Posted on 08/18/2015 7:44:18 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Via the Blaze, consider this an open thread for when Hannity interviews Beck about Trump later tonight at 10 p.m. on his Fox show. There are a million fascinating subplots to Trumpmania and one of them is the sometimes friendly, sometimes not so friendly rifts it’s opening up between big-name conservatives in the media. The Beck/Hannity rift is friendly: Here’s Beck’s respectful open letter to Rush, Sean, et al. last week about why they’re excited about a candidate who’s obviously not a conservative and here’s Hannity’s respectful reply. Read them now as background if you’re planning to watch their tete-a-tete later. (For a less friendly example of a disagreement over Trump, see Mark Levin’s justifiably disgusted reaction to Ann Coulter calling Trump’s immigration plan so great that she wouldn’t mind if he performed abortions in the White House himself.) Beck asks a good question here and then offers a good answer to it.
Why, he says, do conservative opinion-makers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity give Trump a pass on his many, many ideological heresies when normally they’re bulldogs in calling out centrists like Romney for lesser offenses? Beck’s answer: Trump has a swagger that Romney doesn’t. When Trump tells you he’s going to seal the border and destroy the Beltway establishment, you believe him because he doesn’t care who disapproves of him or his objectives. He’s going to do what he sets out to do. After trying for decades and failing to make American government incrementally more conservative, some righties are ready to gamble on a guy who, if, if, if he’s true to his word, will achieve more in that vein than any president since Reagan. Essentially, after six election cycles of making low-risk bets on business-as-usual Republicans, conservatives are willing to make a high-stakes gamble on a guy who won’t be business as usual but, er, might not govern as a Republican either.
Let me give you two other takes on Trumpmania, though, to help explain the divide between Trump-lovers and Trump-haters. I think there’s some truth to what Josh Barro says about Trump appealing to a less libertarian cohort of conservatives, which may explain why Beck in particular is having such trouble grasping his appeal.
Mr. Trump’s critique of government differs greatly from that of most conservatives. The conservative argument for small government ordinarily rests on the idea that citizens necessarily know better what to do with their money and their lives than the government does, because the government lacks the local knowledge that individuals have. Under this theory, even a government run by smart people will do lots of stupid, costly things.
Mr. Trump is positing not a general, inherent failure of government but a very specific one. He nearly shouted it at last week’s debate: “Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid.” This is the core idea of the Trump campaign, and it does not necessarily imply that government should be smaller. It implies that somebody smart, ideally Mr. Trump, should run the government.
If Republican voters share Mr. Trump’s diagnosis that the main problem with our government is stupid leaders, and if they believe that Mr. Trump is much smarter and wiser than the politicians who have come before him, they may be fully prepared to forgive his apostasies on Medicaid, taxes and everything else. If their real beef is not with our leaders but with big government itself, his support should fade as his policy moderation becomes clear.
Beck thinks government gallups along inexorably towards failure because that’s what collectivist institutions inevitably do. The best thing you can do with government is shrink it so that it does as little damage as possible. Some Trump fans — maybe not the sort of grassroots conservatives who read blogs like this one but surely some of his moderate supporters — think the problem with government isn’t necessarily that it’s too big but that it’s been badly run and/or run for the primary benefit of the wrong people and that a better steward could straighten things out. Again, the high-stakes bet on Trump is that he’s a guy uniquely capable, through the force of his personality and his ability to build silent-majority mandates, to do the straightening. Assuming, that is, he behaves like a Republican once in office. Beck, wisely, isn’t willing to make that bet. Hannity seems to be.
The other take on Trump’s appeal is my own, something I’ve been thinking about since he announced his immigration plan this weekend. Trump and Ted Cruz are frequently lumped in together (including by me) because they’re both overt populists and both seen as essentially right-wing phenomena even though Cruz’s base is more uniformly conservative than Trump’s is. In an important way, though, Cruz and Trump are opposites. The point of Cruz’s trademark rhetoric about “bold colors, not pale pastels” is that he’s a true believer in conservatism’s power to win over the masses if it’s presented unapologetically, in its strong form, by an able messenger like Ronald Reagan (or, of course, Ted Cruz).
Give the voters real conservatism and they’ll flock to you, whatever the pollsters or the demographics say. It’s an essentially religious belief in the power of the creed to convert infidels so long as it’s given a fair hearing.
Trump fans, on some level, have given up that belief assuming they ever had it to begin with, I think. They wish Cruz was right but they just don’t think conservatism is an electoral winner anymore, either because the character of the country has changed or because changing demographics have made it impossible. At this point, the best deal you’re going to get is a guy like Trump who’s compromised ideologically but seems to have some conservative instincts, most notably on immigration, and who seems like he really might be willing to push the country in that direction (on certain issues) if he’s given power.
In particular, by calling for all illegals to be deported and immigration to be reduced, Trump would drastically reduce the number of future voters from Mexico and the third world, most of whom would end up voting Democratic given past trends. (Coulter makes this point pretty explicitly in praising Trump’s plan.) If you’ve given up on conservatism’s power to persuade and have come to see national politics chiefly as a power struggle among different demographic groups, Trump arguably makes the most sense. He may not be a conservative but he’ll protect what’s left of the country and the people who still care about it from being preyed upon domestically and abroad, which, at this stage of American decadence, is the best you can hope for. Essentially, and very ironically, he’s the guy standing athwart history yelling “stop!” Not my candidate, but I think what I’ve described is a core part of his appeal.
Glen, you are at a loss because you don’t understand why conservatives trust Trump? I can explain it very quickly.
1. We have NOTHING to lose by trusting him. It was going to be a Dem or a Bush. And we were not going to vote for a Bush. We were resigned to President Hillary. Trump is better than that corrupt witch.
2. Candidates talk talk talk. Glen, you are right, we normally have to trust whether they will do any of what they promise, or even govern the exact opposite way. Trump HAS ALREADY DONE WHAT WE ONLY DARED DREAM: get us facing the truths we LIVE DAILY from illegal immigration. Started to shove the stake into the body of political correctness. Made all statists tremble and pee themselves. HES ALREADY DONE IT!!! No other candidate has actually CHANGED THE LANDSCAPE toward truth.
Get with the program.
He never said that he will vote for him(Trump) .
He just said that Trump rocks .
He is a lib..
He was hoping that I loved Trump
Rule #1 : Demand of them tough questions. No matter how they turn your wheels.
Man that post was so deep I doubt it got the appreciation it deserved
Folks here like it easy to grasp and spew
Lol
You’re high on the same MLK ashes Beck tokes
In other words, you don’t know squat about the communist left, their history, their various fronts, their allies in the democrat party, the manner in which they operate, etc, etc. Because if you did, you would appreciate his efforts to get this info out to the largely clueless masses. No one did it better than he did, dramatics aside. I didn’t care much for his antics, as it undermined his goals somewhat. I guess he felt he needed to do it in order to entertain those audience members with short attention spans, and other various learning disabilities, so that they’d stay tuned long enough to learn something.
This is the first time they have heard conservatism articulated in a way they understand. Whether he is a conservative or conservative enough he has introduced it to people who have never heard it before. These are the sheep and they are responding to America and its message.
He is very likely going to win with people who have never voted Repub in their lives.
The irony in your post
Beck lauds MLK as a conservative which is utter poppycock and you claim his detractors like me don’t understand the origins of the Left
Like only Beck ever read about the Fabians or Debs etc
What Beck does is pick and choose and ignore to suit his own half an adult lifetime as a lefty himself
He race panders nauseatingly
Bashes the shit out of the South.....poor Texas
Is pro Homo marruage
Covets being a Jew like a maniac
He’s just all over the place but manages to convince people who lacked the basics before they listened to him that he has it all figured out
There’s just no there there
But feel free to enjoy
I’m happy he lost his FOX pulpit
I was referring only to his exposing of the communist movement, their various front organizations, their history, their close allies in the demonRat party, etc. Most folks barely have a clue, thanks largely to the other conservative commentators’ and politicans’ failure to properly get the info out.
It’s worse.
The GPO leadership lied to us to get our votes.
They pissed on our leg and told us it’s raining.
I used to believe them.
Now I do not.
And it’s not just a lack of belief, but the knowledge that they deliberately lied to my face to get my vote, and are now chuckling about it and high-fiving each other (Boehner, McConnell, McCain, et al).
Over. It’s through. I won’t fall for the lies—from THEM—GOP—any longer.
If Trump is just a liar too, then I’ll never vote for him again, either, but I will give him ONE chance.
But the GPOe has flushed away all an any chance they had with me.
Adios, Au Revoir, Ciao, Finito, der Ende, Bon Voyage, Sayonara, Auf Wiedersein, So long, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, etc., etc.
“He’s just all over the place but manages to convince people who lacked the basics before they listened to him that he has it all figured out”
Boy that’s a fact. Beck impresses people who weren’t much interested in history before discovering him.
And so his connect-the-dots mishmash of conspiracy theory and selected bits of history seems like some secret key to understanding the world. Beck is more carnival barker than professor.
"No one did it better" other than Robert Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Whittaker Chambers, John Barron, James Burnham, KL Billingsley, David Horowitz, and a whole host of regular writers for National Review and Human Events back in their prime. Of course that would require reading instead of listening to the Beck clown show.
The question they should be asking is why don’t conservatives trust US (GOPe)?
The answer, Glenn, is past performance - that’ll get ya every time.
Yeah, but not one of these folks had a prime time TV show on a popular network like Fox. Of all of the people in prominent media positions, no one did it better than Beck. That is a fact. He reached a lot of folks who would never in a million years come across the people you mentioned. A relative small number of people are political junkies. Yet, even here, there are more than a few who have a vague understanding at best.
I had my FR home up and loaded with stuff on the commie left before Beck even had his show on Fox. On the other hand, as I expected, I see you have nada on your page. Zilch. And you've been here nearly 10 years longer than I have. It's no wonder you can't appreciate what Beck did. Any idea of when you might begin to help get the word out? As they say, better late than never.
Poppycock. Walker and Cruz are serious candidates.
For good reason. They were doing their exposés of Communism long before there was a Fox network or even cable television for that matter. People relied on books and magazines for information and to educate themselves.
The writers I mentioned are for the most part major figures in the field. You are likely too young to know anything about them considering that you think what's important is that they weren't on Fox.
What's important is the quality of the information they presented and not how it was presented. And what Beck is presenting is often nonsense. An obvious example being Beck's ridiculous claim that Martin Luther King was some sort of conservative. King had two major advisers on his staff, Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O'Dell. They both had been long time members of the Communist Party when Joe Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev were running the show. The presence of Levison and O'Dell is what earned King his FBI wiretaps during the Kennedy administration. But this doesn't fit Beck's clownish version of history so instead of informing his fans of this complicating fact of King's life he'll be doing some sort of MLK reenactment this fall while filling his fan's heads with more of his nonsense.
Alan Ryskind was another excellent writer who I failed to include in my list and he wrote about this aspect of King:
For some reason, Hannity has had this fool on his show today for an hour or so....Beck sounds like he’s in tears over Trump not coming on his show.....why Sean is doing this is a mystery.
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