The 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has posed the question for Republicans, whose party has nominated Donald J. Trump for president:
Needless to say, it does not feel good. We are on our own. Those of us who voted in previous general elections—with neither hesitation before nor regret after—for Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney have no clear direction home.
But Bob Dylan also points the way to an answer:
The problem of course is that Republicans think they do have something to lose. In particular, Republicans have Congress. And the fear of losing Congress has led to a kind of paralysis among GOP leaders that is ultimately self-defeating. Republicans would be better off in the last weeks of this election behaving as if they’ve got nothing to lose, speaking their minds and telling the truth. Who knows? This might actually be the best way to help them keep their congressional majority.
It is for the sake of holding Congress that the Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, have tried to triangulate between Trump himself, Trump’s supporters, and Trump’s critics. Though in private appalled by Trump, they didn’t want to repudiate him in public. They thought they could zig-zag their way to holding their majority.
We in no way want to minimize the importance of Republican control of Congress. Losing the Senate would be a real loss. Losing the House would be a grievous one. It would do damage not just to the Republican party and to the conservative cause, but to the country as a whole. A Hillary Clinton presidency with a GOP Congress, or at least a GOP House, would be much less dangerous than two years of unchecked Democratic policymaking.
Still, the attempt to maneuver and equivocate has surely run its course. It’s not working. It is true that politics presents us with “tormenting dilemmas,” as an earlier Nobel literature prize winner, Winston Churchill, notes in The Gathering Storm. But he reminds us that there is at such times “one helpful guide. . . . That guide is called honor.” Churchill concluded that in September 1938, “the moment came when Honor pointed the path of Duty, and when also the right judgment of the facts at that time would have reinforced its dictates.”
Republican elected officials and candidates, as well as conservative leaders and thinkers, will have to make up their own minds as to what are now the dictates of Honor or Duty. All we would ask is that they pause for a moment in their calculations and triangulations. All we would ask is that they refrain from oscillating back and forth from panicked reaction to revelations about Trump to panicked reaction to the blowback from Trump supporters. All we would ask is that they pause to seriously consider the question of honor and duty, as well as the right judgment of the facts at this time.
This week, on one of the cable talk shows, a pundit remarked matter-of-factly that of course Paul Ryan’s primary job is to try to maintain Republican control of the House of Representatives. But surely he should be aiming higher. We very much believe the country will be far better off in 2017 with Speaker Paul Ryan than Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, one reason many of us were once looking forward to 2017 was precisely because Paul Ryan—a thoughtful and principled conservative of the next generation—would be speaker of the House for a full term. But his speakership will not, we suspect, be secured by a path of understandable but ultimately ineffectual equivocation in the face of Trump. Such equivocation puts at risk not just his speakership but his own chance to lead in the future. It puts at risk the future of the party of which he is now the highest-ranking elected official. And it does damage to the country of which he is the third-highest-ranking public official.
In The Gathering Storm, Churchill reports on the debate in the House of Commons on September 2, 1939: “When Mr. Greenwood rose to speak on behalf of the Labour Opposition, Mr. Amery from the Conservative benches cried out to him, ‘Speak for England.’ ” We do not compare this moment to September 1939. But we would say to the speaker of the House, and to others in positions of influence and power: Speak for America.
