A Final Plea
Voters can still prevent the worst
thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more important, to the
country.
By Peter Wehner
October 29, 2024,
9:56 AM ET
Many
Republicans would say that it is one thing, and quite an awful
thing, to withhold a vote from Donald Trump—but that voting for Kamala
Harris, a “San Francisco Democrat,” is nothing short of a betrayal, an act of
apostasy, impossible for any true conservative to justify.
They’re wrong, though in one respect it’s understandable
why they’re wrong. Harris is hardly an avatar of conservatism. She is, after
all, a lifelong Democrat who, in her ill-fated campaign for president in 2019,
positioned herself as a progressive champion. She embraced positions that I
believe ranged from silly to harmful. But it’s a more complicated story than
that.
During Harris’s pre-Senate career, when she served as
district attorney in San Francisco and then as attorney general of California,
her record was generally pragmatic and moderate. In those roles, according to Don Kusler, the national director
of Americans for Democratic Action, her record was one “that would have many
liberals, particularly our California colleagues, angered or at least rolling
their eyes.” Progressives had a much deeper relationship with President Joe
Biden than with Vice President Harris; according to The Washington Post,
“They fear that under Harris they would lose the unique access they had to the
West Wing.” The New Democrat Coalition, a moderate faction in the House, says
it’s the part of the caucus most closely aligned with Harris.
Nor are progressives particularly happy that during the
2024 campaign, Harris has broken with some of her previous liberal stances,
such as opposing fracking, decriminalizing border crossing, and ending private
health insurance. Harris has spent the closing stretch of the campaign
appearing with the likes of Liz Cheney, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has
emphasized her support for Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia, and
risks losing Michigan because she is viewed by some in her party as too supportive
of Israel. During the campaign, Harris has shared that she
owns a Glock, said she’d appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and
declared that she’s a “capitalist” who wants “pragmatic” solutions. Her
economic focus is on tax breaks for the middle class and on creating
opportunities for small businesses. Her economic plan, the Post points
out, contained few items on the liberal wish list. Progressive groups say they
are finding a “significant enthusiasm deficit” among left-wing
voters.
It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a
conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a
far-left liberal. She is neither, and if she’s elected president, she is likely
to govern from the center-left, at least on most things.
BUT
THE STRONGEST CONSERVATIVE CASE for voting for Harris doesn’t have
nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains
a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris. Trump has, in a way
no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most
important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise, because his desire isn’t
to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In that respect and others,
Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than
a Burkean. He has transformed the Republican Party
in his image in ways that exceed what any other American politician has done in
modern times.
Start with character. The GOP once championed the central
importance of character in political leaders, and especially presidents. It
believed that serious personal misconduct was disqualifying, in part because of
the example it would send to the young and its corrosive effects on our
culture. It lamented that America was slouching towards Gomorrah.
In 1998, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president and
embroiled in a sexual scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention—whose membership
is overwhelmingly conservative —passed the “Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials,”
which said, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the
culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and
surely results in God’s judgment.” It added, “We urge all Americans to embrace
and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to
elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate
consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
Yet for a decade now, Republicans, and in particular white
evangelicals, have celebrated as their leader a felon and pathological liar; a
person whose companies have committed bank, insurance, tax, and charity fraud;
a sexual predator who paid hush money to a porn star; a person of uncommon
cruelty and crudity who has mocked the war dead, POWs, Gold Star families, and people with
disabilities. Under Trump, the party of “family values” has become a moral
freak show.
Trump has also profoundly reshaped the GOP’s public policy.
The GOP is now, at the national level, effectively pro-choice, and, due in part to Trump, the
pro-life movement is “in a state of political collapse,” in the words of David French, of The New
York Times. The Republican Party, pre-Trump, was pro–free trade; Trump
calls himself “Tariff Man” and referred to tariff as “the most
beautiful word in the dictionary.” (In July, Trump proposed across-the-board tariffs of
10 to 20 percent, and rates of 60 percent or higher on imports from China.) He
epitomizes crony capitalism, an economic system in which
individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are
favored.
For several generations, Republican presidents have, to
varying degrees, promoted plans to reform entitlement programs in order to
avert fiscal catastrophe. Trump has done the opposite. He has repeatedly said that entitlement programs
are off-limits. As president, Trump shredded federalism and made a mockery of
our constitutional system of government by his use of executive orders to bypass Congress.
He made little effort to shrink government, and lots of efforts to expand it.
On spending, $4.8 trillion in non-COVID-related
debt was added during Trump’s single term, while for Biden the figure is $2.2
trillion. Trump added more debt than any other president in history.
A Wall Street Journal survey of
50 economists found that 65 percent of them see Trump’s proposed policies
putting more upward pressure on the federal deficit than Harris’s, and 68
percent said prices would rise faster under Trump than under Harris. And the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump’s policies would increase
budget deficits by $7.5 trillion over the next decade, compared with $3.5
trillion for Harris.
Pre-Trump Republican presidents celebrated the diversity
that immigrants brought to the nation, and the contributions they made to
America. “All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music,
literature, customs, and ideas,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in Shanghai in 1984. “And the marvelous
thing, a thing of which we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these
things in order to fit in. In fact, what they brought to America became
American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped
us.” George W. Bush urged America to be a “welcoming society,” one that
assimilates new arrivals and “upholds the great tradition of the melting pot,”
which “has made us one nation out of many peoples.”
Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He
curtailed legal immigration during his presidency.
Temporary visas for highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced. Refugee admissions were slashed. Trump, who peddled outrageous lies
against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal
status. (At his rallies, Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting
them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back! Send
them back!”)
Read: Under the spell of the crowd
Edith Olmsted pointed out in The New Republic that
during his first term, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for
immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras,
“placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.”
Trump, who refers to America as an “occupied country” and “a garbage can for the world,” also said he plans to reinstate a ban on
travelers from some countries with Muslim-majority populations. And although
previous Republicans have attempted to slow illegal border crossings, none has
dehumanized those crossing the border by using language from Mein Kampf (“poisoning
the blood of our country”). Trump believes American national identity is based
not on allegiance to certain ideals but on ethnic and religious background.
It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most
antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism. Reagan was a
fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union. “The one thing Reagan was more
passionate about than anything else was the unsupportable phenomenon of
totalitarian power, enslaving a large part of the world’s population,” according to Edmund Morris, a Reagan biographer.
Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the
world’s most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent to the fate of Ukraine in its
war against Russia; one suspects that deep down, he’s rooting for his friend
Putin. Reagan mythologized America; Trump trash-talks it. Reagan was a great champion of
NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security
adviser John Bolton, would withdraw from the alliance in a second term. Reagan
made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy; during his term, Trump
praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uyghurs as “exactly the
right thing to do,” according to Bolton.
Here and there, now and then, Trump is conservative—on
court appointments, for example—but it’s something that he’s stumbled into, for
reasons of political expediency, and that he’s just as liable to stumble away
from. (Trump was pro-choice before he was pro-life before he moved once
again toward the pro-choice camp.) Trump is fundamentally a populist
and a demagogue, a destroyer of institutions and a conspiracy theorist, a
champion of right-wing identity politics who stokes grievances and rage. He has
an unprecedented capacity to turn people into the darkest versions of
themselves. But he is something even beyond that.
IN
RECENT WEEKS, Trump has been called a fascist—not by liberal
Democratic strategists, but by people who worked closely with him. They
include retired General John Kelly, who served as
Trump’s chief of staff; retired General Mark Milley, who served as
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump presidency; and Mark
Esper, Trump’s former secretary of defense, who has said that Trump has fascistic
“inclinations” and is “unfit for office.” In addition, retired General
James Mattis, who also served as Trump’s secretary of defense, has said he agrees with Milley’s assessment. And Dan
Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, has said he suspects that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.
The historian Robert Paxton, one of the nation’s foremost
experts on fascism, was initially reluctant to apply the term fascism to
Trump. The label is toxic and used too promiscuously, he believed. But January
6, 2021, changed all of that.
“The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so
intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing
writer for The New York Times Magazine. “It just
seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was
happening.”
Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn
an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote in Newsweek shortly
after Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol. “The label now seems not
just acceptable but necessary.”
Paxton could add to the parade of horribles the fact that
Trump encouraged the mob to hang his own vice president, came very close to deploying 10,000 active-duty troops to
the streets of the nation’s capital to shoot protesters, invited hostile foreign powers to intervene
in our election, and extorted an ally to find dirt on his
opponents. Paxton could have mentioned that Trump threatened prosecutors,
judges, and their families; referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within”; and called the imprisoned
individuals who stormed the Capitol “great patriots.” He could have cited Trump’s
call for the “termination” of
parts of the Constitution and his insinuation that Milley deserved to be
executed for treason.
Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label,
but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label
applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party
again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose
Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that
can break the hold of Trump on his party.
Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of
mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for
Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The
position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The
position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is
worse.
Read: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal
A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or Trump.
If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more attention to
his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his political
opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit. Trump may be
a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.
My view is that when those seeking positions of power
promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic,
and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power
and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell
the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to
take them at their word.
If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be
homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And
the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be
incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.
Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that
could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have
prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more
important, to the country.