Non-Contradictory Angst

 

There are people I respect who believe that Trump is dangerously unfit to be president, that he probably would like to become our Duce, and that too many Republicans have wrongly abandoned their former beliefs in limited government, free trade, and America’s essential role in the world, making them unfit to govern. There are people I respect who believe that for all Trump’s personal failings, ignorance, and incompetence, he and the Republicans have done some needed and sometimes necessary things that have benefited the country.

There are people I respect who believe that too many Democrats’ embrace leftist dogmas, and favor radical identity politics and a general dangerously expansive statism, making them unfit to govern. There are people I respect who believe the Democrats are doing the necessary work of upholding norms, defending settled, law abiding illegal immigrants from mass deportations, and opposing Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.

These opinions are conflicting by not contradictory. All them can be true, and the saddening fact is that they are. Neither party is fit to govern or deserves the political allegiance of the citizens. People should accept political homelessness, favoring one party or the other on particular issues but not fully throwing in with either, and certainly not expecting too much from either. One would not want to encourage either bunch.

Picking the Wrong Side

 

 Kids my age who started grade school in the mid-1950s had ideas about World War II. Most of our fathers had served in it, and all of our parents had lived through it. At varying levels of knowledge we understood that it had been a war of good against bad, and that we were the good guys and the Germans and Japanese were the bad guys. And of course we were right. Maturity, increased knowledge, and appreciation of the complexity, nuances, and ambiguity of geopolitics did nothing to challenge the accuracy of that kid’s judgment.

Not all wars are like that. Sometimes it is the Hapsburgs and Bourbons fighting over not principles but only who gets what power where. Sometimes there is an ethical distinction, but only between very bad and worse. But sometimes wars are a conflict between a right side and a wrong one, and in those cases people need to see it and take the side of those in the right.

A few decades ago it mainly was the Democrats in this country who had difficulty doing that. Many of them failed to see Soviet communism for what it was and the Cold War for what it was – fundamentally a conflict between freedom and tyranny, right and wrong. Too many of them preached a false notion of a moral equivalence between the sides, and some, such as Edward Kennedy, at least intermittently sided with the Russians. These days it mainly is Republicans who have that difficulty, and by coincidence with regard to a conflict involving Russia.

Under Vladimir Putin Russia became more authoritarian toward its own people and more aggressive toward other nations. Putin made it fairly clear that he would like to regain many or all of the lost territories of the old Soviet empire. His agents and police murdered his political opponents both in Russia and other countries and ran a low level cyber war against the United States and some of its allies. Then, earlier this year, his armed forces attacked Ukraine with a goal of overthrowing its government and seizing its territory – failing in their objectives while committing atrocities, massacres, and war crimes. The Ukrainians defended themselves strongly and effectively, and at present are winning or at least in stalemates on the ground. The Ukrainians had threatened no one and invaded no one. Ukraine’s independence was guaranteed by an international agreement signed by governments including Russia’s. In internal politics and foreign policy Ukrainians had been moving or trying to move toward the more liberal practices of countries to their west. One does not have to romanticize Ukraine as exemplar of liberalism and democracy to see who is right and who is wrong in this war.

Yet many Republicans and their supporters in the conservative media fail to see it, or worse are picking the wrong side. Some such as Tucker Carlson have sided with the Russians explicitly. Others have done so by implication. They are actively hostile to the Ukrainians and have little or nothing bad to say about Putin and the Russians. (Cathy Young has written a good article at The Bulwark covering some of the stupid, petty, and vulgar reactions to Zelensky’s visit to the United States and his speech at the Capitol.)

One should wonder why they do it. A simple answer would be that they like Putin and what they think he stands for. Trumpists, Catholic integralists, and national conservatives may see the supposed tough, traditional, Christian, nationalistic state Putin advertises as better than what they consider to be the weak, decadent, godless, liberal globalism of this country and most of Europe. Whatever the reason, it is a change for Republicans. The party of Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan, the Bushes, Dole, Romney, and McCain would not have been a comfortable place for people supporting anti-American dictators against those trying to resist them. I wish it were not one now, but it surely seems to be.

Still most Republicans do favor the Ukrainians in the war, but many of them question the amount, usefulness, and strategic benefit of the aid sent to Ukraine. That is normal and easily understandable political behavior, especially after the government’s fiasco in Afghanistan. However I think that, with some perhaps important but strategically irrelevant exceptions, they are wrong. I think our country is getting a bargain in Ukraine. America and its allies are going to have plenty to keep them busy for years with China. They do not need to have to deal with a rebuilt version of the Soviet empire threatening Europe at the same time. The Ukrainians have been brave and effective in the war. If with our aid they can stop this anschluss of Putin’s, it could save us from needing to return to Europe in much greater strength and perhaps having to stop his next one directly with our own forces in a NATO country. That would be expensive. 

A Missed Opportunity and a Failed Test

A couple of weeks ago Donald Trump gave Republican politicians and their allies in the conservative media a splendid opportunity to take a stand and do something right to at least partially make up for the cowardice, dishonesty, and lack of principle they had shown since he tried to overthrow the government after losing the election in 2020. He demanded that the Constitution be “terminated” to return him to office and did it explicitly and in writing. All they had to do was call a spade a spade, repudiate an enemy of the republic as an enemy of the republic, and declare that Trump was unfit to hold any public office and unwelcome in their party. The decision to do so should have been an easy one for people who took their oaths of office or fidelity to the Constitution seriously. Yet nothing much happened. The self-styled constitutional conservatives in politics and the media mainly looked the other way just as they had looked the other way or, worse, supported him since November of 2020. It is hard to find a doubt to give them the benefit of.

Many libertarians usually have favored the Republicans over the Democrats in the belief that overall they were friendlier to freedom and usually had policies and plans that were less bad than those of the Dems. It is time for them to reconsider. If today’s Republicans cannot find the nerve or perhaps even a reason to reject a would be Duce who wants to take power by direct and unconstitutional action, how serious is their commitment to freedom and the Constitution, and how are they enough less dangerous than the Democrats to justify supporting them in a general way?

Asking the Wrong Question

 Republicans like to complain about being treated unfairly by members of the traditional media. They often have good reasons for doing so, but, based on what I have seen in the news, today interviewers have been doing them a favor. Asking Republicans if they agree with Trump’s call to “terminate” the Constitution, allowed them to give the easy and probably honest answer that they do not. That is not the right question to be asking Republican politicians and their allies in the conservative media. The right question is “would you support a candidate for public office who called for overthrowing the Constitution of the United States, and if not does that include Donald Trump?” That is the question Republicans should have to answer and live with the consequences, one way or the other.

Having to Take a Stand

“A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for

the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,

even those found in the Constitution. Our great

“Founders” did not want, and would not condone

False & Fraudulent Elections!”

- Donald Trump, December 2, 2002

Sometimes ducking one’s responsibility  hoping a tough problem will go away or take care of itself works, and sometimes the problem gets worse to a point where it cannot be ducked and has to be faced. That is where Republican politicians and their allies in the conservative media are today with Donald Trump.

The man has just called openly and in writing for overthrowing the government and Constitution of the United States to place him in power. He made a similar demand before the election but without explicitly calling for abandoning the Constitution, which could have left Republicans with a shaky out of assuming the man was ignorant enough not to know that there were no legal or constitutional means to do what he wanted. This time he has left them no way out. They have to make a decision and announce it in public.

Republican politicians and people in the conservative media have either to reject Trump or by implication reject the American Constitution, laws, and way of life. At a minimum the Republican national committee should announce that Trump will receive no help or money from the party in the future, and Republicans in the house and senate should declare in public that they will oppose him as a candidate for any elected office at any time. The fully honorable thing would be for Republicans to join with the Democrats and impeach and convict him for attempting to overthrow the government in various ways from December 2020 to the present – serving the country by preventing him from running for any office. If they do nothing Republicans and their friends in the conservative media, including those among them who hold public office or served in the armed forces and swore an oath to the Constitution, will have shown that their professed fidelity to the Constitution and principles of the republic is not real enough to matter, and that having a professed enemy of the republic as a candidate is acceptable to them. They will have earned the contempt of Americans with whom that fidelity is real. (Those Republicans who are insufficiently motivated by honor or patriotism might want to consider pragmatic political reasons for rejecting Trump now. They need to be rid of him before the next election if they want to win it. If they get rid him now when they have good and explainable reasons, his supporters might understand and anyway will have two years to get over any disappointment.)

Whether Republicans do the right thing or not, Merrick Garland needs to. As a political matter it would benefits the Democrats for Trump to run for president in 2024. Garland needs to ignore that and prosecute Trump on charges that will stick.

Republicans Coming Up Short

 

Republicans thought they had good reasons for expecting to do very well in the midterm elections. Biden was unpopular as was his policy of de facto opening the southern border to illegal immigrants. Price inflation was driving real incomes down. Many people were worried about crime, and many Democrats were ignoring their fears and sometimes seeming to side with the criminals. The end of the Afghanistan war had been a fiasco, and people were questioning the way governments handled the Covid epidemic, especially in schools. On the other hand Republicans already held 212 seats in the house after unusually gaining several in 2020, and all but one of the senate seats they hoped to gain and a couple of the ones they had to to defend were in states Biden carried in 2020. Still they were optimistic about having big gains in the house and gaining enough for a majority in the senate. They were wrong. Depending on a runoff in Georgia the number of Republicans in the senate will be the same as or one less than it is now. They gained enough in the house for a majority, but only a slight one. Relative to their expectations the election was a failure for them. Many Republicans are asking what went wrong.

There are some obvious conjectures. According to the news, the Democrats main selling points were defending legal abortion, claiming Republicans wanted to cut social security, and accusing them of being a “threat to democracy”. The Republicans helped the Democrats out on all three. The general understanding in the country after the supreme court reversed Roe v. Wade was that the government of each state would make its own laws on abortion, leaving access to abortion unchanged in blue states with pro-choice governors or majorities in their legislatures. Then weeks before the election Republican senator Lindsey Graham announced a plan to ban abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy everywhere in the country by an act of congress. Such a bill would never have passed, and would have been vetoed by Biden if it did, but by proposing it, Graham helped the Democrats convince some women that a Republican congress would outlaw abortion. Another senator Rick Scott gave the Democrats a hand on social security by proposing sun-setting federal programs every five years without having the good sense to exempt social security and medicare from his plan explicitly. The Democrats’ scare stories on both issues were dishonest, but foolish mistakes by prominent Republicans made them seem more plausible to some people.

Then there was the Democrats’ pitch on a threat to democracy. There the Republicans failed not so much by what they did as by what they did not do. After losing the election in 2020, Donald Trump tried to stay in office through a coup d’etat. Republicans refused to vote to impeach and convict him, and very few even spoke against him. Then weeks before the election this year, he demanded to be returned to power immediately. Even he probably was not ignorant enough not to know there were no legal or constitutional means for that to happen. Republican officials surely were not. They had to know that what the man was calling for was overthrowing the government of the United States. If any prominent Republican denounced him over it, I missed it in the news. While the Democrats exaggerated the threat in their campaign, since nothing did or would come of Trump’s schemes and rants, the man was an ex- and would be future president from the Republican party. Republicans had a responsibility to do something about him, and they didn’t. That (along with some of the odd Trumpist Republican candidates in some races) made it easier for Democrats to convince people that this year a vote for Democrats was a patriotic vote for the laws and Constitution of the republic.

A person can wonder about the Republicans, as Casey Stengel is said to have wondered about the 1962 Mets, whether anyone there can play the game. If so the first step should be a break with Trump, both for their good and the good of the country. Many of them may not care that it is the ethical thing to do, but perhaps they finally will realize it is also the expedient one.

Mean Tweets

 These days one often sees articles or cartoons on conservative web sites listing, usually accurately, various very bad things coming from Biden and his administration and then saying something like “but at least we don’t have any more mean tweets”. The reference to the tweets is intended to stand for the more general notion that usually Republican voters who did not vote for Trump foolishly made a decision based on not caring for his personality instead of the policies and plans of the candidates and got something substantively harmful to themselves to avoid having to put up with something only annoying.  They have a point. Usually while deciding which candidate is the worse human being matters, learning and judging each one’s plans and beliefs is more important in deciding which is the lesser evil. The things the Biden-Harris gang are doing are very bad, and the things they want to do are far worse. But the conservatives are still wrong.  

All along Trump was an arrogant, dishonest, unprincipled jackass and ignoramus who had no business being president. That would have been plain enough if he had never taken to Twitter. The tweets were just something that highlighted the fact. The best reason to have supported him over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she seemed to be an at least equally repulsive person, and her plans and policies were worse. He was still the overall lesser evil in terms of policy in 2020. The important question was whether his character, temperament, incompetence, and lack of principles were exceptionally bad enough to make that not matter. I thought they were but realized that the answer was not obvious, and that many thoughtful people disagreed and planned to vote for him. However, his actions after losing the election changed that, and the answer became obvious.  They were inexcusable throughout, and after  December 14^th he was openly behaving as an enemy of the republic.  The country is better with him gone.

His defenders are also wrong as a matter of practical politics. When a person fouls up and makes a really bad decision, it usually is better to admit the mistake and cut losses instead of throwing good money and good effort after bad. Voters in Republican primaries in 2016 made a very bad mistake in selecting Trump over a number of people who were both qualified to be president and able to defeat Hillary Clinton. That decision eventually led to Republicans losing majorities in both houses, losing the presidency, and temporarily losing some of their natural constituency in suburbs.  Trump was not a Reagan or an FDR bringing net numbers of new voters to his party. He brought some in, but he chased many away. He won a squeaker in 2016 against a remarkably unlikeable opponent, led the party to a beating in 2018, and then lost re-election to an elderly, seemingly mentally slipping bungler who scarcely campaigned. That is not much in the way of winning and winning until you get tired of winning. It is time for Republicans to fold ‘em and walk away or even run.  They need to accept that they bet wrong, take their beating, and move on and try to learn from the mistake and win the next time. The Biden gang is giving them an opportunity to do that.

The Myth of Trump's Political Magnetism

 There has been a common belief among Republican politicians and their allies in the media that Trump has helped the party by being a powerful force politically who attracts and “energizes” people to vote for him and other Republicans.  It has been one reason and perhaps the main one that many Republican politicians stayed with him.  I think it is also largely a myth. It has become commonplace to say Twitter is not the world, and that taking what one sees there as indicative of public opinion is a mistake. It is also true that a Trump rally is not the world, and that  a few thousand fired up,  ardent supporters are not indicative of public opinion either.

Trump won a very close race in 2016 against the most unlikeable and disliked candidate either major party had nominated for a long time. Polls after the election showed he defeated her  by doing better among voters who disliked both of them. Two years later Republican candidates got hammered in the midterm elections of 2018 mainly because of voters’ dislike for Trump.

 Then Trump lost the presidency as an incumbent to a slow moving, uninspiring, elderly  career politician who scarcely campaigned and whose main selling point was that he was not Donald Trump.  Since 1900 only four elected incumbent presidents before Trump have lost their attempt at reelection. Two, Taft and Bush senior,  were damaged by major third party candidates.  The other two, Hoover and Carter, were running after years of very bad times in the country that many voters blamed on them.  Trump had neither excuse.  After losing the election, his egregious behavior likely tipped the two races in Georgia to the Democrats.

People in the media have focused on the former non-voters or Democrat voters in so-called blue collar occupations Trump added to the Republican party, and there have been some. They need to think about what he has subtracted. Self-supporting, college educated men and women who work in the private sector tend to have values and interests  usually more in line with the Republicans than the Democrats. According to polling and supported by results of elections in suburban areas, Trump has managed to drive a lot of them away. Based on the results the net from his efforts and behavior looks like a loss.

In the last week many Republicans have decided that Trump is no longer a political asset. Going forward and thinking about the place for Trumpism in their party, they should consider whether he ever really was.

 

Different Approaches

Republican politicians can be exasperating. Too many are  crude, illiberal on social matters, unserious about liberty, pragmatic in the bad sense of that term, unscientific in outlook, poor at making their case, and generally lacking cohesive, thought out principles. Some  people favoring liberty and individual rights still  support Republicans in elections against Democrats as the lesser evil.  Others say the two parties are more or less equivalently bad and reject both.  Since state and local governments are being left  to make many of the decisions about handling the present epidemic, people have a chance to look at the behavior of politicians from both parties and see if it indicates any meaningful overall differences between the parties.

Republican officials usually have ordered shut downs reluctantly, enforced them fairly politely, relied as much as possible on people going along voluntarily, and begun – usually eagerly – to start getting things back to normal as soon as conditions allowed. From their behavior it seems that they have not liked the things they have done and will be glad to stop doing them.

On the other hand many Democratic officials give the impression of really enjoying having and using this new power over other people. The pettiness, malice, arbitrariness, dogmatic vigor, and simple mean relish with which they have made and enforced  their dictates surely make it seem that  they are having a good time. They certainly are reluctant to let  go. Some even speak seemingly longingly of a “new normal” in which they will keep the new powers indefinitely.  Some of that reluctance to open things up may be a political ploy to hurt Trump in the next election, but that does not explain all of it. (Trump probably  is not going to carry New York in November regardless of how long Cuomo and Wilhelm  keep the state and city shut down.)

Many of us who are fond of neither party believe Democrats on average are more likely than Republicans to want to control more of other people’s lives by force,  and therefore are a worse  threat.  The Dems recently have given that hypothesis a whole lot of support.

At a Republican Rally

There is an old  saying that in this country people  have a choice between the evil party, the Democrats, and the stupid party, the Republicans.  Some people may prefer “bad” or “misguided” over “evil” to label  the Democrats, but it often is hard to argue with “stupid” to describe the Republicans.  A couple of days ago  Debby and I and a friend attended a rally for Senator Cruz at a local restaurant.  It was a lousy place for such an event. The small dining area  was filled  with a large number of people standing  in the spaces around the tables, blocking the waiters and waitresses and probably annoying people trying to eat. That, however, wasn’t stupid but  only excusable poor planning.

The stupidity came later. This was a purely political  rally open to all to fire up support for the Senator’s campaign against a particularly repugnant  Democrat.  Nevertheless the show began with a local politician giving a long and very sectarian evangelical Christian invocation, which clearly implied that Christianity and his kind of Republicanism were inseparable if not more or less the same.  One can assume  that our local Republican politicians know there are Jews, Hindus, Muslims, secular people, Buddhists, Unitarians, and other non-Christians around   whose votes count the same as any believer’s and whose support would help  Republicans win elections. Yet they purposely behaved in a way that such people  could reasonably have understood as signaling that this was a place where they were  not wanted and did not belong.  (Senator Cruz, to his credit, stayed mainly on topics of policy and  political ideology in his speech and when answering questions after it.)

The leftists have some very unpleasant things planned for this country.  In resisting them all Americans who value a free society need to hang  together.  It would be good if more Republicans were smart enough to realize that and act accordingly.

Trump and the Establishment

I don’t like or approve of Donald Trump. He strikes me as an arrogant, blustering,  rude, and thoughtless character. He is wrong on some important issues, not as nearly uniformly wrong as Hillary Clinton, but still wrong.  I certainly wish any of several of the other candidates had gotten the nomination instead. If my state  appears  to be safe from the Democrats’ nominee, I probably will vote for Gary Johnson in November.  However, I am amused by the reaction of prominent members of the Rockefeller/Bush/New York/DC/ ”Establishment”  section of the Republican party to the fact that they did not get their way this year. These are the same people who have consistently told others, such as  libertarians and principled conservatives, to brace up, get over frustration over not getting nominees who agree with their ideas, and support the party’s  candidate for president as an alternative superior to what the Democrats are selling. One might guess that their notion of the desirability of unity is limited to unifying around whatever and whomever  they prefer.

Since they are telling everyone Trump is both a bad choice to govern and a bad choice politically, it is interesting to look at how they and their candidates have done in the last few decades first in terms of governing and then in the matter of political success and astuteness.

  Given Rockefeller’s unpopularity among Republicans, Nixon was their approved choice in 1968. His administration gave the country affirmative action quotas, wage and price controls, the EPA, the first oil “crisis”, and concessions to the Soviets, continued the disastrous war in Vietnam for several years, and ended with his leaving office over a scandal.  The elder George Bush, after winning election for Reagan’s third term, raised taxes, disparaged Reagan’s policies as insufficiently kind and gentle, failed to keep Iraq from invading Kuwait,  gave us the ADA, and mismanaged much of the aftermaths  of our victory in the Cold War and of the war in Iraq.  George W. Bush increased government spending and deficits  significantly,  gave us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and  TARP, approved torturing prisoners and spying on American citizens, squandered the opportunities presented by having Republican majorities in both houses of congress, and led the country into long and futile wars and attempts at “nation building” in the Middle East.  A case can be made that each of these three was less bad for the country than the Democrat who ran against him, but it would be hard to argue that any of them was good for the nation.

Members of the establishment made a political decision  in 1964 to oppose and sabotage the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, both at the convention and afterwards. With their help Johnson won in a landslide, and carried along enough leftist Democrats into the congress to allow him have his way on the various programs and laws of the Great Society.  Goldwater probably would have lost to Johnson anyway, but might have kept it close enough  to leave Republicans in congress able to block some of that if he had not been torpedoed by people in his own party.  Four years later the establishment’s choice  Nixon  was in the end a political disaster for the Republicans.  Their  choice in 1976, Gerald Ford, bumbled through an ineffective campaign and lost to Jimmy Carter. The establishment’s  candidates in 1980 lost the nomination  to their opponent Ronald Reagan who, despite their warnings and  misgivings, won two landslide elections and became one of the most important and successful presidents in American history.  Their choice  Bush senior was elected in 1988 on Reagan’s coattails, but was sufficiently inept politically that he lost as an incumbent in 1992 despite having once had an approval rating over 80%. The establishment  served up Bob Dole in 1996 who lost to Clinton in a race that never became close and then gave us George W. Bush who managed to win two very close elections against two wooden and unappealing opponents but whose political failures and ineptitude paved the way for Obama and the large majorities the Democrats enjoyed in the congress after his election.  After that came John McCain who campaigned tepidly and  lost to Obama, and Mitt Romney who campaigned tepidly and could not defeat Obama even after people had had the chance for four years to learn what the man was like.

There are many  good reasons for skepticism about Trump, but the record of his opponents in the  Republican establishment at picking qualified candidates or making astute and effective  political decisions is not among them. 

Trump and Blutarsky

It finally came to me this morning what  the Trump candidacy calls to mind – at least to me.  He’s Blutarsky in the famous scene from Animal House raving against the mistreatment dished out to the Deltas and inspiring them to go all out and  make a really futile and stupid gesture of defiance. The Deltas didn’t mind when Bluto said it was the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor, and the people attracted to Trump don’t mind his garbled facts and bizarre notions. People see that Dean Obama and the assorted Marmalards and Neidermeyers of his administration have put the country  and much of what it stands for on double secret probation and worse, and they don’t like it. They feel cheated and abused. They sense that something really wrong and dangerous is happening. They see establishment Republicans displaying a pervasive phoniness and reacting to events with whimpering resignation and don’t like that either. Trump presents himself as someone who knows what is happening to America, doesn’t like it, and is willing to fight back. That alone may explain his popularity and why so many people are ready -  emotionally at least  - to sign up with him, Otter, and the boys and make this homecoming parade one to remember.

It may also be enough to keep Trump very popular and perhaps even in the lead until and unless one of the other, more realistic candidates grasps  the depth of the disgust, anger, and sense of betrayal at large in the country, understands and accepts  the desire of Americans to climb into the car with D-Day and yell “ramming speed”,  and offers them a way to do so productively and effectively.  Exhortations from the likes of Bush or Kasich to more or less remain calm because all is more or less well seem unlikely to  get it done.

Republicans Need to Get Serious

There is still a political controversy over a plank in the platform of the Republicans in Texas endorsing so-called therapies intended to change homosexuals into heterosexuals. It is not clear to me what the Republicans had in mind with this plank. Some say they were merely affirming a person’s right to choose. Others say they were advocating such therapies and supporting their use on unwilling adolescents. What is clear to me is that they were not using their heads when they did it. There is a very nearly zero probability of the Texas legislature outlawing these practices, and they must have known that. So why burden their platform with something which was unnecessary and likely to offend homosexuals?

I believe the actions, plans, and policies of the Obama administration are a serious threat to the freedom and safety of Americans and must be resisted and reversed, starting with the elections  this November. The Republicans in Texas claim to believe this also, yet seem to have trouble seeing what it should mean in terms of action, as their conduct in this example  illustrates.

While many homosexuals may be leftists committed to Obama and the Democrats, many others of both genders are concerned, freedom loving, patriotic Americans who are dismayed by what is going on with this administration and might be more willing  to support the Republicans if the Republicans would stop insulting them.  If we really are in a crisis, that is not too much to ask of the social conservatives. They would not have to change their beliefs or prejudices. They would only have to learn to welcome allies in the important struggle wherever they could find them  and realize that if the place is on fire, the social and cultural controversies (all of them, not just the ones concerning homosexuality) are less important at the moment than putting the flames out.

Libertarians certainly have done that for  the social conservatives. Many of us will hold our noses in November and vote for some really remarkable Republican yahoos, because we believe that the threats we face are real and serious, and that those who oppose them need to make common cause to overcome them.   A great man was quoted as saying it well in a situation far more dangerous than the one we face: “we must all hang together, or, assuredly,  we shall all hang separately.” He meant it literally. We have the luxury of facing the alternative only figuratively, but leaving Obama and company unchecked will be bad enough. Surely the homosexual baiting and all the rest can wait at least until the imminent threat has passed.

Republicans and the Media

Mailings from Republican fund raisers tell us that things are serious, that the leftists are running amok, and that people who believe in limited government must engage in a focused, determined, committed struggle to win the coming election and start righting the country before the damage gets even worse. I think these claims are generally correct. I wish the Republican politicians would act as though they thought so too.

However, the sad fact is that many of them do not seem to take things all that seriously. They too often come across as unfocused, careless, and even unaware, particularly in their relations with the press. With very few exceptions members of the traditional media are leftists – some strong leftists, some weak leftists, some thoughtlessly conformist leftists, some I-don’t-really-believe-this-stuff-but-it’s-the-party-line-and-I’ve-got-to-follow-it-to-get-ahead leftists, but almost all leftists. Their bias against and hostility toward Republicans are easy to see. If a Democrat in Washington comes down with gonorrhea, they will report that he fell ill while trying to get closer to his constituents. If a Republican catches a cold, they will report that he contracted a disease that can be spread by illicit sexual contact. The people in the traditional media are the Republicans’ enemies. They are out to defeat and if necessary destroy them. This is well known and well established and transparently obvious.

Given that, a sensible person would react with caution and care not to give these people ammo. He would not expect a fair shake and would keep his feet well away from his mouth at all times. Yet too many of the Republicans in Washington go around shooting their mouths off in the most impolitic ways, acting as though they believe they can win their antagonists’ approval, and generally seeming oblivious or indifferent to the fact that they are surrounded by real enemies and in a political knife fight. That needs to stop. The stakes are pretty high. They need to toughen up and to wise up.