Confessions of a Never Trump Conservative

Sorry, but no one has the unmitigated right to my vote. Earn it.

If you are indeed a Republican, there is no more certain way to make a Democratic friend by announcing your dislike of Donald J. Trump. Of course, the quickest way to lose that friend is to mention that the reason you do not like Trump is because the man behaves like a Democrat.

Away we go.

I will freely admit that I am in a bit of a funk that 2024 is going to become a droll and dreary repeat of 2020. President Joe Biden — whose performance after the State of the Union Address was the antithesis of sleepy anything — befuddled a Republican backbench whose lack of spirit could only be described as somewhere between phlegmatic and languorous — private school words for bad.

How bad was it? Rain Man bad (very bad). Heck — the man literally called out Republicans on Social Security only to watch them collapse like a cheap tent in a hurricane. Three frickin’ times! Ah, for the days where Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) and others grognards would pound the table as if it were Prime Minister’s Questions — only for Bill Clinton to give as good as he got.

What could possibly make it worse? How about Senator Katie Britt’s (R-Kitchen) attempt to respond to Biden’s secular tent revival — from a kitchen.

I want to know who the mental genius was who decided to give Senator Britt the Republican Response from a kitchen and then fire them — then hire them back — and then FIRE THEM AGAIN. No wait — let’s make it worse by theatrically expressing seven different emotions using the same intonation which hovered somewhere between Joel Osteen megachurch energy and scolding a toddler. How many RPMs is William F. Buckley Jr. doing in his grave right now?

Don’t answer that.

Far more rewarding and revealing was watching President Joe Biden work the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives via C-SPAN like a man who actually enjoyed being back on Capitol Hill. Conversely, Republicans looked like Biden had sunk their battleship by taking away their best talking point — Sleepy Joe. Given the thin margin by which House Republicans are clawing on to power in Washington, there is perhaps more truth in the observation than most conservatives — and there aren’t many of us anymore — are willing to admit.

Of course, few Republicans even identify as conservative, trading the moniker for populist, nationalist, or some other empty sock we can stick our hands in. So long as the puppet tells us what we want to hear — and better still if what he says “triggers” a Democrat — then it most certainly must be the truth, yes? Shits and giggles is the new thoughts and prayers, I suppose.

Which brings me to my point — the kicker and my primary lament over the way American politics has changed over the last 20 years and how the parties have changed from ideologically driven to just two loose camps of nihilistic power brokers. In short, both parties suffer from a lack of confidence in what they believe in a programmatic sense — and it was on display last week in spades.

Consider that just 20 years ago, it was Democrats calling for border controls and Republicans arguing for reform. Just 20 years ago, Republicans demanded a muscular foreign policy while Democrats demanded the peace dividend. Labor unions were a uniquely Democratic core constituency. Corporations were Republican institutions. Yet by and large, the same people who were Democrats then are Democrats today, and the same people who were Republican then are Republican now.

Instead, we have two opposing camps who don’t believe much of anything other than one thing, which is to keep the opposition away from power. Or worse still, hold to the shibboleths of progress as if each and every expansion of the word can should somehow neglect the question of ought. Just because we can have smartphones, does it mean we ought to carry them everywhere? Just because we can perform cosmetic surgeries on children to change their sexual organs, does it mean we ought to do this? Just because we can bulldoze that farm and replace it with townhomes, does it follow that we ought? We can raid the Capitol, ought we? We can riot in three dozen cities, is that something we ought to do? Just the other day, protesters shut down I-95 in Richmond. Can they do it? Sure… but ought? C’mon, guys…

One of the problems of liberalism — and as Americans, we are all to some degree inheritors of the liberal philosophical tradition — is that it tends to suppress the things which used to divide us with the promise of more material happiness. The upshot you can see all around you. Rail against Western liberal democratic capitalism all you want — we are living in a golden age. Yet the downside to this is that the more advanced this liberal democratic capitalist order we live in becomes, the more effective it is at distilling the word meaning out of our society, work, careers, and our own core individual raison d’etre — and so rather than living a meaningful life, we mindlessly amuse ourselves to death (pace Huxley) and call this freedom.

If liberalism is indeed by definition the conference of rights upon individuals, the greatest of these being the right to individual autonomy, then it should be no small wonder why the leap from liberalism to nihilism is so short. Make yourself the end of your own existence, and it is no small wonder why people become horribly vicious when discussing politics. Every difference — every person — becomes a hate crime against your most supreme right of all. Good luck resorting to reason. We want what we want — and that is the only morality in a materialistic liberalism.

That right there is why I cannot in good conscience bend the knee to a man like Donald J. Trump — not just because he is not a conservative, but because at core he is little more than a right-wing progressive. The man wants what he wants and has built a career living his life autonomously — especially at the expense of others. There is even a small pile of dead babies, Steve.

Just to prove the point? These “Gramscians of the right” — this is what they call themselves — use the same tactics the left has successfully employed for over 50 years — a war of position followed by a war of movement. During the Civil Rights era? Such tactics were incredibly useful for social change. When weaponized against certain races, creeds, ethnicities, opinions, and ideas?

Again — just because you can doesn’t mean you ought.

The bad news? Pandora has opened her box, the cat is out of the bag, and the toothpaste is out of the tube. Gramscian tactics work, not because they are political but precisely because they profane the sacred. January 6th? Lock her up? One day of dictatorship? See a pattern?

Trump is the symptom of a stage-four colon cancer long ignored by generations of corporate greed and government-driven self-interest. The fact that there are plenty of Democrats who would love to pay Republicans back in Trump’s own coin shows that this disease metastasizes quickly and respects no party boundary. If left unchecked, self-styled leaders become arrogant — and this leads to conflict, coercion, and finally stasis.

In short, that’s how you get Trump.

Once you see the dynamic of how we talk to one another about the political — federal, state, and local — it is hard to unsee. That reality should make us feel no small degree of shame that we have allowed our civil discourse to be surrendered this way.

Yet for one, I refuse to succumb to this cynicism — I have to refuse. Our neighbors are not our enemies. Disagreement isn’t about right and wrong, but rather about excavating good then better and finally towards the excellent ideas. No problem created by human beings cannot be solved by human beings — bottom line.

Yet I wonder — aloud — whether we are gone too far in our liberalism-turned-nihilism. Is winning an argument better than understanding one’s opposition? Is all of the political today presently reduced to “I want what I want” followed by destroying one’s opposition?

God, I hope not. But I worry.

As for myself, my reasons for opposing Trump are not going to be the reasons of a frothing left-wing progressive. Nor are they the reasons of a liberal. Nor do I find myself terribly enthused about being coerced by friends on the right as if by the act of not choosing I am in fact Spartan-kicking America into the first step towards a thousand years of darkness. Maybe I’m just not convinced? I have very little interest in a politics which demands I must hate my neighbors and coerce them into my way of thinking in order to participate in Our Democracy (TM) or Making America Great Again (TM).

Maybe that more than just boring, it’s banal.

Don’t be afraid — dear reader — to exercise a third option when the world is forcing you to make a decision between bad and worse. Sometimes the most moral decision is not to choose at all. We don’t owe them our votes. They should campaign for it, and campaign they will for my vote — if they can earn it.

Find me a politics willing to defend and protect the idea that every person in America— no matter what their background or condition — deserves an equal chance to live their potential, and we might discover that the things that bring us together are worth a lot stronger than the artificial divisions put upon us by distant apparatchiks who don’t matter and don’t care.

Those voices are out there — and they are under 75 years of age (I promise). Yet if the choice this November is between a left-wing progressive and a right-wing progressive, then I have better things to do than sell out.