Right, there's something about extremism that feeds extremism...

// Lennart

Sent from my phone.


> On Jul 26, 2016, at 21:30, Centroids <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Harsh but fair. If Trump wins, I bet we will get someone equally horrific on 
> the Left in the next cycle. 
> 
> 
> 
> "Whatever happens in November, conservatives and Republicans will have 
> brought a catastrophe upon themselves, in violation of their own stated 
> principles and best judgment. It’s often said that a good con is based upon 
> the victim’s weaknesses. Why were conservatives and Republicans so 
> vulnerable? Are these vulnerabilities not specific to one side of the 
> political spectrum—are they more broadly present in American culture? Could 
> it happen to liberals and Democrats next time? Where were the guardrails?"
> 
> 
> 
> The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy
> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-seven-broken-guardrails-of-democracy/484829/
> (via Instapaper)
> 
> A long time ago, more than 20 years in fact, the Wall Street Journal 
> published a powerful, eloquent editorial, simply headlined: “No Guardrails.”
> 
> In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there 
> are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, 
> who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who 
> have no notion of self-control.
> 
> Twenty years later, that same newspaper is edging toward open advocacy in 
> favor of Donald Trump, the least self-controlled major-party candidate for 
> high office in the history of the republic. And as he forged his path to the 
> nomination, he snapped through seven different guardrails, revealing how 
> brittle the norms that safeguard the American republic had grown.
> 
> Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s 
> all over: Trump did not deceive anyone. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin in 2008, 
> Trump appeared before the electorate in his own clothes, speaking his own 
> words. When he issued a promise, he instantly contradicted it. If you chose 
> to accept the promise anyway, you did so with abundant notice of its 
> worthlessness. For all the times Trump said believe me and trust me in his 
> salesman patter, he communicated constantly and in every medium that there 
> was only thing you could believe and trust: If you voted for Donald Trump, 
> you’d get Donald Trump, in all his Trumpery and Trumpiness.
> 
> The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated 
> him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals who 
> argued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to 
> him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied 
> all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and 
> coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with 
> dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with 
> criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his 
> disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They 
> knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he 
> speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. 
> None of that dissuaded or deterred them.
> 
> And the “them” is growing. When I wrote about the Trump candidacy last fall, 
> that candidacy was still backed only by one-third of Republicans, most 
> typically the party’s least-affluent, least-educated, and least-churched 
> supporters. Back then, I offered four guesses about the party’s response to 
> Trump: beat him, steal his issues, ignore him, or change the rules to 
> circumvent him. I under-estimated him—or possibly over-estimated them. Trump 
> steadily added to his support, moving up-market and up in the polls. In the 
> Oregon Republican primary of May 17, the first after his last rivals conceded 
> defeat, Trump won 66.6 percent of all votes cast. Polls in late May show 85 
> percent of Republicans now supporting Trump.
> 
> Those of us who live and socialize among conservatives every day discover 
> that another friend has—with greater or lesser reluctance—accepted the 
> leadership of the bombastic businessman and reality-television star. To those 
> of us who still cannot imagine Trump as either a nominee or a president, this 
> movement toward him among our friends, relatives, and colleagues is in 
> varying degrees baffling and sinister. Yet it is happening: an inescapable 
> and accelerating fact.
> 
> Whatever happens in November, conservatives and Republicans will have brought 
> a catastrophe upon themselves, in violation of their own stated principles 
> and best judgment. It’s often said that a good con is based upon the victim’s 
> weaknesses. Why were conservatives and Republicans so vulnerable? Are these 
> vulnerabilities not specific to one side of the political spectrum—are they 
> more broadly present in American culture? Could it happen to liberals and 
> Democrats next time? Where were the guardrails?
> 
> Let’s survey the breakage, from earliest to latest, and from least to most 
> alarming.
> 
> The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a 
> candidate for president of the United States should speak and act. Here’s 
> Adlai Stevenson accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1952:
> 
> That I have not sought this nomination, that I could not seek it in good 
> conscience, that I would not seek it in honest self-appraisal, is not to say 
> that I value it the less.
> 
> There was a certain quantum of malarkey here—but it wasn’t all malarkey. From 
> the founding of the republic, Americans have looked to qualities of personal 
> restraint as one of the first checks on the power of office. "The aim of 
> every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, 
> men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common 
> good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual 
> precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their 
> public trust.” So argued James Madison in Federalist 57. In Federalist 68, 
> Alexander Hamilton promised more specifically: “Talents for low intrigue, and 
> the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the 
> first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a 
> different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the 
> whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to 
> make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of 
> the United States.”
> 
> Through two-and-a-quarter centuries, conservative-minded Americans have 
> worried that one change or another would obliterate the old ideals: the rise 
> of parties in the 1800s, universal white-male suffrage in the 1830s, votes 
> for women, television, etc. We can argue about the character of the various 
> presidents elected along the way. Yet when Barack Obama sought the office in 
> 2007, he sounded the familiar refrain: “I know you didn't come here just for 
> me, you came here because you believe in what this country can be.”
> 
> To put it mildly, that’s not the tone of the Donald Trump campaign. President 
> Nixon said in his 1969 eulogy of former President Eisenhower, “He exemplified 
> what millions of parents hoped that their sons would be: strong and 
> courageous and honest and compassionate. And with his own great qualities of 
> heart, he personified the best in America.” Donald Trump, by contrast, former 
> Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lamented, exemplifies what 
> millions of parents would fear in their sons: “the bullying, the greed, the 
> showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”
> 
> During the election of 1800, Hamilton warned his friend Harrison Gray Otis 
> that Aaron Burr “loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own 
> aggrandizement” and could not, consequently, be trusted to honor any 
> agreement with his political opponents. Trump’s political allies have said 
> the same and worse of him, while yet grudgingly pledging to support him in 
> the end. Something’s obviously changed in the American definition of 
> acceptable behavior in those who seek power. That guardrail is down.
> 
> The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of 
> trustworthiness in politicians.
> 
> The dark arts of politics include dissimulation, evasion, and misdirection. 
> Days before the election of 1940, Franklin Roosevelt famously promised the 
> mothers and fathers of America, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any 
> foreign war.” He’d left himself a wide loophole, however, for as he explained 
> to his speechwriter Robert Sherwood, “If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a 
> foreign war, is it?”
> 
> Outright lying, however, happens more rarely than you think in politics, 
> especially in high and visible offices like the presidency. Political 
> scientists estimate that presidents keep about three-quarters of their 
> campaign promises. When presidents break their word, the reason is far more 
> likely to be congressional opposition than the president’s own flip-flopping. 
> If politicians really did lie all the time, voters would not be so outraged 
> on those occasions where a politician is indubitably caught in untruth—and 
> yet voters are outraged. Even where the politician did not intentionally lie, 
> as George W. Bush did not intentionally lie about weapons of mass destruction 
> in Iraq, important statements exposed as damagingly untrue inflict untold 
> political damage.
> 
> Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything 
> before seen from a major-party nominee. The stack of lies teeters so tall 
> that one obscures another: lies about New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11, 
> lies about his opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan war, lies about his 
> wealth, lies about the size of his crowds, lies about women he’s dated, lies 
> about his donations to charity, lies about self-funding his campaign. 
> “Whatever lie he’s telling, in that minute he believes it,” Senator Ted Cruz 
> said of Trump in May 2016. "But the man is utterly amoral. Morality does not 
> exist for him.”
> 
> As late as March, 2016, more than half of Republicans and Republican leaders 
> described Trump as “dishonest” in a Washington Post survey. They voted for 
> him in the primaries all the same, and by rising pluralities even as the lies 
> accumulated.
> 
> Trump’s lies weren’t overlooked—and they weren’t believed. They were condoned 
> by Republicans who had come to believe, “everybody does it.” MSNBC host Joe 
> Scarborough spoke for many:
> 
> Conservatives that have been betrayed by the Washington establishment for 30 
> years, by Republican candidates that run for office saying they're going to 
> balance the budget and lie. Republican candidates that run and say they're 
> going to overturn Obamacare and lie. Republican candidates who say vote for 
> me and I'm going to have a humble foreign policy and lie.
> 
> But Scarborough’s list of betrayals weren’t “lies.” They were failures, 
> failures made inevitable by the impossibility of the Republican base’s own 
> demands. (How do you balance the budget while cutting taxes, without touching 
> either defense or Medicare?) As one unfriendly critic noted, the Republican 
> rank-and-file weren’t exactly innocent victims of elite deception.
> 
> Republican voters … wanted everything, and, after all, GOP leaders promised 
> them that it was possible—even though those same leaders knew it was not.
> 
> Place the blame for that failure where you will, however, the results were 
> glaring: radical Republican rejection of the trustworthiness of their 
> leaders—all their leaders. What, then, was one liar more—especially if that 
> liar were more exciting than the others, more willing to say at least some of 
> the things that Republicans wanted said? Cynicism leads to acceptance of the 
> previously unacceptable. Another guardrail down.
> 
> A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should 
> possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs.
> 
> Donald Trump is surely the most policy-ignorant major party nominee of modern 
> times, or perhaps of any time. As with the lies, it’s almost impossible to 
> keep track of the revelations of gaps in his knowledge. The most spectacular 
> may have been talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt’s exposure of the fact that Trump 
> lacked the most basic understanding of the structure and mission of the U.S. 
> nuclear arsenal.
> 
> It’s a fair generalization that Republicans demand less policy expertise from 
> their national leaders than Democrats have usually expected from theirs. 
> Ronald Reagan was less well-informed than Jimmy Carter; George W. Bush had 
> mastered less detail than Al Gore. Yet both Reagan and Bush had at least 
> proven themselves successful governors of important states. Both men offered 
> clear and plausible presidential platforms, which both men implemented in 
> their first year in office more or less as advertised.
> 
> What’s different now is the massive Republican and conservative rejection of 
> the idea that a candidate for president should know anything substantive 
> about governing at all. As of November, 2015, 62 percent of Republicans 
> insisted that “ordinary Americans” would do a better job solving the 
> country’s problems than professional politicians. While 80 percent of 
> Democrats wanted experience in government in the next president, according to 
> post-Super Tuesday 2016 exit polls, only 40 percent of Republicans did so. 
> The larger share, 50 percent, preferred an “outsider.”
> 
> Over the past three cycles, Republicans have elevated a succession of 
> manifestly unqualified people to high places in their national politics. 
> Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann shot to stardom in the Tea Party era. For a 
> brief period in late 2015, Ben Carson led the Republican polls—Carson being 
> the only candidate who made even Donald Trump look knowledgeable by 
> comparison. Government is a complex science and a sophisticated art. Its 
> details matter, its trade-offs reverberate into four and five dimensions. 
> Although Republican voters in the aggregate are better informed than 
> Democratic voters in the aggregate, their votes are guided by two more urgent 
> and immediate feelings: bleak pessimism (79 percent of Republicans say they 
> are on the “losing side” of most political debates, versus 52 percent of 
> Democrats) and unyielding refusal to compromise with opponents (while 63 
> percent of Democrats favor a president who’ll compromise with the other 
> party, only 35 percent of Republicans do so). Despairing yet obdurate, 
> Republicans have come to value willpower over intellect, combativeness over 
> expertise. Donald Trump’s nomination culminates that evolution. A third 
> guardrail down.
> 
> One guardrail that Trump’s opponents all assumed would hold fast was the 
> fourth: the guardrail of ideology. Hardline conservatives would surely reject 
> a candidate who barely understood what a principle was! Anti-compromise 
> Republicans would certainly recoil from a candidate who advertised himself as 
> a deal-maker! Wrong and wrong.
> 
> Trump bungled tests of orthodoxy on abortion, taxes, Obamacare, and national 
> security. He survived unscathed. Attacks on Trump as a false conservative 
> signally failed, whether launched by fellow-candidates or outside super PACs. 
> As Ross Douthat of The New York Times nicely phrased it, “A party whose 
> leading factions often seemed incapable of budging from 1980s-era dogma 
> suddenly caved completely to a candidate who regards much of the conservative 
> vision with indifference bordering on contempt.”
> 
> The ideology guardrail snapped because so much of the ideology itself had 
> long since ceased to be relevant to the lives of so many Republican primary 
> voters. Instead of a political program, conservatism had become an individual 
> identity. What this meant, for politicians, was that the measure of your 
> “conservatism” stopped being the measures you passed in office—and became 
> much more a matter of style, affect, and manner. John McCain might have a 
> perfect pro-life voting record. Mitch McConnell may have proven himself 
> President Obama’s most effective opponent. Jeb Bush may have cut state taxes 
> every year. But compared to Sarah Palin’s folksy attacks on big city elites … 
> or Ron Paul’s dark allegations of conspiracy at the Federal Reserve … or Ted 
> Cruz’s government filibusters and shutdowns–none of those real-world 
> achievements weighed much in the balance.
> 
> The party’s once mighty social conservatives collapsed like sodden newsprint 
> before a candidate who treated them with flagrant disrespect. The ardently 
> pro-life Pat Buchanan belittled Trump’s mangling of the movement’s core 
> principles: “New to elective politics, Trump is less familiar with the 
> ideological and issues terrain than those who live there.” Trump urged 
> evangelical leaders to “trust him” on traditional marriage. Days later, he 
> told a reporter that he’d “move forward” on gay rights. He then resolved the 
> contradiction by refusing to answer more questions about the issue.
> 
> John Boehner and Eric Cantor had been chased out of Congress for much smaller 
> deviations from orthodoxy. How did Trump get away with so much more? Trump 
> may not be much of a conservative by conviction. But he functions as a 
> conservative in silhouette, defined by the animosity of all the groups that 
> revile him. “SJWs will elect Trump,” warned the anti-Trump writer Rod Dreher 
> in The American Conservative after protesters shut down a Trump rally in 
> Chicago in March. “I am not a Trump supporter, and I reject much of his 
> rhetoric. But he has a right to give a speech, even an obnoxious speech, 
> without it being interrupted by demonstrators. … What those protesters have 
> done tonight is create a lot more Trump voters out of people who are sick and 
> tired of privileged leftists using thug tactics to silence their opponents.”
> 
> “We love him most for the enemies he made,” said supporters of the 
> anti-Tammany Democrat Grover Cleveland. The sentiment applies pretty 
> generally in politics. As conservatism’s positive program has fallen ever 
> more badly out of date, as it has delivered ever fewer benefits to its 
> supporters and constituents, those supporters have increasingly defined their 
> conservatism not by their beliefs, but by their adversaries. And those 
> adversaries Donald Trump has made abundantly his own.
> 
> Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: 
> the primacy of national security concerns. Trump has no relevant experience, 
> no military record, scant interest in the topic—and a long history of casual 
> expressions of sympathy for authoritarian rulers. He famously explained that 
> he gets his military advice from TV talk shows. The most recent Republican 
> secretary of defense, Bob Gates, told Yahoo’s Katie Couric that he would not, 
> at present, feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button.
> 
> Trump has slighted NATO as “obsolete.” “If it breaks up NATO,” he has said of 
> his plans to withdraw American protection from allies who don’t spend more, 
> “it breaks up NATO.”  He’s also proposed withdrawing U.S. protection from 
> Japan and South Korea, and spoken favorably of those two countries providing 
> for their own security by obtaining nuclear weapons, apparently unaware of 
> the tensions between those two U.S. allies. Trump also mused open-mindedly 
> about Saudi Arabia acquiring nuclear weapons.
> 
> There’s something more going on here than an Iraq War hangover. Trump’s 
> foreign policy is predicated upon an apocalyptic vision of the United States 
> as a weak and fading country, no longer able to shoulder the costs and 
> burdens of world leadership. That view aligns with the deeply pessimistic 
> mood of today’s Republican voters. Sixty-six percent of them say that life 
> has gotten worse for people like them as compared to 50 years ago. (Trump 
> voters are the most pessimistic: 75 percent of them say things are worse for 
> people like themselves.) Half of Trump Republicans describe economic 
> conditions in the United States as poor; almost 40 percent of them assess 
> that American involvement usually makes global problems worse.
> 
> Trump’s foreign-policy statements are so careless and so seemingly poorly 
> considered that it’s tempting to dismiss them. If he did become president, 
> wouldn’t he be surrounded by steadier hands, who would draw him back toward 
> the historic norms of American policy? Perhaps. But also very likely … not. 
> Trump’s ramshackle statements do present a coherent point of view. His 
> instinct is always to abandon friends and allies, to smash up alliances that 
> have kept the peace, to leave the world to fend for itself against aggressors 
> and predators.
> 
> Trump’s one significant foreign-policy address was delivered to an audience 
> that included the Russian ambassador but no representatives of any U.S. 
> allies. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, worked for seven years for 
> the kleptocratic ruler of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Trump’s online presence 
> is strongly reinforced by pro-Putin trolls and bots.
> 
> Republicans still care that their candidate be “strong.” They thrill to 
> Trump’s rhetoric of massive violence against ISIS. What they seem no longer 
> to care about is the larger architecture of security built since 1941 to keep 
> America and its friends safe, prosperous, and free.
> 
> Despairing and demoralized, they lack the “energy and conviction”—in the 
> phrase of the French Cold War writer Jean-Francois Revel—to sustain American 
> leadership or to defend American interests in the larger world. The guardrail 
> of conservative commitment to U.S. global leadership has smashed, ripping 
> open a danger to the world, and a sinister opportunity to global 
> mischief-makers.
> 
> A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all 
> faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against 
> destructive politics. In the words of the 1980 Republican platform: “The 
> truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be 
> victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, 
> physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic 
> circumstance.”
> 
> Disrespect for targeted groups—including the very biggest of them all, 
> women—has been the recurring theme of the Trump candidacy. Even many 
> Republicans who have accepted Trump are left uneasy by the candidate’s tone 
> and associations. Trump himself is trying to retrace some ground, tweeting an 
> image of himself eating a taco bowl and explaining to Fox’s Greta van Sustern 
> that he’d wish to “back off” a ban on Muslim entry into the United States “as 
> soon as possible.”
> 
> Trump has appealed to white identity more explicitly than any national 
> political figure since George Wallace. But whereas Wallace was marginalized 
> first within the Democratic Party, and then within national politics, Trump 
> has increasingly been accommodated. Yes, Trump was often fiercely denounced 
> by rivals and insiders in the earlier part of the campaign. But since 
> effectively securing the nomination by winning the Indiana primary on May 3, 
> that criticism has quieted—when it has not ceased altogether. One-time Trump 
> opponents like former Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer now dismiss 
> criticism of Trump’s slurs and insults as “a Northeastern look down your nose 
> at other people who are different …. That [criticism] is disdain for the 
> voters.”
> 
> America in 2016 is vastly more racially diverse society than the America of 
> Goldwater’s and Wallace’s time. At that time, an overwhelming white majority 
> was presented with demands for equality by a long subordinated African 
> American minority. At least as a matter of formal law, the white majority of 
> the 1960s and 1970s acceded to that demand. Everett Dirksen, the Republican 
> leader in the U.S. Senate, spoke for that majority when he led the fight to 
> end the filibuster of what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “The 
> time has come for equal of opportunity in … government, in education, and in 
> employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.”
> 
> The country’s different now, and the change has brought unexpected political 
> consequences.
> 
> Whites exposed to the racial demographic shift information preferred 
> interactions/settings with their own ethnic group over minority ethnic 
> groups; expressed more negative attitudes toward Latinos, Blacks, and Asian 
> Americans; and expressed more automatic pro-White/anti-minority bias. … These 
> results suggest that rather than ushering in a more tolerant future, the 
> increasing diversity of the nation may instead yield intergroup hostility.
> 
> That’s the summary of a set of experiments by psychologists at Northwestern 
> University. Their work is supported by abundant evidence across the social 
> sciences, including perhaps most famously a 2007 paper by Robert Putnam 
> showing that increases in ethnic diversity lead to collapses in civic health. 
> Trust among neighbors declines, as does voting, charitable giving, and 
> volunteering.
> 
> As community cohesion weakens, moral norms change. What would have been 
> unacceptable behavior in a more homogenous national community becomes 
> tolerable when a formerly ascendant group sees itself at risk from aggressive 
> new claims by new competitors. Trump is running not to be president of all 
> Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white 
> Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as 
> evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their 
> tribe.
> 
> And so breaks another guardrail.
> 
> Which brings us to the last and perhaps very most ominous of the broken 
> guardrails.
> 
> The generation that bore arms in World War II returned home with a 
> strong—arguably unprecedentedly strong—loyalty to the nation as a whole. 
> Never before or after did so many civilians move across state lines as in the 
> decade of the 1940s. Then followed the great migrations from city to suburbs, 
> of black farmworkers to northern cities, and of northern officeworkers to the 
> booming Sunbelt.
> 
> Once fierce religious rivalries blurred into the broad categories— 
> Protestant, Catholic, Jew–which in turn discovered new affinities for each 
> other in a common creed of “Americanism.”
> 
> In a way unknown before, and unfamiliar since, the veterans of World War II 
> routinely voted one way for presidents and governors, and the opposite way 
> for members of Congress or state legislatures. Democrats won majorities of 
> both houses of Congress in nearly every election from 1954 through 1992, with 
> Republicans only holding the Senate for a brief stretch from 1981 to 1987. 
> Yet voters delivered pendulum-swing-style landslide presidential victories, 
> sometimes to Democrats (1964), sometimes to Republicans (1972, 1984).
> 
> In 1972, more than 37 million Americans cast a vote for a Democratic member 
> of the House of Representatives: something over 52 percent of all House votes 
> cast. Only about 29 million Americans voted for Democrat George McGovern for 
> president that year. Ticket splitting in 1984 was only a little less 
> dramatic: House Democrats won a combined 4.25 million more votes than House 
> Republicans, even as Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by some 17 million 
> votes.
> 
> Partisan identities have hardened since then. “Today, far larger proportions 
> of Democratic and Republican voters hold strongly negative views of the 
> opposing party than in the past,” observe Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster 
> in their paper, “All Politics is National: The Rise of Negative 
> Partisanship.” Negative partisanship is the argument deployed to reconcile 
> anti-Trump Republicans to their party’s nominee.
> 
> Thus, defeated Senator Marco Rubio told the Today program on May 11 that, 
> without retracting a word of criticism of Donald Trump, “I'm even more scared 
> about her [Clinton] being in control of the U.S. government.”
> 
> Negative partisanship has softened the Wall Street Journal too. The day after 
> Trump released a list of selections for the Supreme Court, the Journal’s 
> editors reassured readers: “Nothing is certain with Mr. Trump, but that’s far 
> preferable to the certainty that Hillary Clinton would nominate a 
> down-the-line liberal.”
> 
> Even more arrestingly, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg—one of the most 
> forceful of the conservative “Never Trump” voices—explained on May 21 that 
> while he would continue to speak against Trump as a danger to the 
> conservative movement:
> 
> If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d 
> probably vote for none other than Donald Trump because (endorsing a view 
> presented to him by a National Review supporter) we know Hillary will be 
> terrible, while we can only suspect Trump will be. Trump will probably do 
> some things conservatives will like—Supreme Court appointments, etc.—while we 
> know for a fact Hillary will not.
> 
> Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the 
> very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your 
> party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil. And with that, the last 
> of the guardrails is smashed.
> 
> Many conservatives and Republicans recognize Trump as a disaster for their 
> institutions and their ideals. Yet they have found it impossible to protect 
> things they hold dear—in large part because they have continued to fix all 
> blame outward and elsewhere. “President Obama created Donald Trump,” charged 
> Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in a March 3, 2016, op-ed.
> 
> To the extent that Donald Trump has policies, I’m probably more sympathetic 
> to them than Jindal is. Much of the traditional conservative ideology was 
> obsolete. Migration should be reduced. Americans reasonably depend on 
> Medicare and Social Security. It’s time to move past culture wars on private 
> sexual behavior. Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus 
> of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that 
> something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. 
> The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the 
> causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react 
> to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives 
> for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most 
> self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong? That will 
> be the excruciating mystery to ponder during the long and difficult work of 
> reconstruction ahead.
> 
> This article originally stated that Democrats won both houses of the U.S. 
> Congress in every election from 1954 to 1992. We regret the error.
> 
> Related Video
> 
> In this Atlantic interview, senior editor David Frum explains that Trump’s 
> success can be traced to his unorthodox views on immigration, social 
> security, and healthcare.
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> -- 
> -- 
> Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community 
> <[email protected]>
> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
> Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
> 
> --- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
> "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an 
> email to [email protected].
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
-- 
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community 
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to