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RE: I said it's a binary election
Posted on: August 25, 2016 at 16:39:39 CT
blake1771 MU
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/nevertrump-needs-help-1463160342
By JAMES TARANTO
May 13, 2016 1:25 p.m. ET
944 COMMENTS
(Best of the Tube this weekend: Catch us on “The Journal Editorial Report” discussing the presidential election. Fox News Channel, 12:30 p.m. ET Saturday and 3:30 p.m. Sunday.)
Commentary’s Peter Wehner isn’t happy about the unity dance of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan. “He’s trying to build a bridge to the man, which may be admirable,” Wehner writes, referring to Ryan. “I’m trying to contain a person I consider to be a virulent virus, which may be necessary.” Put aside the etymologically redundant “virulent”—Trump is a virus?
Why do people like Peter Wehner dehumanize their political opponents? For the answer, we turned to a 2014 essay titled “Why We Dehumanize Political Opponents,” by Peter Wehner. It turns out some of them have it coming:
Some people who appear bad actually are bad. It is precisely the beliefs and behavior of Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jon-Il [sic], Bashar al-Assad, Idi Amin, Khaled Mashaal, Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Timothy McVeigh and countless others—that make them fundamentally worse than you or I. Some individuals really and truly are monsters.
To be sure, Trump isn’t a monster, he’s a virus, and as a medical authority once observed, “a virus is what we doctors call ‘very, very small.’ ” Still, this sort of rhetoric—likening human beings to vermin or pathogens, worthy of eradication—has an ugly history. We won’t name names, but some individuals who employ it really and truly are monsters.
Wehner published a somewhat abashed-sounding essay this morning titled “Trump Supporters Are Wrong, Not Evil.” He’s probably not a monster. At worst he’s a benign one like Grimace from McDonaldland. But his grotesque rhetoric—from a man who, in that 2014 piece, extolled the virtues of intellectual humility, self-reflection and open-mindedness—is all too typical of conservatives who style themselves #NeverTrump. It’s not just that they disagree with Trump or find his character wanting, or even think Hillary Clinton is the lesser of evils. Trump’s ascendance has caused them to lose perspective, to take leave of ordinary logic. He’s driving them mad.
Another example comes from Jonah Goldberg, who is—well, let us understate the matter and say “disappointed” in Rick Perry’s endorsement of Trump. Goldberg leads with a nice gotcha, quoting Perry during his own evanescent candidacy as warning that Trump’s candidacy “will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.”
So far, so good. But then comes Goldberg’s response (ellipsis his):
Lest you’re thrown off by the alliteration, “perdition” means eternal damnation in Hell.
Perry has since had an epiphany, selling his political soul for a seat on the Trump Train. He even says he’s open to being Trump’s running mate, which would make him a co-pilot (or co-conductor?) leading us down the tracks to Hell. (”Can I blow the whistle Mr. Trump?”)
As Thomas More might say, “Why Rick, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but to be Donald Trump’s valet?”
Taking his words literally, Perry wants to make a deal with the devil.
We’re going to go out on a limb and say Perry did not mean those words literally. Taking them figuratively, he concluded it was no longer wise to demonize Trump. We suppose if Wehner ever changes his mind about Trump—a big if, but hey, he wouldn’t be the first—Goldberg will accuse him of wanting to infect people with Zika.
Goldberg continues:
Trump has dispatched one of his top minions, Sarah Palin, to punish Ryan for his effrontery in second-guessing Trump’s commitment to conservatism. She said she’ll work to defeat Ryan’s re-election bid this fall. “His political career is over,” Palin said on CNN.
She’ll probably fail, but the message is clear. The litmus test in the new Republican Party boils down to loyalty, not to a principle or conviction, but to a man: Trump.
It’s a cult of personality, pure and simple.
We thought Palin’s comment foolish too and said as much yesterday. We would also argue that the Trump campaign has elements of a personality cult. But Goldberg does not even begin to make that case. His vision is so distorted by his loathing for Trump that he fails to see the “litmus test” he cites—the expectation that a political party’s elected officeholders will fall in behind the party’s presidential nominee—for what it is: a feature of every ordinary campaign.
Similar failures of logic: The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes sarcastically tweeted yesterday, apropos of the Trump-Ryan powwow: “We will now unify around principles we don’t share. GOP #2016.” Well, yes. That is pretty much the definition of a major political party.
National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote a piece last week titled “The Election Is Not an A/B Test,” meaning that one can be against A without being in favor of B, where A and B are Trump and Mrs. Clinton in either order. That’s true enough on an individual level—one has the alternatives of abstaining and casting a third-party protest vote. For the country as a whole, however, it is an A/B test: In November those who do choose to vote will collectively select one of the two parties’ nominees, almost certainly Trump or Mrs. Clinton.
See if you can spot the whopper in this passage, from Commentary’s Noah Rothman:
The question with which I wrestle is, if the right were to “win” with Trump in November, what will they have won beyond an election? The vision for conservatism to which they devoted their careers will have been thoroughly repudiated. Their conception of an attractive and inviting conservatism that appeals to a majority of Americans over tribal identity politics will have been destroyed, and by their own hands.
It’s one thing to say winning an election isn’t worth sacrificing one’s principles (or, to be realistic, is worth only so much sacrifice). But read that last quoted sentence again. Rothman is saying it’s not worth winning an election if the cost is losing one’s ability to appeal to the majority. Isn’t winning elections the whole point of appealing to the majority? Or is the point that the majority to which Trump hypothetically appeals includes too many of the wrong kind of people?
Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s token conservative blogress, is interested in preserving the selectivity of the Republican Party’s appeal—indeed, in making it considerably more selective. Her post is titled “Stop Trump, Then Remake Conservative Politics.” (What do we do for the rest of the day?)
Here is her proposal for “a platform that is contemporary and conservative and for which there is arguably a broader demographic and geographic appeal”:
It should not include (for there is no political appetite for these things, and they are unattainable and/or unwise from a policy standpoint): opposition to gay rights; large tax cuts for the rich; protectionism; expelling women from combat in a volunteer army; rooting gays out of the military; obsessing over bathroom assignments; fixating on local ordinances about wedding services; keeping the status quo on entitlements; cutting out (as opposed to reforming) the safety net; never, ever raising taxes on anyone; and mass deportation. . . .
Along with all of this, conservatives have to end their intellectual isolation and self-delusions. They need to stop pretending that climate change is not occurring (the extent and the proposed solutions can be rationally discussed) or imagining that there is a market for pre-New-Deal-size government.
She wants to reinvent conservatism as liberalism with entitlement reform. Good luck with that. Even more absurd than the substance, though, are the circumstances under which she issues these diktats. She’s providing a long list of those who are to be excluded from conservatism while rejecting and vowing to “stop” the nominee of the more conservative of the two political parties. She’s in front of a house pretending to stand guard, when in reality she has locked herself out.
We take no pleasure—OK, that’s a lie, but we take considerable discomfort as well—in mocking our fellow conservative intellectuals. We know and respect most of the people we’ve quoted in this column. We have misgivings about Trump and can certainly understand why others would have misgivings stronger than ours. But the Nevertrumpers hurt their own cause through disrespect for other views, not to mention for basic logic. Nor was it necessary to search far for examples; there are many we didn’t use.
Jonah Goldberg observes in the column we quoted above: “The conservative movement can wait out a [Hillary] Clinton presidency intact.” He imagines it is intact now: That may be the most succinct statement of the problem
By JAMES TARANTO
May 13, 2016 1:25 p.m. ET
944 COMMENTS
(Best of the Tube this weekend: Catch us on “The Journal Editorial Report” discussing the presidential election. Fox News Channel, 12:30 p.m. ET Saturday and 3:30 p.m. Sunday.)
Commentary’s Peter Wehner isn’t happy about the unity dance of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan. “He’s trying to build a bridge to the man, which may be admirable,” Wehner writes, referring to Ryan. “I’m trying to contain a person I consider to be a virulent virus, which may be necessary.” Put aside the etymologically redundant “virulent”—Trump is a virus?
Why do people like Peter Wehner dehumanize their political opponents? For the answer, we turned to a 2014 essay titled “Why We Dehumanize Political Opponents,” by Peter Wehner. It turns out some of them have it coming:
Some people who appear bad actually are bad. It is precisely the beliefs and behavior of Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jon-Il [sic], Bashar al-Assad, Idi Amin, Khaled Mashaal, Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Timothy McVeigh and countless others—that make them fundamentally worse than you or I. Some individuals really and truly are monsters.
To be sure, Trump isn’t a monster, he’s a virus, and as a medical authority once observed, “a virus is what we doctors call ‘very, very small.’ ” Still, this sort of rhetoric—likening human beings to vermin or pathogens, worthy of eradication—has an ugly history. We won’t name names, but some individuals who employ it really and truly are monsters.
Wehner published a somewhat abashed-sounding essay this morning titled “Trump Supporters Are Wrong, Not Evil.” He’s probably not a monster. At worst he’s a benign one like Grimace from McDonaldland. But his grotesque rhetoric—from a man who, in that 2014 piece, extolled the virtues of intellectual humility, self-reflection and open-mindedness—is all too typical of conservatives who style themselves #NeverTrump. It’s not just that they disagree with Trump or find his character wanting, or even think Hillary Clinton is the lesser of evils. Trump’s ascendance has caused them to lose perspective, to take leave of ordinary logic. He’s driving them mad.
Another example comes from Jonah Goldberg, who is—well, let us understate the matter and say “disappointed” in Rick Perry’s endorsement of Trump. Goldberg leads with a nice gotcha, quoting Perry during his own evanescent candidacy as warning that Trump’s candidacy “will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.”
So far, so good. But then comes Goldberg’s response (ellipsis his):
Lest you’re thrown off by the alliteration, “perdition” means eternal damnation in Hell.
Perry has since had an epiphany, selling his political soul for a seat on the Trump Train. He even says he’s open to being Trump’s running mate, which would make him a co-pilot (or co-conductor?) leading us down the tracks to Hell. (”Can I blow the whistle Mr. Trump?”)
As Thomas More might say, “Why Rick, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but to be Donald Trump’s valet?”
Taking his words literally, Perry wants to make a deal with the devil.
We’re going to go out on a limb and say Perry did not mean those words literally. Taking them figuratively, he concluded it was no longer wise to demonize Trump. We suppose if Wehner ever changes his mind about Trump—a big if, but hey, he wouldn’t be the first—Goldberg will accuse him of wanting to infect people with Zika.
Goldberg continues:
Trump has dispatched one of his top minions, Sarah Palin, to punish Ryan for his effrontery in second-guessing Trump’s commitment to conservatism. She said she’ll work to defeat Ryan’s re-election bid this fall. “His political career is over,” Palin said on CNN.
She’ll probably fail, but the message is clear. The litmus test in the new Republican Party boils down to loyalty, not to a principle or conviction, but to a man: Trump.
It’s a cult of personality, pure and simple.
We thought Palin’s comment foolish too and said as much yesterday. We would also argue that the Trump campaign has elements of a personality cult. But Goldberg does not even begin to make that case. His vision is so distorted by his loathing for Trump that he fails to see the “litmus test” he cites—the expectation that a political party’s elected officeholders will fall in behind the party’s presidential nominee—for what it is: a feature of every ordinary campaign.
Similar failures of logic: The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes sarcastically tweeted yesterday, apropos of the Trump-Ryan powwow: “We will now unify around principles we don’t share. GOP #2016.” Well, yes. That is pretty much the definition of a major political party.
National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote a piece last week titled “The Election Is Not an A/B Test,” meaning that one can be against A without being in favor of B, where A and B are Trump and Mrs. Clinton in either order. That’s true enough on an individual level—one has the alternatives of abstaining and casting a third-party protest vote. For the country as a whole, however, it is an A/B test: In November those who do choose to vote will collectively select one of the two parties’ nominees, almost certainly Trump or Mrs. Clinton.
See if you can spot the whopper in this passage, from Commentary’s Noah Rothman:
The question with which I wrestle is, if the right were to “win” with Trump in November, what will they have won beyond an election? The vision for conservatism to which they devoted their careers will have been thoroughly repudiated. Their conception of an attractive and inviting conservatism that appeals to a majority of Americans over tribal identity politics will have been destroyed, and by their own hands.
It’s one thing to say winning an election isn’t worth sacrificing one’s principles (or, to be realistic, is worth only so much sacrifice). But read that last quoted sentence again. Rothman is saying it’s not worth winning an election if the cost is losing one’s ability to appeal to the majority. Isn’t winning elections the whole point of appealing to the majority? Or is the point that the majority to which Trump hypothetically appeals includes too many of the wrong kind of people?
Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s token conservative blogress, is interested in preserving the selectivity of the Republican Party’s appeal—indeed, in making it considerably more selective. Her post is titled “Stop Trump, Then Remake Conservative Politics.” (What do we do for the rest of the day?)
Here is her proposal for “a platform that is contemporary and conservative and for which there is arguably a broader demographic and geographic appeal”:
It should not include (for there is no political appetite for these things, and they are unattainable and/or unwise from a policy standpoint): opposition to gay rights; large tax cuts for the rich; protectionism; expelling women from combat in a volunteer army; rooting gays out of the military; obsessing over bathroom assignments; fixating on local ordinances about wedding services; keeping the status quo on entitlements; cutting out (as opposed to reforming) the safety net; never, ever raising taxes on anyone; and mass deportation. . . .
Along with all of this, conservatives have to end their intellectual isolation and self-delusions. They need to stop pretending that climate change is not occurring (the extent and the proposed solutions can be rationally discussed) or imagining that there is a market for pre-New-Deal-size government.
She wants to reinvent conservatism as liberalism with entitlement reform. Good luck with that. Even more absurd than the substance, though, are the circumstances under which she issues these diktats. She’s providing a long list of those who are to be excluded from conservatism while rejecting and vowing to “stop” the nominee of the more conservative of the two political parties. She’s in front of a house pretending to stand guard, when in reality she has locked herself out.
We take no pleasure—OK, that’s a lie, but we take considerable discomfort as well—in mocking our fellow conservative intellectuals. We know and respect most of the people we’ve quoted in this column. We have misgivings about Trump and can certainly understand why others would have misgivings stronger than ours. But the Nevertrumpers hurt their own cause through disrespect for other views, not to mention for basic logic. Nor was it necessary to search far for examples; there are many we didn’t use.
Jonah Goldberg observes in the column we quoted above: “The conservative movement can wait out a [Hillary] Clinton presidency intact.” He imagines it is intact now: That may be the most succinct statement of the problem
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RE: I said it's a binary election - blake1771 KC - 8/25 16:39:39