Douthat’s Choice
A “Sophie’s Choice,” from the William Styron novel and subsequent film version, is a difficult decision one has to make in which neither outcome is obviously worse than the other. A Douthat’s Choice is the miserable option facing conservative voters this fall. In his Sunday column, Ross Douthat writes about the “heads they win, tails we lose” situation for the Right. Excerpts:
Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump presidency, with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass protests — and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety or extinct.
In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a firewall against whatever post-2020 liberalism might become.
This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure, an agent of its marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the federal bench.
Douthat talks about the specific things that US conservatism desperately needs to offer America, and that Trump conspicuously fails to produce. More:
What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won’t continue at this pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump — and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.
Read it all. You really should, for the details.
If Douthat is right (and I think he is), conservative voters can either:
- Vote for Trump, and keep the Democrats out of the White House for four more years, but watch the GOP and organized conservatism turn into a zombie freakshow of impotent crankery; or
- Vote for Biden (or withhold your vote from Trump), and watch the Democrats fill the federal government with wokesters, but clear Trump out of the way of those up-and-comers in the GOP who have the desire and the skills to build a real alternative to the Democrats in time for 2022 and 2024.
The way I’ve framed the choice indicates my sympathies, obviously. There are no good options for us conservatives this fall, only two very bad ones. Most two-term presidents struggle to have a successful second term. Given how poorly Trump has performed this year, given the extreme crises he has faced, it is hard to conceive that a second Trump term would be anything but a washout.
Did y’all see the clips of Trump’s low-energy speech at West Point over the weekend, the one in which he couldn’t lift a glass of water to his lips with his right hand? The one in which he sort of toddled off the stage, taking baby steps? Four more years of this weakness and confusion, and the Right will be sunk so deep it will take ages to climb out.
A lot can happen between now and November, but at this point, it is hard to see this exhausted and exhausting president making a case for putting up with him for four more years. I am very well aware of how terrible it will be for conservatives if these Democrats, on fire with wokeness, take over the White House. Joe Biden is a kindly old man who personally doesn’t seem to pose a threat, but the thousands of staffers throughout the federal bureaucracy will be on fire to de-Trumpify the government. But conservatives have to think strategically. It’s not like the Right is seeking a second term for a successful president at the peak of his power and faculties. Last week the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apologized for having taken part in that Lafayette Park photo op. You want to risk that the country would face a war with a military that doesn’t have confidence in the Commander in Chief? The wheels are coming off.
Of course the wheels are coming off the country too. A case could be made that the Democrats would be tied down with civil unrest, rising crime, and a bad economy for Biden’s term, and would overreach on wokeness. All the Republicans would have to do is come up with a real populist — and not a return to GOP business as usual — who doesn’t alienate women and independents. Whatever happens, it’s likely that the 2024 election is going to be the real realignment one — that is, the one that sets the terms for the next political era.
UPDATE: Just as an aside, I find it frustrating that so many conservatives have this idea that a Republican president is preventing a cultural revolution. I have written about it before: Trump as katechon, the force holding back the deluge.
It really is true that Trump, or any other Republican in the White House, holds back certain bad things. But honestly, conservatives, there is almost nothing that this or any president could do to hold back the cultural revolution taking over corporations and institutions. I’m not saying to vote, or not to vote, a certain way, but only pointing out that politics has a limited sphere of authority.
Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.