Posted on January 26, 2016

“Conservatives” Blast Trump

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, January 25, 2016

National Review has published a collection of short blasts against Donald Trump by 22 “conservatives.” They worry about some of his policies, but mainly they call him names. In an introductory essay called “Against Trump,” the editors set the tone: The Republican front-runner is “heedless and crude,” “a huckster,” “a menace to American conservatism,” and “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist.”

Their writers then get to work. Mr. Trump is a “con man” (Mona Charen), a “know-nothing demagogue” who suffers from “raging egomania” (Mark Helprin), “the politicized American id” (John Podhoretz), a “glib egomaniac” and “bombastic showoff” (Thomas Sowell), a “political conman” (Katie Pavlich), a “narcissist” (Cal Thomas), a harbinger of “two-bit Caesarism” (William Kristol), a peddler of “know-nothing protectionism,” “nativism,” and “one-man rule” (David Boaz), etc.

You know you’ve won the argument when your opponents are reduced to name-calling.

But there are a few substantive complaints amidst the roaring. One is that Mr. Trump is too ignorant to run the country. According to Mark Helprin, Mr. Trump “doesn’t know the Constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defense, economics beyond real estate,” and so on. This is true of almost the entire political class. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were genial ignoramuses, but Reagan is a hero to National Review.

Andrew McCarthy sniffs that Mr. Trump doesn’t know who Hassan Nasrallah is. I doubt Mike Huckabee, Jim Gilmore, Chris Christie or John Kasich know who he is either, and Ben Carson thinks the pyramids were built to store grain.

Several NR writers think Mr. Trump wants to be a dictator. David Boaz of Cato says that Mr. Trump “is effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini . . . and govern by fiat.” Mr. Trump is certainly full of promises about what he will do, but so is every other candidate. They say “I will (fill in the blank).” They don’t say “I will persuade Congress to pass legislation that will (fill in the blank).”

Many of these “conservatives” say they worship limited government and the separation of powers, and perhaps they do, but I can’t think of a recent president who hasn’t attacked another country without a declaration of war, and Barack Obama has run wild with executive orders. The NR “conservatives” may not like that, but why are they angrier about what Mr. Trump hasn’t done than what others have done? According to their precious Constitution, the Supreme Court and the threat of impeachment will curb Mr. Trump’s imagined excesses.

But Donald Trump is guilty of worse than Ceasarism and bombast. National Review considers itself the tabernacle of conservatism, and its high priests have declared that Mr. Trump is not a conservative. They say he’s a closet liberal on abortion, gun control, socialized medicine, and big government.

For me and for millions of Americans, the answer to that is a resounding “Who cares?” Most of the time, Donald Trump doesn’t even claim to be a conservative. He cares deeply about the well-being and happiness of Americans, and is the first major candidate since Patrick Buchanan who understands that South-of-the-border illiterates don’t make good Americans. So long as he sticks to that message it won’t make any difference whether he’s “liberal” or “conservative” or a conman or a showoff or any of the other names National Review calls him. People of all political persuasions will vote for him.

There is nothing partisan about wanting your people to survive and prosper. What does the saying “politics stops at the water’s edge” mean but that when the survival of the nation is threatened we set aside disagreements and fight the common enemy. Our survival is threatened, and Mr. Trump is the only candidate who seems to understand that.

But NR’s sniffing about Mr. Trump not being a conservative highlights the most inexplicable and pathetic thing about “conservatives.” They don’t realize that the one thing that must absolutely be conserved is something they pride themselves on pretending doesn’t matter: the race of people who make what they call conservatism even possible. Do they really believe that Mexicans and Haitians and Guatemalans and Vietnamese and Bangladeshis and Chinese are ever going to be made to care about the Second Amendment or Madisonian democracy or limited government?

This is why these people are cuckolded conservatives or “cuckservatives.” Just like a man with a faithless wife, they are lavishing care on somebody else’s children. Their beautiful Constitution and elegant libertarianism are wasted on Third-Worlders, for whom these things are alien and meaningless. The institutions National Review thinks it is preserving will be kicked aside by people whose ancestors had no hand in building them.

What cuckservatives are determined not to understand is that without the historic American people, there is no America, no Western culture, no civilization fit for white men. Anyone who stands for the European people and traditions of America is our comrade, whatever his politics.

There is something grotesque about people who sacrifice Americans to abstractions, who put principle over people. And if they think that pronouncing Donald Trump “not a conservative” will move the electoral balance by even a hair they are deluded. Do they imagine people all across America saying to themselves, “I was going to vote for Trump, but NR says he’s not a conservative so I guess I’ll vote for Jeb Bush”?

Liberals are just as deluded about the insignificance of race, of course. Their vision of the perfect society requires a population of Danes, not Mexicans. The only part of “liberalism” Third-Worlders understand is government handouts. Feminism, gay rights, “diversity,” “tolerance,” environmentalism, yoga and fruit-juice drinking–you don’t see much of that in “communities of color.” But liberals are at least consistent in their madness. They want to change everything, so it is more excusable that they not realize that changing the population makes their kind of change impossible.

But back to the anti-Trump blasts, I almost forgot: Not one of the NR 22 dared call Mr. Trump a “racist” on the record, but there were plenty of hints: “Trump’s vitriolic–and often racist and sexist language–language” (Russell Moore), “the unavoidable issue of racism” (Michael Medved), and “racial and religious scapegoating” (David Boaz). Keep it up, National Review. You’re beginning to sound just like the Washington Post; Dana Milbank titled one of his columns “Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.”

When both National Review and the Washington Post agree that the Republican front-runner and probable nominee–a man who could well become the president of the United States–is a “racist,” we know that a new day is dawning in America.