Conservatives are again facing a presidential election encumbered by an unsatisfactory candidate and an alternative that is unacceptable.
President Trump’s character flaws are numerous, a point on which there is virtually universal acceptance. And yet, at least among many conservatives, there is some belief that those faults are not reflected in policy. That is to say, the president may project a defective personality, but it doesn’t detract from the good things his administration has done. Unfortunately, that isn’t right.
The phenomenal economic success this country enjoyed during the first three years of Trump’s term, success which put us in a far better position going into the COVID-19 pandemic than we would have been in otherwise and set us up for a remarkable rebound, is overshadowed in great part by the president’s failure to illuminate those successes adequately and his preoccupation with himself.
It’s a similar story with his foreign policy successes, which were slower to come and perhaps not quite as comprehensive as his economic ones but nevertheless substantial. Getting NATO members to pay closer to their fair share, walking away from the United Nations when necessary, decisively smashing ISIS, and brokering peace between Arab states and Israel are no small feats. Yet the president himself does a better job than even his adversaries of burying those stories.
Character does have an impact. Trump’s buffoonery has hurt the conservative cause, and the damage may persist for some time. Conservatism is perhaps best defined as the politics of reality, backed up by a strong intellectual and cultural tradition that draws from some deep wells: Aristotle, Burke, Oakeshott, Kirk, and so forth. Trump has never been particularly inclined to draw from those wells, and his philosophical rootlessness erodes the credibility of the ideas and concepts of his “side,” regardless of the good policies he puts in place. He (usually) does something of the right thing, but all the noise he generates is a disservice to the policy and the idea behind it.
The rootlessness explains his frequent courting of policies that are popularly attractive but nonetheless damaging, like his cleaving to protectionism and his flirtation with price controls on prescription drugs, for instance. There is, therefore, a conservative case to be made against Trump. That said, there is no conservative case that can be made for Joe Biden.
Biden is running on an appeal to “normalcy,” and the electorate craves that. The seed his campaign is planting is that he will restore the presidency to its former grandeur and usher in an aura of consistency and continuity. He won’t.
To begin with, Biden himself is not a picture of consistency. Over the course of more than 40 years of professional political life, he has adopted positions all over the map. The most consistent thing about him, politically, is his steady drift leftward. As the Democratic Party’s titular leader, he has proven unable to contain an eccentric and far-left insurgency and selected a running mate who has no desire whatsoever to do so. This is not a recipe for a return to normalcy.
On domestic policy, it is difficult to imagine a prescription for a battered economy worse than the one the Biden campaign has proposed. His tax, environmental, healthcare, and regulatory policies, as analyzed by a rigorously well-researched Hoover Institute study released last week, would be every bit as bad as expected, particularly over the long term.
The outlook for foreign policy under Biden is no brighter. Neither Biden nor Harris have spoken much about it, and the Commission on Presidential Debates has not done well to elevate the issue, but the hints we have are a foreshadowing of a return to the rudderless foreign policy of the Obama administration that enabled the accelerated ascension of Russia and China and largely subordinated U.S. interests to the U.N. — the same U.N. that just awarded seats on the Human Rights Council to Russia, Cuba, and China.
Then, of course, there is the threat of structural damage. Court-packing and the end of the filibuster are being held over the country like the sword of Damocles.
So conservatives face a Sophie’s Choice. Trump is damaging to the conservative cause in a number of ways, not all of which are merely aesthetic. Biden-Harris, on the other hand, is damaging to the nation. The depressing moral calculus weighs in favor of Trump.
Conservatives who, as the line in “America The Beautiful” says “more than self their country love,” ought to support Trump’s reelection, count their silver, and, however it turns out, commence work immediately on rehabilitating the brand.
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant and columnist.
