OPINION

Trump and conservatives

Dennis Prager provoked a bit of consternation in right-leaning circles recently with a column criticizing conservatives who criticize Donald Trump.

Prager attributes such Trump criticism from otherwise congenial precincts to a failure to fully appreciate the dire condition the country would have found itself in had the Democrats kept the presidency for another four years, and thereby completed the leftist transformation begun by Barack Obama.

For Prager, the possibility that Trump saved the country "covers a lot of sins--foolish tweets included." There is a civil war going on, according to Prager, and "Trump, with all his flaws, is our general." Conservatives should therefore quit carping and sniping from the sidelines and "report for duty."

Persuasive fellow that he tends to be, Prager's analysis is not entirely without merit--the Democratic Party has indeed been taken over by the radical left of "Occupy Wall Street," "Black Lives Matter," and the "Resistance." Its ideological orientation, consisting of a toxic, rigorously enforced mixture of political correctness, (not so) creeping socialism, primitive identity politics, and environmental hysteria, adds up to something more totalitarian than anything we have seen before in American politics. As Prager notes, such liberal fascism comes much closer to the real thing than whatever Trump has done or espoused.

Keeping such fever-swamp radicalism as far away from the levers of power as possible would thus seem a political project justifying, per Prager, a certain tactical coordination among conservatives, maybe even the reluctant embrace of a President Trump as the lesser evil.

What Prager might overlook, however, is the possibility that prominent Trump critics like Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Bill Kristol generally share Prager's assessment of the country's condition and what is at stake; they, too, believe we have gone too far down the wrong (leftist) track and that there is a desperate need to reverse course and repair the damage.

Where they differ from Prager is in their view that Trump is an unreliable leader of such a crucial but daunting project due to insufficient ideological conviction and serious deficiencies of character, temperament, and judgment; that he is a false prophet who is far more likely in the end to destroy the crucial institutional obstacle to further leftist transformation, the Republican Party, than to prompt a conservative restoration.

To agree with such a perspective is not to entirely ignore Trump's virtues--unlike most Republicans (a generally cowardly lot), he fights back against his opponents, particularly against a biased and corrupt mass media. In refreshing contrast to his predecessor, he is also an unapologetic nationalist committed to the defense of American interests abroad.

Trump's "gut" instincts appear to be conservative on at least some issues, and he is perhaps capable of being guided in that direction by advisers on others (like the nomination of Neil Gorsuch and withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement).

But all that still might not be enough to compensate for the daily incompetence, unforced errors, juvenile tantrums, and all-around outrageous behavior that provides a continuing flow of ammunition to Trump's (and the conservative movement's) enemies.

While an incoherent, ineptly pursued conservative agenda is preferable to a coherent but mendacious leftist one, the damage that can be done to the conservative cause by the kind of uncritical support for Trump that Prager recommends shouldn't be discounted.

Which also brings us around to the greatest source of continuing Trump skepticism--that the GOP is in better shape, from local and state offices all the way to Washington, than at any time in a century, but is also now held hostage to a president with poor impulse control, no knowledge of or interest in public policy (and apparently no desire to acquire such), and an only hazy relationship to facts and logic. Those are hardly trivial flaws in the leader of a political party, let alone someone ensconced in the Oval Office and serving as our commander-in-chief.

Based on what the Soviets used to call the "correlation of forces," the Republicans should have checked most of the boxes on their conservative wish list by now, but instead they've been playing defense from the day of Trump's inauguration, not because of anything the unhinged Democrats are doing but because of Trump's apparently never-ending stream of unforced errors.

It is thoroughly understandable, given Trump's unsavory opponents, that many conservatives have swallowed hard and closed ranks behind him. But just because Trump is often unfairly criticized by the usual suspects doesn't mean there is nothing to criticize.

Commentators on public affairs should call them as they see them, not serve as propagandists for a particular political party or as part of a particular president's defense team.

In the end, a closed-minded defense of Trump by Republicans is ultimately no more admirable or beneficial to the country than closed-minded opposition to him by Democrats. Indeed, a reasonable argument could be made that the kind of blind-faith tribal partisanship recommended by Prager is more the cause of our political woes than a solution to them.

Dennis Prager wonders why so many conservatives continue to criticize Trump. Following the logic of Occam, it might be because he does so many things that deserve criticism.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 06/12/2017

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