The sliver of terrain I inhabit grows slimmer by the day
It's nearly enough to make a conservative lose his balance
A frequent theme of my Precipice essays is the ever-narrower piece of ideological real estate I inhabit as the crackup continues. Recent events have only confirmed my sense that there’s ever-less terrain on which to plant my feet.
Conservative writer Justin Stapley has been speaking for me lately, when he argues that the movement on the Right the crux of which is opposition to Donald Trump has been badly compromised by some of its most prominent voices exhorting all of us to vote Democrat this fall. The Lincoln Project is a distinct organization from Principles First, but a lot of Lincoln Project leaders were featured speakers at the recent Convention on Founding Principles. Stapley now asserts that it is too late in this election cycle to focus on ideas and principles, and that the Principles First project’s moment is not now.
Why can’t the likes of Stapley or me just get on board with the Lincoln Project’s way of seeing things?
I’ve never gone for the binary-choice argument, from May 2016 to the present. I wrote someone in as my presidential choice then, and I’m likely to do so again this November. The get-behind-Biden conservatives - I guess they’re still conservatives - portray him as the decency-and-moderation alternative to the Very Stable Genius, but his views on energy, for example, give the lie to that image. Biden’s running mate’s pronouncement that she is “nothing but proud” of domestic violence-perpetrator Jacob Blake and that his antisemitic father is “incredible” is another recent example of where this ticket is really situated on the spectrum.
Trumpists trot out the binary-choice argument as well. They feel like they have an ace up their sleeve in the number of people, mostly administration staffers, who are willing to go on record with their names saying that Trump didn't disparage the US military with over-the-top insults on a 2017 trip to France vis-a-vis the number of anonymous sources that Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, the Associated Press and the Washington Post independently cite for proof that he did.
But consider how this story fits a pattern that includes the account of Trump calling a roomful of generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” or the account of his insults, on phone calls and to their faces, of such leaders of US ally nations as May, Merkel, Macron and Trudeau.
And Trump didn’t help his case with his weird remarks the other day about generals, soldiers and companies that make bombs.
And now the if-you’re-conservative-you-really-ought-to-get-behind-Trump crowd is making hay of the fact that Anthony Fauci says he doesn’t feel Trump has ever downplayed the threat of the coronavirus. Now, I have the utmost respect for Dr. Fauci. He strikes me as a straight shooter whose take on the pandemic I can use as the basis for conducting myself. But what he has to say has to be squared with what Bob Woodward has on tape, namely, Trump saying "I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
No, sorry, everybody, but nothing I’m seeing lately lessens the confirmation of my take that the bust-up of post-America continues apace. The real conservative response, in my estimation, is to keep arguing for those principles and ideas that the Trumpists mock us for and the Left hates us for. No, we offer no remedy for the bust-up, but at least a basis for rebuilding will be available after it’s final.