‘Vote For The Crook. It’s Important’

One of the more annoying aspects of right-wing discourse in the age of Trump is how many Trump partisans meet any criticism of their man with a sheep-like accusation of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or “Orange Man Bad.” It’s the right-wing equivalent of Social Justice Warriors shrieking “Bigot!” whenever some speaks ill of a favored ethnic or sexual minority.

I think Trump is crooked, without question. Do I know for sure that he violated any laws? No. By “crooked,” I mean that he is not a man who cares about the law, either the legal code or the moral law. I think Bill Clinton was crooked too, by the way. I’m talking about the fundamental orientation of the man toward the law. Donald Trump is a disgrace.

But it still might be important to vote for him. Let me explain.

In Britain today, the Labour Party, in its annual conference, committed itself to extending voting rights to all foreign nationals living in the UK. That, and to open the borders for “free movement.” (I wrote about it here.) That means that if Labour takes power, it will effectively dissolve Britain as a nation.

Now, you may think that Tory PM Boris Johnson is a boob. But if you are any kind of British patriot, you have to do whatever it takes to keep Labour from taking power and dissolving the nation. That might mean a Liberal Democratic vote in the next general election, but it certainly means voting in whatever way stands the best chance of keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of No. 10 — even if it means voting for Boris Johnson.

This is an example of the principle of Vote For The Crook: It’s Important. To be clear, I don’t think Boris Johnson is a crook, but he is an example of a deeply flawed politician for whom one must vote to forestall a much worse fate than being governed by him.

This is something we Louisiana voters know from our 1991 governor’s race. It pitted former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, who was legendarily crooked, against former and unrepentant Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The entire GOP leadership denounced Duke. Lots of people, conservatives included, put this sticker on their car (I did too):

It was funny, but the point was a serious one: Edwin Edwards (who eventually went to prison in the late 1990s for bribery) was plainly a crook, but his crookedness was less harmful to the state than a Duke governorship would be. The bumper sticker was an emblem of despair over the state of Louisiana’s politics. It’s hard to express strongly enough how much both conservatives and good-government liberals despised Edwin Edwards. He was, and remains, a clever man, but also a symbol of good ol’ boy Louisiana political corruption. To find oneself in a position to have to vote for EWE because that was the only way to keep a Klucker out of the governor’s mansion was revolting. I can remember to this day standing in the voting booth and pulling the lever for Edwards — something I never, ever imagined doing.

But it was important. Edwards won in a landslide. Even people who hated the man knew they had to put the interests of the common good over their personal revulsion.

As regular readers know, I did not vote in the 2016 presidential race (it didn’t matter; my state was heavily pro-Trump), but if I end up voting for Trump in 2020, it’ll be a VFTC:II thing.

It’s easy to see how Trump is analogous to EWE (though unlike Trump, EWE was quite competent). But how can the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates possibly be analogized in any way to David Duke?

In 1991, Duke’s political positions were mostly boilerplate Reagan conservatism. Had an ordinary Republican espoused them, it would have been no big deal. He probably would have won. But everybody knew that Duke was no ordinary Republican. He had been the most visible face of the Ku Klux Klan, and was remarkably polished. I’ve you’ve never seen him on television, check out this NBC News report on his political rise. He looked and sounded like a mainstream politician.

Nobody was fooled by the makeover. Duke’s supporters knew who he really was, and that’s why they backed him. (I know this because I argued with some of them.) Regular Republicans knew that supporting Duke would have meant mainstreaming a truly hateful figure, that voting for him would have meant much more than voting for a politician who professed a particular policy platform.

With EWE, you knew that you would get a corrupt Democrat. With David Duke, you knew that you would get somebody who reset the rules in a fundamental, and fundamentally bad, way. Of course this is why NeverTrump Republicans voted for Hillary. I was not a Never Trumper, and would not have voted for Hillary, period. But I respected Republicans who did out of principle. Trump really and truly was a threat to the system they valued. In some ways, that was what I liked about him — that he would blow things up. But I also was worried that given his character, he would also blow up some norms that needed to be preserved. Both things happened.

Anyway, the point is that it is conceivable that an electorate could be faced with a choice in which the crook (or the fool) is preferable to his opponent. We had that in Louisiana in 1991. We will face that again in 2020, with whoever the Democrats nominate to meet Trump.

There are a variety of reasons why conservatives might conclude that it’s important to vote for the crook in 2020. Here are mine.

Let’s start with this:

Joe Biden – Male convicts that identify as female will be housed with women.

“In prison the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is not what in fact the prison says it is.” pic.twitter.com/587Hn9ssvf

— TrumpSoldier (@DaveNYviii) September 21, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

All the Democrats are very far to the left on LGBT issues. From The Advocate magazine, here’s a guide to where all the leading Democrats at the LGBT debate stand. They all support the Equality Act (as does Bernie Sanders), which, as I wrote here, would make it federal law for transgendered people to gain access to same-sex spaces. It’s a federal “Wax My Balls, Bigot” Act. Seriously, it is. We will not see the media talk much about how radical the Equality Act is, but voters should understand that this is what every one of the Democratic presidential candidates supports: female erasure. In fact, the Equality Act passed the Democratic House.

The Democratic Party is not just a party of gay rights. It is a party of radical transgender rights. It is a party that supports redefining the meaning of male and female in law. I can live with a crook in the White House before I can live with someone who would change the law in this way.

It is unavoidably the case that the expansion of LGBT rights comes at the cost of religious liberty for those believers and religious institutions that hold to traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic teaching on homosexuality (and, I suppose, transgenderism). In the years to come, we are going to see the tax-exempt status of “anti-LGBT” religious institutions challenged. We have already seen religious adoption agencies forced out of that ministry because they will not conform to the new mandate. The next decade or two is going to bring a concerted assault on religious liberty at every level except the right to worship. And the Democratic Party is on the wrong side of this issue.

Is Donald Trump a solid Christian? No, I don’t believe he is. Is he a morally upstanding man? Don’t make me laugh. But here’s the thing: Donald Trump does not hate people like me. The Democratic Party does, and will work to roll back my religious liberties, which are the most precious thing to me. Social and religious conservatives are going to have to depend for protection on federal judges who have strong First Amendment views regarding religious liberty in the years and decades to come. Those judges will not come from a Democratic president. They will come from a Republican president who has the ethics of a Corleone, without the style.

And let’s consider abortion. Here’s a report on courtroom testimony at a recent hearing regarding two undercover pro-life journalists who caught Planned Parenthood staffers and others on video saying grotesque things about their work. From the report about the court hearings:

Dr. Forrest Smith is on of the longest-practicing abortionists in the United States. He has performed anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 abortions throughout his career, over the course of 50 years. Smith testified to the ways abortions performed at Planned Parenthood facilities put women at risk and were modified to result in live births.

Smith reviewed video footage presented at a Planned Parenthood conference, and testified that the methods demonstrated in the video would cause a “tumultuous labor” that would result in “fetal expulsion,” in which “the fetus comes out without any assistance from the abortion doctor, no instrumentation.”

Smith also testified that Planned Parenthood abortionists’ methods and drugs used allowed them to extract more intact organs, and that video evidence showed they used different standards in determining the death of a fetus.

Smith explained that just because an umbilical cord is clamped or the limbs are torn off, does not mean the fetus is dead. He said one Planned Parenthood abortionist who previously testified, Doe 9, “is having live births although she doesn’t know.” Doe 9 was relying on “lack of pulsation of the fetal cord” and “that’s not fetal demise,” he said.

The Democratic Party and all its presidential candidates are 100 percent in favor of abortion extremism. They support this kind of thing. Donald Trump, noted crook, does not. I think what he said to the Ukrainian president is probably an appalling abuse of power. But Donald Trump does not favor laws that allow for the extermination of unborn children and the harvesting of their body parts, including beating hearts.

What about immigration? Am I happy with the way Trump has handled the immigration issue? No. But unlike Elizabeth Warren, his likely 2020 rival, he is not for open borders. Biden has been evasive on his immigration stance, but I have every confidence that he will move to the far left. And so forth.

The Democrats are also on board with race-and-gender wokeness, which unfairly stigmatizes whites and males. Whatever his many flaws, Donald Trump doesn’t think people like me are bad because we are white and/or male.

Abortion. LGBT. Religious Liberty. Immigration. On all of these issues, the Democrats are truly terrible, from a socially conservative point of view. Donald Trump is not. That’s not a trivial difference. These are fundamental questions about life, liberty, and the future of our country.

Look, I can understand why some people who aren’t liberal nevertheless refuse to vote for Trump, because they believe that his crookedness is too great a threat to the Republic. I respect that. Honestly, I do. I go back and forth about this a lot in my own mind. But for many conservatives, what the Democrats stand for is epically awful, and what a Democratic president in these radicalizing times will mean is a game changer that’s in the same category as a 1991 vote for David Duke would have been in Louisiana.

A lot can happen between now and Election Day 2020, but come next fall, it might be vital to take a deep breath (and a slug of Early Times), and … to vote for the crook, because it’s important. It’s not necessary to pretend that Orange Man Good to justify a vote for him, either.

UPDATE: Let me put it like this. Donald Trump represents serious moral disorder. The Democratic Party and its standard-bearers also represent moral disorder, but of a much more serious kind. That’s the difference.

Remember Nina Burleigh? She’s the journalist who, back during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, said that she would fellate Clinton herself to thank him for preserving abortion rights. At the time, conservatives (including me) cited that as an example of how corrupt liberals were. Just look at that so-called feminist, carrying water for that dirtbag Bill Clinton! we said. Where are her morals now?

In retrospect, Burleigh was right. She understood that protecting what she, as a feminist, considers to be a primary good (abortion rights) required having to defend a president that she no doubt believed to have behaved wrongly towards Monica Lewinsky. Preserving abortion rights was a much more important feminist goal than holding Bill Clinton to account for his exploitation of Lewinsky and his betrayal of his wife.

Yeah, it was gross. But from a pro-choice feminist point of view, it was defensible. Trump has turned a lot of us into Nina Burleigh Conservatives. I am quite confident that if the next Democratic president is every bit as sleazy as Donald Trump is, that most Democrats would stand by him too, if the alternative is a setback in abortion rights, and other things that matter greatly to them.

To repeat: there are degrees of moral disorder. This corrupt world puts religious and social conservatives in a position now of having to defend some more primary moral goods by having to surrender secondary moral goods.

UPDATE.2: I’m struggling with this. I’m going to think out loud here for a minute.

I was just thinking about the people with whom I interacted when I was writing about the Catholic abuse scandal, back in the years 2002-06. The ones who really did believe that protecting the greater mission of the Catholic Church required turning a blind eye to gross corruption in the priesthood and episcopacy. I’ve always believed that that was a grave mistake, because the only power the Catholic Church has in the modern era is moral. Or to put it another way: the Catholic Church has no power these days; it has authority. If people come to believe that the Church’s leaders are morally bankrupt, then they (the leaders) will lose everything.

To what extent is it like that with politics, do you think? Presidents can exercise power even if they have reduced moral authority, because the Constitution grants them those powers. The president might be a dirtbag, but by the authority of his office, he can make things happen.

When Richard Nixon’s deeds came to light, he had to go, because we were still a country that connected moral and political authority. The Clinton ordeal really was a watershed. If he had a sense of shame, he would have resigned. But he toughed it out, and his political supporters stuck by him. So did most American voters. The pollster Whit Ayres said on NPR today that even though Donald Trump is unpopular, most Americans do not at this point support impeachment. He said that the GOP made a big mistake in the 1990s, thinking that when the American people had all the facts about Bill Clinton’s behavior, that they would support impeachment. They were wrong about that, and paid a price. Ayres says the numbers for Trump and impeachment today are where they were for Bill Clinton — something the Democrats should worry about.

The Bill Clinton impeachment debacle revealed that Americans had a high tolerance for misconduct in the Oval Office. Something had changed since 1974. Bill Clinton lied under oath. It was no longer thought to be disqualifying if a president lied under oath. America had moved on. You could call it progress, if you like. We had become a more cosmopolitan country, one with more sophisticated morals. Or you could call it decadence. Whatever it was, it was new. The new thing was not personally corrupt politicians; it was that we the people were now able to accept personal corruption in our presidents.

Again, we can accept it in political leaders but not in religious leaders, because the authority of religious leaders is almost wholly moral. I say “almost,” because true-believing members of traditional churches (e.g., Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans) believe in the Augustinian principle of ex opere operato — which means, basically, that the religious authority works through the office, not the character of the man who holds the office. This is a very, very important principle, because it guarantees the faithful that the sacraments they receive from the hands of a corrupt bishop or priest are trustworthy, even if he is not.

Still, in our time, if churchmen are to have any authority beyond the minimal ability to offer the sacraments, they have to be perceived as men of high moral character. For better or worse, gone are the days when people respected the bishop because he was the bishop. That would have happened even if the abuse scandal had never occurred, simply because it is in the leveling nature of our culture today. But heaven knows the abuse scandal accelerated the decomposition of clerical authority.

A voter can say “President ____ may be corrupt, but he pursues policies I favor, whereas the opposition would pursue policies I consider harmful. Therefore, I’ll just clench my jaw and keep supporting President ___.” But it is much more difficult for a religious believer to say that about corrupt bishops. Their personal corruption eviscerates their moral authority, which is almost the only authority they have. You might not want your daughter to work for either Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, but you might be happy to have either man fighting for your political views in the public square. But nobody is going to want their son to work in any capacity for a Cardinal McCarrick figure.

Anyway, I’m belaboring the point. What concerns me is how far we can go in accepting moral corruption in our presidents without the office itself losing its legitimacy. Jonathan V. Last has a short but unsettling reflection on the possibility of impeaching Trump. He points out that nobody knows what impeaching Trump will bring. Trump has managed to destabilize the presidency in a time of peace and prosperity, says Last; imagine what would happen if one of America’s adversaries decided to test us in this unstable moment. More:

But there is a price to be paid for destabilizing the status quo—even when the net effect is positive. That price increases geometrically when you destabilize everything—both the good and the bad—all at once. Because that is not mere “destabilization.” It’s chaos.

In any stable system—no matter how sub-optimal it may be—there is a price for creating chaos.

We are about to start getting a look at the bill.

I would argue that the more significant destabilization took place when the Bush administration, and the entire American national security establishment, led this nation into a disastrous war of choice in Iraq under false pretenses. I would argue that the more significant destabilization occurred when the financial crash of 2008 happened … and few if any elites paid a price for it. Donald Trump didn’t do those things. Those things arguably created Donald Trump.

However, as Last points out, you can say the non-traditional (to speak as neutrally as possible) things Donald Trump has done as president are on balance for the good, because the status quo was harmful, but you also have to concede that even a corrupt status quo established order. People who think chaos is preferable to order have never lived in real chaos.

Our political system is not a religious system. People can just walk away from church if they lose faith in its leadership. You can’t just walk away from the United States of America. You may despise everything about the system, but if you violate its laws, you’re going to jail.

But.

The constitutional system of the United States of America is not made of stone. It is something that will stand as long as the people who live in this country believe in it. What happens when we arrive at a point where each half of the country believes that the political views and candidates of the other half are illegitimate?

What happens when the next war presents itself? Who will go to war behind a commander in chief that they despise? Not just dislike, but despise? At some point, a president who doesn’t have moral authority becomes a danger to the nation, because he delegitimizes its political institutions. Once that starts, how does it end?

 

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