“Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15,” ran the obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch two days later, reflecting a prevalent mood in the country regarding the choices this fall.
We feel her pain. To some, it resembles the Iraq-Iran war, in which most people longed to see both sides defeated. To others, it evokes the day in World War II when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, turning a collaboration between the two worst regimes that had ever existed into a battle of bad against worse.
Given the choice, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt did not waste a beat before throwing their lot in with the Soviet Union, choosing the gray, grim, but not yet too aggressive murder machine against the red-hot and rampaging wildfire that was the more pressing immediate danger.
Hillary Clinton, you may be our Soviet Union, the less-bad dictatorship we reluctantly back as the last-ditch defense against the even more dire alternative; the chronic disease that we hope we can manage, as opposed to the raging infection that might soon see us dead.
“No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have,” Churchill told the House of Commons days later. “I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which now is unfolding … Can you doubt what our policy should be?”
No, we cannot. Hillary, you may not be like being compared to a disease and/or a dictatorship, but at the moment you need all the help you can muster. And for the moment at least, we are it.
And know that that moment, unless strange things happen, is likely to be all that there is. Once Hitler lost, Churchill went back to opposing the Communists, and on March 5, 1946, made the speech in Fulton, Mo., in which he said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” and so doing announced the Cold War.
A year later, President Truman (with the help of Gen. Eisenhower and Congressman Kennedy, who would succeed him in power), was launching the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and NATO, and beginning what would be 40-plus years of intense confrontation. It was not a submission, but a suspension of war in the interests of ending a still greater danger. And then they resumed their former hostilities, as if very little had changed.
If Predicate One for the Hillary gambit is the wartime alliance of the Anglo-Americans with Communist Russia, Predicate Two is the decision of Alexander Hamilton in the presidential election of 1800 to back Thomas Jefferson, his bitter and long-time political enemy, against Aaron Burr.
Jefferson was a foe, but Burr was a genuine threat to all order, a man who in time would try twice to dismember the Union (and, in between efforts, kill Hamilton in a duel, over what he perceived as a slight).
Threats such as these compel extreme measures, ones one does not lightly take. “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons,” Churchill said at the time, adding, “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby.”
Conservatives who fear Trump find their lives simplified in a similar manner, which explains any number of things.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
