What if you don’t care that Donald Trump is vulgar and vile? What if you don’t care that Trump is no conservative? What if you don’t care that Trump is untrustworthy? What if you don’t care that Trump is unprepared, uneducated, uncontrollable, and generally unfit for the presidency?
Maybe you think Hillary Clinton is the devil, so this incontinent narcissist is the lesser of two evils. But maybe, for you, it’s simpler than that.
Maybe you support Donald Trump because you think our government, our republic, and our culture are so corrupt that Trump’s vices are virtue.
Maybe you just want someone who will burn it all down.
“My reason for voting Trump is simple,” a Twitter follower wrote to me on Monday: “no candidate is worthy of the office but Trump is at least an anvil to drop on both parties.”
This sort of argument for Trump is common. “2016 is the Flight 93 election,” one anonymous conservative writer declared behind the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus: “charge the cockpit or you die.”
This argument is embedded in the Trump campaign. Steve Bannon, the Trump campaign’s CEO, describes himself as a “Leninist,” according to historian and former Marxist Ronald Radosh. “Lenin,” he told Radosh, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
The Flight 93/Lenin argument moots any conservative objections that Trump would be damaging, because those who espouse it actually desire the damage Trump would inflict.
Back in April, pollster PRRI asked voters if they agreed that “Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
Outside of Trump’s supporters, most Republicans (then backing John Kasich or Ted Cruz) disagreed. These conservative and moderate Republicans were less likely to accept that statement than Democrats were. But two thirds of Trump supporters agreed: rules needed to be broken.
Trump disdains limits on power. He sees it as weakness. Most of his supporters agree.
We don’t have time for niceties such as the Constitution or the rule of law, the argument goes. If a conservative objects that Trump’s designs require the President doing things outside the President’s authority, a Trump supporter might point out that Obama and Clinton have no problem doing that. Conservatives have been playing by rules liberals never apply to themselves, and that’s why the liberals have been winning.
Edmund Burke foresaw all of this, of course.
As politicians turn more and more to pandering, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France that if one politician “should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors. …”
Burke, in the Trumper’s parlance, is thus a “cuckservative.”
If you still want to play by the rules — if you’re not willing to brush aside or even celebrate Trump’s shortcomings — then you obviously don’t really believe things are that bad. This makes you blind, in the eyes of many Trumpers. Worse, you may be a hypocrite.
It’s the most common story in American storytelling today. The maverick, the renegade, who throws out the rule book, is the hero we need.
For my part, I’m not willing to back Trump. I just can’t tell who is the lesser of the two evils the major parties have forced on us this election. Hillary’s deliberate, authoritarian, dishonest, opaque evil is hard to weigh against the evil of a President Trump, who could leave the conservative movement and the country in ruins.
Worrying about Trump ruining the GOP and conservatism gives up the act, they charge. Are we not already standing amid ruins?
I’ve spent 16 years in journalism ringing the bell that things were bad and getting worse. Did I not really believe it?
I think things are bad. I believe the Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have poked holes in the Constitution, unshackling government so it can expand beyond control. I think civil society has been eroded, the family is threatened, and the Church is under attack. I tremble for my country when I reflect that millions of innocents have been slaughtered thanks to a lawless, dishonest Supreme Court more dedicated to the sexual revolution than to the rule of law.
And I think Hillary will make things worse.
Yet I don’t think things are bad enough to burn it all down. This is the hardest argument for a conservative to make because positivity doesn’t come easy for us. And it’s impossible to tell if we’re just talking our book. Maybe we don’t think things are “time for a revolution” bad because Conservatism, Inc., as the “Flight 93” essayist calls it, allows us to live cushy lives inside the Beltway while the provinces burn.
If you’re living in Fayette County, Pa., things seem revolutionary bad. Civil society is nearly dead, jobs are disappearing, and your kids are dying from an overdose. The burn-it-all-down mindset may make sense here.
But from the likes of “Publius,” the conservative-ish intellectuals making this argument, it’s a lot weaker.
Tellingly, the Flight 93 essay’s author is afraid to give his name. His justification is that supporting Trump is gauche — nigh unforgivable in polite circles. “I do have something to lose, and may well yet lose it.”
It turns out we all have something to lose — even those of us not born into wealth, without intimate connections to power or plush writing gigs in New York.
Conservatism is one of those things some conservatives might not want burned down. It seems valuable to have an intellectual tradition that contends government ought to operate within limits, that rapid changes to complex systems are dangerous.
If you’re in the back of the plane, and you’re going to die anyway, then you need to go rogue. But most of the time you’re not in the back of Flight 93.
Today, it seems that some of the Right’s intellectuals have elected to go rogue for less noble reasons. Failing to attain heroic virtue or to find the justification of desperate circumstances, they’ve clung instead to the vice of an anti-hero.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
