I won’t march off the cliff with the Trumpists

George Will offers an interesting analysis of the forthcoming debacle here:

“The Republican Party’s Coming Trumpian Disaster”

I’m concerned, however, not only because Mr. Trump will lose overwhelmingly, thus injuring both the conservative movement and the Republican Party for years to come and, along the way, delivering the Supreme Court into the hands of leftist activists for at least a generation.

I’m concerned because I don’t want Donald Trump to win.  He is a serious threat to the cause of constitutionalism, limited government, and political order.  And I’m heartsick because his successful acquisition of the Republican Party says very worrisome things about the citizenry of the United States.

I’m grateful (I guess) to Anne Palmieri for calling my attention to Andrew Sullivan’s recent article, published while there still seemed a fading hope of escaping a Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party, entitled “America Has Never Been More Ripe for Tyranny.”

It’s a longish article, and it contains a few rough words.  But it’s a serious piece.  I agree with it, and I very much — very much — suggest that you take time to read it.

I’ve been alluding for months now to the parallels that I see between the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and the very recent emergence of Trumpism — which I regard as simply a local American variant of the recrudescence of authoritarian political movements in today’s Europe.  (See, for instance, my 11 March 2016 blog entry entitled “The alarming rise of the Strong Man.”)

One of the striking aspects of Trumpism is its intellectual vacuity.  There is no coherent body of principles or policy positions to it; Mr. Trump seems scarcely to know or care anything about such things, and his backers seem fine with that.  Conservatism is a more or less coherent family of opinions and judgments.  Conservative spokesmen can be eloquent or tongue-tied, effective or inadequate.  But Trumpism seems to be all about the Strong Man.

I find this appalling.  It comes far too close for my comfort to the Führer-Prinzip, the “Leader Principle,” that was at the very heart of Nazism (as well as, in its own way, of Italian Fascism).

“The Party is Hitler!” cried Rudolf Hess, introducing the still relatively new German chancellor at 1934’s Nuremberg rally.  “But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!  Hitler, Hail Victory!  Hail Victory!  Hail Victory!”

Hess’s introduction reminds me a bit of a “meme” that I saw yesterday, in which Mitt Romney is shown thinking to himself “I can’t support Donald Trump, because he reminds me what a loser I am!”  Mr. Trump is manifestly obsessed with being a “winner” and with harshly mocking “losers”– Minderwertigen was the Nazi term for such people — and it seems that many of his followers see things the same way.  It’s reminiscent of Social Darwinism.  Sieg Heil!  Hail Victory!

On a more troubling note, though, I mention a comment posted on my blog yesterday by a Trumpist calling himself or herself mnn2301.  Not pleased by my public failure to support Mr. Trump, mnn2301 wrote this:  “If you don’t vote for Trump, you should be tried for treason as you will cause Hillary to win.”

mnn2301 may have been joking.  But there was no sign of humor in either that post or in his/her fairly insulting follow-up comment.

If s/he was serious, I find the comment really quite appalling.  But, unfortunately, not altogether surprising.

I have repeatedly said that, as a deeply committed, life-long political conservative, I cannot ethically vote for either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton.

Why do Mr. Trump and his movement concern me so much?

I served a German-speaking mission.  I was in neutral Switzerland most of the time; only a tiny portion of our mission spilled over into Germany then.  But I met and spoke with a fairly large number of Germans, and it was eye-opening to me.  As a kid, I had grown up with talk from my father about Nazism (he had been a sergeant in the 11th Armored Division, in General Patton’s Third Army), as well as a slew of television shows, movies, and documentaries about World War Two.  When I actually met Germans, though, I was stunned — though I shouldn’t have been — by how very normal they seemed, how much like “us” they were.  They weren’t uniquely evil, genetically unrelated to Americans, or conspicuously demonic.  They weren’t monsters.  Yet Germany had elected Adolf Hitler to head its government and had enthusiastically followed him into a savage war and into even more savage crimes against humanity.  And then I read Hannah Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she described the sheer ordinariness of the notorious Nazi criminal and mass murderer Adolf Eichmann.  And it became clear to me that such things might easily happen in America, too.  That we’re not somehow exempt or immune.

That is why Donald Trump and Trumpism concern me so very deeply.  Limited representative government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, decent treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, and respect for human rights and civil liberties are infinitely precious.  But they’re also delicate plants, and they’ve been rare in world history.  We trifle with them at our considerable peril.  And, once gone, they’ll be retrieved, if they’re retrieved, only at the price of much bloodshed.

To me, Mr. Donald Trump represents far too great a risk.  As a conservative, I cannot and will not support him.

Posted from Terricciola, Italy