2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances. To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
The Flight 93 Election
By: Publius Decius Mus
September 5, 2016
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may
die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit
and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the
metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a
semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your
chances.
To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic.
The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except
perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist
that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are
still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America
is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so
bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary,
and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a
restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
Not to pick
(too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most
conservatives. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or
Hillary? Though his answer—“even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at
random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is unwarrantedly
ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and
inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration,
trade, and war—right from the beginning.
But let us back up. One
of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last
decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility
that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad.
On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills
plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive,
intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism.
Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure.
Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A
disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t
know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t)
discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students
with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like
that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private
intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want
and I’ll stipulate it.
Conservatives spend at least several
hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences,
fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and
everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of
the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want
their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the
like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly
fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?
If
conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality,
religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if
they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family
values”; if they are right about the importance of education to
inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined
knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal
norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of
initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a
healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of
paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society
and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a
strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if
they are right about the importance of all this to national health and
even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed
off a cliff.
But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t
believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an
immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent
article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed,
almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti
inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does
Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative”
“solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization,
federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say,
conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the
utopian and unrealizable.
Decentralization and federalism are all well
and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without
reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully
improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against
a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic
renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will
save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How
are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to
enact itself is not a strategy.
Continetti trips over a more
promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest
abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy
retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and
setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion."
That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes
are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like
Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump.
At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified
the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically,
they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s
reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an
implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I
expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative
intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this
instance.
Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the
Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that
Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different!
The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of
that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock
in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear
recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.
Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that
there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural,
economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present
reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must
undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or
less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some
conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.
Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with
no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that
conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature,
wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions.
Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second,
of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with
conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is
ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as
conservatism.
If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s,
and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been
doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform,
another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit
proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century,
then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy
doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under
leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and
superior to it.
They will say, in words reminiscent of dorm-room
Marxism—but our proposals have not been tried! Here our ideas sit,
waiting to be implemented! To which I reply: eh, not really. Many
conservative solutions—above all welfare reform and crime control—have
been tried, and proved effective, but have nonetheless failed to stem
the tide. Crime, for instance, is down from its mid-’70s and early ’90s
peak—but way, way up from the historic American norm that ended when
liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s. And it’s rising
fast today, in the teeth of ineffectual conservative complaints. And
what has this temporary crime (or welfare, for that matter) decline done
to stem the greater tide? The tsunami of leftism that still engulfs our
every—literal and figurative—shore has receded not a bit but indeed has
grown. All your (our) victories are short-lived.
More to the
point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The
answer—which appears to be “nothing”—might seem to lend credence to the
plea that “our ideas haven’t been tried.” Except that the same
conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to
the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been tried,” who is
ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks
of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own
self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising
“entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort
businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us.
Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising
circuit?
Only three questions matter. First, how bad are things
really? Second, what do we do right now? Third, what should we do for
the long term?
Conservatism, Inc.’s, “answer” to the first may,
at this point, simply be dismissed. If the conservatives wish to have a
serious debate, I for one am game—more than game; eager. The problem of
“subjective certainty” can only be overcome by going into the agora. But
my attempt to do so—the blog that Kesler mentions—was met largely with
incredulity. How can they say that?! How can anyone apparently of our
caste (conservative intellectuals) not merely support Trump (however
lukewarmly) but offer reasons for doing do?
One of the Journal of
American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt
republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling
that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider
the possibility that the republic is dying. That possibility,
apparently, seems to them so preposterous that no refutation is
necessary.
As does, presumably, the argument that the stakes in
2016 are—everything. I should here note that I am a good deal gloomier
than my (former) JAG colleagues, and that while we frequently used the
royal “we” when discussing things on which we all agreed, I here speak
only for myself.
How have the last two decades worked out for
you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos
class, chances are: pretty well. If you’re among the subspecies
conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted—perhaps not
consciously, but unmistakably—your status on the roster of the
Washington Generals of American politics. Your job is to show up and
lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To
the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as
sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower
wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless,
pointless, winless war.
All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors
would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary
Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely
reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their
“opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often
indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like
32 “genders,” elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy,
“Islamophobia,” and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.
A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire
Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our
darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a
level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto
seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced”
Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and
England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the
Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave
of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction
campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the
Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to
torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and
the collective shrug by everyone else.
It’s absurd to assume that
any of this would stop or slow—would do anything other than massively
intensify—in a Hillary administration. It’s even more ridiculous to
expect that hitherto useless conservative opposition would suddenly
become effective. For two generations at least, the Left has been
calling everyone to their right Nazis. This trend has accelerated
exponentially in the last few years, helped along by some on the Right
who really do seem to merit—and even relish—the label. There is nothing
the modern conservative fears more than being called “racist,” so
alt-right pocket Nazis are manna from heaven for the Left. But also
wholly unnecessary: sauce for the goose. The Left was calling us Nazis
long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes. And how
does one deal with a Nazi—that is, with an enemy one is convinced
intends your destruction? You don’t compromise with him or leave him
alone. You crush him.
So what do we have to lose by fighting
back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks. But those are
going away anyway. Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t
understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need
no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would
rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in
which each side ostensibly has a shot.
If you haven’t noticed,
our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms,
but we do nothing with them. Call ours Hannibalic victories. After the
Carthaginian’s famous slaughter of a Roman army at Cannae, he failed to
march on an undefended Rome, prompting his cavalry commander to
complain: “you know how to win a victory, but not how to use one.” And,
aside from 2004’s lackluster 50.7%, we can’t win the big ones at all.\
Because the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us. I will mention
but three ways. First, the opinion-making elements—the universities and
the media above all—are wholly corrupt and wholly opposed to everything
we want, and increasingly even to our existence. (What else are the wars
on “cis-genderism”—formerly known as “nature”—and on the supposed
“white privilege” of broke hillbillies really about?) If it hadn’t been
abundantly clear for the last 50 years, the campaign of 2015-2016 must
surely have made it evident to even the meanest capacities that the
intelligentsia—including all the organs through which it broadcasts its
propaganda—is overwhelmingly partisan and biased. Against this
onslaught, “conservative” media is a nullity, barely a whisper. It
cannot be heard above the blaring of what has been aptly called “The
Megaphone.”
Second, our Washington Generals self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Lenin is supposed to have said that “the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” But
with an opposition like ours, why bother? Our “leaders” and “dissenters”
bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets
for them. Fearful, beaten dogs have more thymos.
Third and most
important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no
tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the
electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less
republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does,
of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two
other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the
Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much
overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will
forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and
constitutional niceties. Because they are.
It’s also why they
treat open borders as the “absolute value,” the one “principle”
that—when their “principles” collide—they prioritize above all the
others. If that fact is insufficiently clear, consider this. Trump is
the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from
conservative orthodoxy in so many ways that National Review still hasn’t
stopped counting. But let’s stick to just the core issues animating his
campaign. On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left
(conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his
Democratic opponent. And yet the Left and the junta are at one with the
house-broken conservatives in their determination—desperation—not merely
to defeat Trump but to destroy him. What gives?
Oh,
right—there’s that other issue. The sacredness of mass immigration is
the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.
Their reasons vary somewhat. The Left and the Democrats seek ringers to
form a permanent electoral majority. They, or many of them, also believe
the academic-intellectual lie that America’s inherently racist and evil
nature can be expiated only through ever greater “diversity.” The junta
of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to
legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by
pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige.
The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of course desperately want
absolution from the charge of “racism.” For the latter, this at least
makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court—much less
cash his check—with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic
Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct
expense of their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the
right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our
newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the
ballot box? It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it
ever will. But that doesn’t stop the Republican refrain: more, more,
more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip
forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the
answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another
rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!
This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a
people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates
for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has
stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my
country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.
Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect. So what? We can lament until we
choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of
our time—or, more importantly, to connect them. Since Pat Buchanan’s
three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who saw one piece: Dick
Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on immigration. Yet,
among recent political figures—great statesmen, dangerous demagogues,
and mewling gnats alike—only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw
all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them.
The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all
of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass
them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of
their foolishness and hubris.
Which they self-laud as
“consistency”—adherence to “conservative principle,” defined by the 1980
campaign and the household gods of reigning conservative think-tanks. A
higher consistency in the service of the national interest apparently
eludes them. When America possessed a vast, empty continent and
explosively growing industry, high immigration was arguably good policy.
(Arguably: Ben Franklin would disagree.) It hasn’t made sense since
World War I. Free trade was unquestionably a great boon to the American
worker in the decades after World War II. We long ago passed the point
of diminishing returns. The Gulf War of 1991 was a strategic victory for
American interests. No conflict since then has been. Conservatives
either can’t see this—or, worse, those who can nonetheless treat the
only political leader to mount a serious challenge to the status quo
(more immigration, more trade, more war) as a unique evil.
Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows
them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to
ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more
obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant
references to his faults. That the Left would make the campaign all
about the latter is to be expected. Why would the Right? Some—a few—are
no doubt sincere in their belief that the man is simply unfit for high
office. David Frum, who has always been an immigration skeptic and is a
convert to the less-war position, is sincere when he says that, even
though he agrees with much of Trump’s agenda, he cannot stomach Trump.
But for most of the other
#NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?
Another question JAG raised without provoking any serious attempt at
refutation was whether, in corrupt times, it took a … let’s say ...
“loudmouth” to rise above the din of The Megaphone. We, or I,
speculated: “yes.” Suppose there had arisen some statesman of high
character—dignified, articulate, experienced, knowledgeable—the exact
opposite of everything the conservatives claim to hate about Trump.
Could this hypothetical paragon have won on Trump’s same issues? Would
the conservatives have supported him? I would have—even had he been a
Democrat.
Back on planet earth, that flight of fancy at least
addresses what to do now. The answer to the subsidiary question—will it
work?—is much less clear. By “it” I mean Trumpism, broadly defined as
secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.
We Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country
through stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of
unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never
be restored.
But we can probably do better than we are doing now.
First, stop digging. No more importing poverty, crime, and alien
cultures. We have made institutions, by leftist design, not merely
abysmal at assimilation but abhorrent of the concept. We should try to
fix that, but given the Left’s iron grip on every school and cultural
center, that’s like trying to bring democracy to Russia. A worthy goal,
perhaps, but temper your hopes—and don’t invest time and resources
unrealistically.
By contrast, simply building a wall and
enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting off the flood
of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by incentivizing
the English language and American norms in the workplace. These policies
will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and
(we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and
middle classes of all races and ethnicities. The same can be said for
Trumpian trade policies and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if
productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks
a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20
years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be
better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie
than to add one extra slice—only to ensure that it and eight of the
other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to
the same four industries and 200 families.
Will this work? Ask a
pessimist, get
a pessimistic answer. So don’t ask. Ask instead: is it
worth trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can’t say,
forthrightly, “yes,” you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a
conservative intellectual.
And if it doesn’t work, what then?
We’ve established that most “conservative” anti-Trumpites are in the
Orwellian sense objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If
you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have
you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be:
Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie
liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts
forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and,
I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a
second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited
government, and a 28% top marginal rate.
But for those of you who
are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the
prior four following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.
The election
of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any
virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they
cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a
generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against
the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more
Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate
that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.
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