On May 22nd, National Review Online posted an article by scholar Victor Davis Hanson, called “The Trump Rationale,” attempting to explain Donald Trump’s lasting appeal to his base. The article’s subheader is: “His voters knew what they were getting, and most support him still.”
The piece does indeed explain the psychology of the Trump supporter, though perhaps not in the way Hanson intended. To properly review it, I decided it needs a good old-fashioned fisking.
(A note: ‘fisking‘ refers to an incident where the left-wing journalist Robert Fisk had one of his columns demolished by a right-winger, point by point. The term should not be confused with ‘fisting,’ although the intention and result are often similar.)
“1) Was Trump disqualified by his occasional but demonstrable character flaws and often rank vulgarity? To believe that plaint, voters would have needed a standard by which both past media of coverage of the White House and the prior behavior of presidents offered some useful benchmarks. Unfortunately, the sorts of disturbing things we know about Trump we often did not know in the past about other presidents. By any fair measure, the sexual gymnastics in the White House and West Wing of JFK and Bill Clinton, both successful presidents, were likely well beyond President Trump’s randy habits. “ (et cetera…)
This sort of thing is why the average person is more and more cynical, because both houses of the duopoly are doing their utmost to promote the ideal that might makes right and “objective morality” is just a consolation prize for losers. Recall that in the days of Monicagate, the people on Hanson’s side – I was one of them – were railing about how tolerating Bill Clinton’s immorality was going to degrade the political culture. Now that the “conservatives” benefit from that degraded standard, they act like it was handed down from Saint Augustine. Meanwhile, Democrats offered the same defenses “conservatives” offer now, they benefited from Clinton’s popularity, and in more recent years they got a lot of their precious campaign money from the likes of Harvey Weinstein (and we’re alternately supposed to believe that either ‘everybody knew’ or ‘nobody knew’ about his violations). And now that enabling misogyny has bitten them in the ass last election, liberals have developed an acute case of scruples.
In any case, this particular subject is something I’ve already addressed on a semi-regular basis. We do not need to go over how many areas of complaint that Republicans have with Democrats, the Clintons in particular, to compare to what Trump and his cronies are actually doing. Comparison of rhetoric to fact just demonstrates that for all the erudition of Victor Davis Hanson – and I used to be a fan – he is providing a rationalization, not a rationale. During the campaign and certainly now, support for Trump was less a matter of rationality and more an appeal to tribal emotionalism. I wish these guys had just been honest enough to say: “Don’t vote for the liberal bitch who lies to you, ignores security procedures and exploits financial corruption. Vote for the conservative white guy who does all of that in spades!”
“2) Personal morality and public governance are related, but we are not always quite sure how. Jimmy Carter was both a more moral person and a worse president than Bill Clinton. Jerry Ford was a more ethical leader than Donald Trump — and had a far worse first 16 months. FDR was a superb wartime leader — and carried on an affair in the White House, tried to pack and hijack the Supreme Court, sent U.S. citizens into internment camps, and abused his presidential powers in ways that might get a president impeached today. In the 1944 election, the Republican nominee Tom Dewey was the more ethical — and stuffy — man. In matters of spiritual leadership and moral role models, we wish that profane, philandering (including an affair with his step-niece), and unsteady General George S. Patton had just conducted himself in private and public as did the upright General Omar Bradley. But then we would have wished even more that Bradley had just half the strategic and tactical skill of Patton. If he had, thousands of lives might have been spared in the advance to the Rhine. Trump is currently not carrying on an affair with his limousine driver, as Ike probably was with Kay Summersby while commanding all Allied forces in Europe following D-Day. Rarely are both qualities, brilliance and personal morality, found in a leader — even among our greatest, such as the alcoholic Grant or the foul-mouthed and occasionally crude Truman. “
All of which is setting up a false choice between personal morality and brilliance (or even competence). It is false not because this conflict cannot be observed in history, but because Trump is neither moral nor brilliant. Unless grifting counts as brilliance, in which case he’s fuckin’ Leonardo da Vinci.
“3) Trump did not run in a vacuum. A presidential vote is not a one-person race for sainthood but, like it or not, often a choice between a bad and worse option. Hillary Clinton would have likely ensured a 16-year progressive regnum. “
Everything is always “but Clinton would be worse.” No doubt this will continue to be the excuse no matter what depth Trump reaches: Clinton will always be worse, even when it is demonstrable that Trump is worse, if simply due to the fact that he’s the actual president now.
“As far as counterfactual “what ifs” go, by 2024, at the end of Clinton’s second term, a conservative might not have recognized the federal judiciary, given the nature of lifetime appointees. The lives of millions of Americans would have been radically changed in an Obama-Clinton economy that probably would not have seen GDP or unemployment levels that Americans are now enjoying. “
I’ll just leave this here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/27/606078181/economy-probably-started-2018-off-slow-short-of-trumps-growth-target
“What John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Peter Strzok, Sally Yates, and others did in 2016 would never have been known — given that their likely obstruction, lying, and lawbreaking were predicated on being unspoken recommendations for praise and advancement in a sure-thing Clinton administration. Christopher Steele might have either been unknown — or lionized. “
But YOU would have been making it known, Victor. You and the other guys in the “conservative” grievance media, in the same way that you are making hay from these people now, and no one except the grievance media and their audience particularly cares. Because while certain elements – like Bill Clinton demanding an audience at the airport with Loretta Lynch over Hillary’s email investigation – deserved bipartisan attention, even the valid points of investigation don’t get it because the whole complaint is smothered in bad faith.
“4) Something had gone haywire with the Republican party at the national level. “
Finally, a point of agreement.
“The proverbial Republican elite had become convinced that globalization, open borders, and free but unfair trade were either unstoppable or the fated future or simply irrelevant. Someone or something — even if painfully and crudely delivered — was bound to arise to remind the conservative Washington–New York punditocracy, the party elite, and Republican opinion makers that a third of the country had all but tuned them out. It was no longer sustainable to expect the conservative base to vote for more versions of sober establishmentarians like McCain and Romney just because they were Republicans, well-connected, well-résuméd, well-known, well-behaved, and played by the gloves-on Marquess of Queensberry political rules. Instead, such men and much of orthodox Republican ideology were suspect.
“Amnestied illegal aliens would not in our lifetimes become conservative family-values voters. Vast trade deficits with China and ongoing chronic commercial cheating would not inevitably lead to the prosperity that would guarantee Chinese democracy. Asymmetrical trade deals were not sacrosanct under the canons of free trade. Unfettered globalization, outsourcing, and offshoring were not both inevitable and always positive. The losers of globalization did not bring their misery on themselves. The Iran deal was not better than nothing. North Korea would not inevitably remain nuclear. Middle East peace did not hinge of constant outreach to and subsidy of the corrupt and autocratic Palestinian Authority and Hamas cliques. “
The first part, that the Republican elite was irrelevant to the average voter, let alone the average Republican, is true. The second part is more rationalizing. Assuming that Trump’s policies are a constructive approach to illegal immigration, China’s unfair trade practices, North Korea or the Middle East is to deny the fact that Trump has no care about any of these things and knows that much less.
The hardcore critique of the Republican establishment, whether one is a populist or “economic conservative” is that Republican leadership doesn’t care about the average voter. But that’s because Republicans have always tried to split the difference between appealing to the people who fund their campaigns and the people who actually vote for them, even though these two priorities are often at odds. The punch line to the joke is that this is exactly what they’re doing now, because Trump is the only person who appeals to both camps, and as long as he’s throwing red meat to the culture warriors, they won’t care that the rich sponsors are soaking the poor.
“5) Lots of deep-state rust needed scraping. Yet it is hard to believe that either a Republican or Democratic traditionalist would have seen unemployment go below 4 percent, or the GDP rate exceed 3 percent, or would have ensured the current level of deregulation and energy production. A President Mitt Romney might not have rammed through a tax-reform policy like that of the 2017 reform bill. I cannot think of a single Republican 2016 candidate who either could or would have in succession withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, demanded China recalibrate its asymmetrical and often unfair mercantile trade policies, sought to secure the border, renounced the Iran deal, moved to denuclearize North Korea, and hectored front-line NATO allies that their budgets do not reflect their promises or the dangers on their borders. “
Something approaching substance here. The hardcore Republicans are indeed getting a lot of what they want from this president, and I think we can agree that President Romney would not have “rammed through” what he wanted, because as a career politician he was raised on procedure and not might-makes-right. So were Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, but they at least as much as Trump set the stage for an environment where Republicans “ram through” everything they want with absolutely no regard for the other people on the floor. Not that Democrats deserve any special courtesy, but it’s rather telling that the less popular mandate Republican policies have, the more fanatic they are at enforcing them, not despite popular will, but actively against it. And even though one arm of that political machine is voter suppression, the more the ruling faction acts in defiance of outside reality, the more likely they are to come to error, which will only serve to compound their unpopularity. Creating such a radical “rammed through” regime was always a bad idea. It usually is when the midterm election after a new president’s election leads to a severe loss in seats to the ruling party, even when it isn’t deliberately TRYING to piss off the nonpartisan voter. Ask the Democrats. The last time they had both houses of Congress, they used it to pass Obamacare, and they lost their Senate majority just in time for the Census. Another hint: It’s easier to roll back tax cuts than expansions to the medical bureaucracy.
“6) Something or someone was needed to remind the country that there is no longer a Democratic party as we once knew it. It is now a progressive and identity-politics religious movement. “
I just find it odd that a conservative in National Review is using the term “religious movement” as a pejorative. Unless Hanson, like many of us, has reached the conclusion that most religious movements are not introspective attempts to find values in the transcendent, but shabby pretexts for justifying political prejudices on the grounds that some things cannot be explained by reason. If he believes this, I say: welcome to the club.
“Trump took on his left-wing critics as few had before, did not back down, and did not offer apologies. He traded blow for blow with them. “
And I’ve mentioned that one point of value in Trump is that his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude is instructive for anyone who wants to counter the crybully tactics of the Left. But that still begs the question of what you are going to replace the old liberal order with, and Hanson leaves himself empty-handed when he says, in so many words, “look, Eisenhower diddled his staff chauffeur, and things turned out great.”
The point is not that personal immorality is an automatic disqualifier for a statesman. But is it an automatic qualifier? Are we approving on the basis of vices instead of virtues? Of course even Hanson isn’t so dense as to explicitly assert this, even if that is what he is asserting implicitly. What you do is judge an individual on balance. That is why history judges Martin Luther King Jr. as positive on the whole (despite his adultery), why the historical judgment on Bill Clinton is far more ambiguous, and why the judgment on Donald Trump is already decidedly in the negative.
Of course, that could change. Trump could get a peace deal with North Korea, although maybe not. Even if he did, that might not put him on the side of the angels. After all, in 1929, Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty, creating Vatican City in Rome and thus solving the diplomatic impasse between the secular Italian state and the “captive” Papacy. This is an achievement that stands to this day. Why then did Mussolini end his life executed, dragged through the street and hung up to be spat on and jeered at by his former subjects? Well, I guess after you kill political opponents, gas Ethiopians, turn the military into a joke and turn the government into a collaborator with the Holocaust, people judge you on balance.
“In the end, only the people will vote on Trumpism. His supporters knew full well after July 2016 that his possible victory would come with a price — one they deemed more than worth paying given the past and present alternatives. “
Quite. Even if Democrats get Congress back this year (and again, these guys could find a way to strike out in a whorehouse), you need two-thirds of the Senate to impeach. Republicans couldn’t do it to Clinton when the country was far less polarized. But then, Clinton was far more popular. And the reason why Democrats might get the House back is that America has paid the price for Trump, and now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore (I fucking hope), Trump has lost his one surefire rallying point. That’s why he keeps relitigating an election that he WON, so that his dupes will have something to rile them up rather than think about how the country is scarcely better off than it was under Obama.
“To calibrate the national mood, they simply ask Trump voters whether they regret their 2016 votes (few do) “
https://www.facebook.com/IRegretVotingForTrump/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/us-small-farmers-regret-voting-trump-180330092417106.html
http://prospect.org/article/how-ambivalent-trump-voters-feel-about-him-now
“and whether any Never Trump voters might reconsider (some are), “
Again, that depends on whether Republicans can rally enough people around being the NotDemocrat party when that’s really all they have to offer. Based on the latest round of special elections and primaries, I’m not so sure.
“and then they’re usually reassured that what is happening is what they thought would happen: a 3 percent GDP economy, low unemployment, record energy production, pushbacks on illegal immigration, no Iran deal, no to North Korean missiles pointed at the U.S., renewed friendship with Israel and the Gulf states, a deterrent foreign policy, stellar judicial appointments — along with Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, and lots more, no doubt, to come. “
Drip, drip, drip, Trumpniks.