A time for choosing

“A time for choosing” was the title of this speech by Ronald Reagan 60 years ago. Reagan made the case for Barry Goldwater over probably the most awful President of my lifetime, Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously accelerated a gruesome war he had no intention of winning and grossly expanded our morally and fiscally bankrupt welfare state.

Where’s Reagan now that we really need him? Unfortunately he’s gone, but he would make a better President dead than either of the choices we have now — so much so that I have a “Reagan-Bush” sign planted on my front lawn.

But Tuesday’s election is what it is, so again it’s a time for choosing. In this post, I want to start to examine the man now very slightly favored to win it, former President Donald Trump.

As often happens, my thinking runs along the lines of the Wall Street Journal, which opened its recent appraisal like this:

What a presidential choice America’s two major political parties have offered the country. The Democrat is a California progressive, elevated at the last minute, who looks unprepared for a world on fire.

“Looks unprepared” is a euphemism of comic proportions. Nothing about her campaign suggests she’s prepared in the slightest. She was an identity-centered pick for Vice President, and has conducted herself in office exactly as you would expect an identity-centered pick to do. The term “word salad” was not invented for her but it might as well have been.

The Republican is Donald Trump, who still denies he lost in 2020 and has done little to reassure swing voters that his second term will be calmer than his rancorous first.

This again is a euphemism. In just the last week, his extravaganza in Madison Square Garden started off with a racist “comedian” insulting Puerto Ricans, followed quickly by his seeming to suggest that Liz Cheney should get shot. He didn’t really mean that (what he meant was the credible point that, if she thinks it’s a good idea for American blood to be shed in overseas wars, maybe she could offer to be first in line), but, for the eight zillionth time, Trump spoke far more carelessly than a serious candidate, and still less a President, ought ever to be doing.

The best argument for a Trump victory is that it would be suitable penance for the many Democratic failures at home and abroad. A spending-fueled inflation that shrank real wages. Adversaries on the march. Abuses of regulatory power and law enforcement. If Ms. Harris wins, progressives will claim vindication and pursue more of the same—perhaps checked somewhat by a GOP Senate. A Harris defeat would slow the forced march left, at least for a time.

This pretty much nails it, with, in my view, one amendment: The best argument for a Trump victory is that it would be a rebuke and a setback to the vicious and arrogant anti-American thinking that undergirds our Reigning Culture and — sometimes concealed and sometimes not so much — the dominant outlook in academia, journalism, and the Democratic Party. The problems with their anti-American worldview are, in extremely condensed form, three-fold. First, it’s corrosive, notwithstanding all Ms. Harris’s phony and cynical talk about unity. Second, it’s false — America is not a racist vortex; it’s an enormous force for good for its own people and for the world. Third, a country cannot long survive when ruled by people who hate it. Contrary to Obama and his acolytes, including Ms. Harris, America does not primarily need reformation to atone for its awfulness. Primarily it needs restoration of the values that have made it singularly great. It won’t get it from Trump, but it will come a lot closer than it will from Obama’s fourth term.

A second argument is that Mr. Trump’s first term was better than expected. His leadership was often chaotic and caustic, and he rolled through multiple chiefs of staff and security advisers. But voters recall that at home he presided over a strong pre-Covid economy spurred by deregulation and tax reform. His judicial nominations were excellent.

…in contrast to what we can expect Ms. Harris’s to be. Being an identity pick herself, the chances that her judicial selection will be anything other than a Diversity Carnival are next to zip. But that’s not the end of it, either. Certain to be among her priorities is expanding (i.e., packing) the Supreme Court. If that goes through (fortunately its chances are slim, for now), it will be enough to make Sonia Sotomayor look like Felix Frankfurter.

Abroad [Trump] broke many diplomatic rules and his praise for dictators was disconcerting. But enemies stayed quiet on his watch, he kept Iran in a box, and the Abraham Accords began a new era of cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab states….

The authoritarian rule that Democrats and the press predicted never appeared. Mr. Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup. America’s checks and balances held, and Democrats benefited from the political backlash.

The most heated argument against Trump has been that he’s hell-bent to be a dictator (or a “fascist” in the language of the ever-so-unifying Ms. Harris) supported by, as the equally unifying Joe Biden would say, “garbage.” (I confess puzzlement about whether “garbage” is a step up or a step down from Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”).

And it’s true that Trump has only himself to blame for his reckless and law-free behavior on Jan. 6. He couldn’t even meet Richard Nixon’s standard for accepting defeat (and Nixon had a better case that his election actually was stolen). Trump’s behavior on that day was not acceptable for any citizen, and still less for the citizen whose Oath of Office consists primarily of a vow to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

It’s a legitimate and dead-serious objection to Trump, therefore, that his behavior threatened perhaps the crowning achievement of American democracy — the peaceful transfer of power from the governing party to the replacement the voters have chosen. Yet even here, in the heart of the most urgent argument against Trump, his enemies have planted the seed of one of the most urgent arguments against Harris, and one of the most deeply troubling prospects of a Harris Presidency:

As I said in my talk to the Berkeley Federalist Society, it is, ironically but precisely, the peaceful transfer of power that Trump’s indictments now put at risk. The entire, irreplaceable predicate of the peaceful transfer of power is the losing side's faith that the winning side won’t try to put them in jail. Any way you slice it, Trump's prosecutions — certain to endure if not multiply under a Harris Administration —  endanger that predicate as never before in our nation's history, including the aftermath of the Civil War. (Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were never tried for anything).  We have not asked ourselves with the sobriety the moment demands whether that is too high a price to pay to hold even an unrepentant man to the punishment that, strictly as a matter of law, he seems to many to have earned. But, under Harris and whatever hack she chooses to be Attorney General (Keith Ellison?) this is where we’re headed.

As I said in an earlier post, at least banana republics have bananas.