Henry Bodkin
2024-11-04 18:59:55 UTC
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PermalinkOct. 29, 2024
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
With a week to go before the election, Kamala Harris has yet to come up
with a compelling rationale for her candidacy, other than to accuse her
opponent of being a fascist. Ask her a question to which she doesnt have a
canned answer and she struggles for a coherent response. The most notable
difference between her current presidential bid and her previous one in
2019 is that she has repudiated many of her past views. Is it because shes
hiding her real convictions or because she has few real convictions at
all?
Yet Im going to vote for her. Other conservatives should, too.
Why? Because Donald Trump is worse. He isnt worse because hes a fascist:
If he were, his outspoken opponents would have wound up in prison, not on
MSNBC. He isnt worse because his presidency was an unremitting failure:
The (prepandemic) economy thrived, Operation Warp Speed was a triumph, the
world was more at peace than it is today and there were important
diplomatic achievements such as the Abraham Accords. Nor is he the only one
who can disrespect political norms: Its Harris, not Trump, who is
campaigning on ending the Senate filibuster and perhaps packing the Supreme
Court.
But Trump is worse in ways that matter profoundly to the rule of law, the
health of capitalism and the future of freedom at home and abroad.
Conservatives who claim to care about these things should also care about
what Trump may do to each of them and, crucially, do so in the name of
conservatism. Consider:
Law. Conservatives are indignant about the flimsy civil and criminal cases
progressive prosecutors have brought against Trump cases they almost
certainly wouldnt have brought against anyone else.
But politicizing justice is exactly what Trump sought to do during his
presidency. He tried to strong-arm Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian
president, into participating in a dirt-digging expedition against Joe and
Hunter Biden. His Justice Department tried to block a merger between AT&T
and Time Warner in 2017, almost certainly out of presidential spite against
CNN. He appointed a hack as an acting attorney general and took legal
advice from conspiracy theorists, including Sidney Powell.
Oh, and he incited a mob to obstruct the lawful transfer of power and has
never recognized the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The only question
honest conservatives should ask themselves is this: If a Democrat had
behaved this way, how would they feel?
Capitalism. This year, for the first time in history, interest payments on
the federal debt, $870 billion, exceeded our $822 billion in military
spending. The overall federal debt has more than doubled in the past 10
years alone, to nearly $36 trillion.
Conservatives are supposed to be against overspending government. But an
analysis from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
estimates Trump will add about $7.75 trillion in debt. Conservatives are
supposed to be against higher taxes. But tariff which Trump says is his
favorite word is just another word for tax, and his plans to impose
massive new tariffs on imported goods will inevitably be paid by American
producers and consumers. Conservatives are supposed to abhor inflation, but
Trumps fondness for big spending and low interest rates is inherently
inflationary.
Conservatives are also supposed to dislike government regulation. But as
the Financial Times columnist Ruchir Sharma noted in July, Trump ended up
adding more than 3,000 new regulations a year, in the same range as his
predecessors going back to Bill Clinton.
Freedom. The left overstated (and in doing so, damaged) its case that Trump
was Vladimir Putins asset. But Trump was and remains a sycophant to
Putin and to Chinas Xi Jinping and North Koreas Kim Jong-un and
Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarys Viktor Orban. What president
can lead the free world when hes so consistently effusive about its
enemies?
Trumps supporters rejoin that his policies toward these countries were
often better than his rhetoric. True but mainly because he was surrounded
by advisers like Gary Cohn, Jim Mattis and John Bolton, who didnt let him
get away with his worst policy impulses. Other advisers, including
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, did do Trumps bidding: What we got was the
dishonorable negotiation with the Taliban that laid the ground for Bidens
disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Today, my Trump-leaning friends acknowledge that his pledge to cut off aid
to Ukraine would be a victory for Putin and a calamity for the West but
that its counterbalanced by what they see as his stronger support for
Israel. But the Middle East and Ukraine are, at bottom, different fronts in
the same war. Allow Putin to succeed in Ukraine, and Israels threats from
Russias allies in Iran, Syria and Yemen will multiply.
Like many unhappy conservatives, I look at this election as a choice
between misfortunes. Faced with a similar dilemma in 1800, Alexander
Hamilton offered advice that should resonate with at least a few right-
leaning voters today: If we must have an enemy at the head of the
government, he wrote to a fellow Federalist, the House speaker Theodore
Sedgwick, that May, let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are
not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his
foolish and bad measures.
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