped by the Cleveland Public Library, near the convention site, in order to take a brief break from politics and to take a look at a Shakespeare First Folio (a recommendation of a passer-by who thought I’d appreciate the exhibit), the library staff were most accommodating. Indeed they were happy to show us not just the Shakespeare but an exhibit on modern conservatism they had put together featuring, among other things, the contributions of The Weekly Standard. That was an unexpected highlight of a pleasant week.
The Republicans attending the convention were nice too. Even Trump supporters — most of them — were friendly. Different convention-goers variously introduced themselves as fans of the print magazine (by the way, be sure to subscribe or renew your subscription), of the website (by the way, we had a ton of good reporting and analysis from Cleveland–you might want to scroll back and take a look at some of it if you missed it), of my “Conversations,” and of the work of various of my colleagues. GOP interns were eager to talk and to take selfies.
But in a way, perhaps, Republicans are too nice. They desperately want to believe the best, or not believe the worst, about Donald Trump. I won’t litigate the case here, except to call attention to two posts from over the weekend you might have missed: Steve Hayes on Trump’s craziness, and mine on Trump’s Putin connections.
But if you believe that the nomination of Trump is a grave misfortune at best, and a disaster for the GOP and for conservatism at worst, the niceness of the Cleveland experience produced an odd psychological state. On the one hand, one was having, minute to minute and hour to hour, a pleasant time. On the other hand, one was witnessing the Trump Captivity of the GOP. As I wrote from Cleveland for the blog late Monday night:
So Cleveland was both pleasant and depressing. And I’m afraid as the memories of the pleasantness fade, the depressing fact remains: The Republican party, once the party of freedom at home and abroad, of Constitutionalism and limited government and the rule of law, of traditional virtues like personal responsibility and patriotic sacrifice and individual self-restraint, has nominated as its candidate someone who believes in and exemplifies none of these. Looking at the Public Library exhibit on the history of modern conservatism–and reflecting on that on the whole admirable history–one had to acknowledge that history has very little to do with Trump’s Republican party.
I don’t think that’s a good thing.
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Trump could win
By the way, it’s good not to let one’s distaste for Trump (or Clinton, for that matter) distort one’s analysis of the race. And as an analyst, I think Trump has a better chance to win than most D.C. pundits do. Clinton is a horrible candidate, and has no message beyond FEAR TRUMP. That may be enough. But in a year where the voters want change, they’ll bend over backwards to convince themselves the candidate of change (Trump) is acceptable. All Trump has to do is make his version of change not TOO risky. And I suspect the liberal media and the Clinton campaign will make that somewhat easier for him by focusing their attacks on the wrong aspects of Trump and Trumpism (see Jonathan Last’s thought-provoking post here).
In any case, we’ll see where the candidates stand after each gets (or doesn’t get) a bump from his or her convention. But here’s an anecdote:
A few of us grabbed lunch at a burger and beer joint downtown on the first day of the convention. The burgers and beer were fine–though not as good as at the Winking Lizard sports bar Steve Hayes, John McCormack and I frequented later in the week. (By the way, shouldn’t that excellent Cleveland-area chain go national?) In any case, we were chatting with our waitress, a young (apparently single) mom who was looking forward to taking her two little kids to Disney World, where she’d never been, at the end of this busy work week. We drifted into a discussion of politics, and after some hesitation she acknowledged she intended to vote for Trump. Why, we asked? Because, she said, she had a low opinion of Hillary, thought Trump would be a strong leader and bring about change, and because of Trump’s stance on law and order (one of her cousins is a policeman). I asked her whether she’d voted before. Yes, she said, she’d voted for Obama, hoping he’d bring about change, and feeling the Romney Republicans were out of touch with people like her.
Wow, I thought. How many other Obama-Trump voters are out there? They’re not the types who’ll volunteer their views to pollsters. Could there be more of them than there are Romney-Clinton switchover voters? It strikes me as quite possible.
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Peter Thiel
One of the genuinely interesting moments of the GOP convention was the Thursday night brief speech by Peter Thiel. Peter’s an impressive man and an original thinker. If you want more of a sense of his thought-provoking take on America and the world, you might be interested in the two Conversations we’ve done, which you can listen to here and here.
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Worth Reading
The good news is that, even as we face the Trump Captivity of the GOP for at least the next three months, and the challenge of what to do after, conservatives continue to produce very fine intellectual work. For example. the redoubtable Mary Eberstadt, whose contributions to TWS include, most memorably for me, a wonderful appreciation of my father, has a new book out, which we’ve praised both online and in the print magazine.
Eberstadt’s previous works include the very interesting How the West Really Lost God and Adam and Eve After the Pill. Both are very much worth reading. But her new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe, is more urgent, a cry of alarm about political assaults on religious believers. As Jonathan Last puts it:
Eberstadt counsels religious believers to understand that what has happened in the West isn’t really that the idea of faith has been eclipsed. Instead, she writes, “We need to understand that there’s a new faith in Western civilization: a quasi-religious faith in the developing secularist catechism about the sexual revolution….”
It’s Dangerous to Believe is a tour de force, essential reading for anyone wondering how our civilization can survive the current moment.
So, while the Democrats spend the week attacking Trump, you can read Eberstadt’s bracing but very lively and readable new book to remind yourself of how wrong-headed and dangerous their political agenda is.
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Onward!
Bill Kristol
