Between the Trump-Infected Republicans and the Anti-American Democrats: Life Is Choosing, Whether You Like It or Not

Paul has an excellent and important post up this morning describing what Republicans stand for, and pointing out that, for by far the most part, it’s the same thing they’ve stood for since Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Essentially, it’s smaller, less expensive and intrusive government; more individual freedom (and, critically, responsibility); law and order; and unapologetic protection of American interests in the world.

But, as Paul points out (and I noted less adroitly in my post yesterday), Republicans have a problem. The titular leader of the Party is Donald Trump. The country was in better shape under Trump than it is now, largely because Trump, while himself a sometime conservative at best, governed mostly following traditional Republican principles. The problem is Trump’s persona, and specifically his numerous and serious character defects. He’s self-involved and juvenile to an astonishing degree, and not particularly honest either. He refused to accept that he lost the last election even though virtually all the polling (including from friendly polls) predicted he would, and his own quite conservative Attorney General, Bill Barr, and numerous other allies, told him he had. He then egged on a bunch of nonsensical rioters in body paint and buffalo horns who sought to disrupt (or prevent altogether — you can’t get a straight story) the counting of the electoral votes on January 6, and thus the peaceful and lawful transfer of power that is perhaps the single most cherished hallmark of the many noble gifts America has given the world.

I was never in doubt that the rioters would fail. American democracy was never at risk to the faux panic-stricken extent the Left wants us to believe. But none of that mitigates the stain Trump’s reckless vanity smeared on our history. Whether he’s a criminal or not — something that remains to be determined — he has forfeited public trust and proven himself unfit for office. We are fortunate that traditional Republican principles can be carried forward for the future of American governance by a number of excellent potential candidates, foremost among them (in my view) Tom Cotton.

But just as there’s a problem with Trump, there’s a counterpart problem, to wit, being blindly obsessed with Trump. Like any other obsession, it distorts judgment, and in a dangerous world, distorted judgment is not something America can afford.

In just two years, we’ll have another Presidential election. Someone is going to win it, and the country is then going to be run by either an administration with Republican principles or Democratic ones. This fact cannot be made to go away either because of our amply justified dismay with Donald Trump’s moral failures and contempt for law, or because of our at least equally justified dismay with Joe Biden’s decrepit embrace of the dangerous, sinister and corrosive forces now driving the Democratic Party.

As I said in the title of this post, life is choosing whether you like it or not.

The choice between the fundamental Republican outlook on America and the competing Democratic one is what deserves our attention. I won’t keep you in suspense: It has become pellucidly clear that, while Republicans overall think well of America and want to see her flourish, Democrats overall think America is a seriously flawed country, if not an evil one, and deserves the “reckoning” they not-so-secretly relish. (Hence the title of our blog, “Ringside at the Reckoning”). The partisan divide about race is closely related here. Republicans want equal opportunities while Democrats want equal outcomes. In order to get equal outcomes, they are willing if not eager to adopt policies rooted in contempt, if not in some instances hate, for the white majority. This is what they call “equity.”

And that is where I get off the train. I am painfully aware of the dangers Donald Trump and his kind of thinking present to the honest and lawful governance I spent my career, 25 years in the Justice Department, trying to advance. This is not what America is about, it’s poison, and Republicans need to wake up. But I will never — never — support a political party that hates me and wants to handicap my life and my family’s life because I’m white. Even more important, I will never support a political party that thinks America, or “Amerika” as they call it in their few honest moments, stinks. America has its flaws as every country everywhere at any time has its flaws, but it does not stink. It is, to the contrary, as Lincoln understood, the last, best hope of earth.

If the Democrats don’t know this, or pretend not to, or dismiss it as dull-witted Rotary Club patriotism, fine. It’s their Party. But for as long as this is their attitude, they cannot be trusted with governing the country.

The specifics of their toxic attitude toward America are everywhere, and, at least as reflected in criminal law, it’s getting people killed. They want no border enforcement because — let’s just say it — they don’t think America deserves even the rudiments of sovereignty a secure border represents. They don’t want criminals held accountable or imprisoned because they see criminals as victims and the rest of us as their oppressors. They don’t want to do anything serious to prevent Iran from getting The Big One (and indeed want to pay for Iran’s building it) because of America’s rancid “imperialism” in the Middle East (and everywhere else). They don’t want energy independence because America is the world’s polluter (even as the actual polluter, China, gets a pass). They don’t want white kids in their teens and twenties to have a fair, race-neutral shot at college admission because of a long-dead social system of slavery and Jim Crow those kids had nothing to do with.

In the real world, this is where we are. Just pretending that our ex-President is the country’s central problem is every bit as foolish and juvenile as he was, and, given the alternative we see now and the perils we face in the future, more dangerous. It’s not just Trump’s obsessive defenders, but his obsessive critics as well, who need to wake up.