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.
Beck is correct:
There is nothing in Trump’s past that shows he’s a conservative.
Hannity was busted by Beck on why it was so important to judge Obama on his past yet he ignores everything in Trumps past.
What Glen doesn’t ‘get’ is that it is not a matter of trust. The crowd in DC has already made us distrust everything a politician says.
It is about the message and Trump’s apparent willingness to take on the PC police and not back down.
Huh. You’re right in that they all do convey a sort of weakness and almost weird immaturity of presence.
Beck’s a grandstander with melodramatic tears. And I’m never entirely convinced this whole conservative shtick of his isn’t some joke that went horribly wrong and he’s just playing out the string (he was a radio comic before, and he did name his production company after Welles’ company that pulled the biggest accidental hoax in history). Plus he backed Romney. I didn’t say Hannity knows #$%^ about $#%^, I just said I don’t understand why conservatives trust Beck.
I never cared much for his "dramatics". I always assumed he was doing it for theater, to entertain, to keep folks with short attention span syndrome interested long enough to learn something. To that effect, I'm sure it worked.
Your statement is rich.
Trump has a best a checkered past.
Republicans in the last ten years have at best a checkered past.
One could ask why conservatives are willing to trust another Republican other than Trump when the result is that we are always going to get screwed.
At this point Republicans have lied so much that there is no downside to going with Trump.
If any other Republican is elected I know what we are going to get.
May as well go with Trump. He may surprise.
I don’t understand it either.
I fear expectations like this are where deism, or an over optimistic Christianity that thinks the viable plan is to push the world uphill till it becomes perfect in place, will take us.
And it will bog your life down as it stubbornly fails to be fulfilled.
I can’t argue with any of that . . . which is exactly why I and millions of other conservatives are willing to give Donald Trump a serious look.
Problem is I think the whole thing is theater to entertain. And I just don’t believe a word he says. I really think he was trying to do a Colbert and the jokes landed wrong and instead he became a conservative icon.
The movement Obama rode in on, loved everything about this outlaw.
Might as well at least have our own outlaw.
Jealous of the spot light.
Rush was saying yesterday that the punditry believes reality is where they work and talking to their colleagues.
Reality for the voters is main street where Trump lives. He may be wealthy but he has to be tuned in.
The Republican candidates are all overshadowed by the establishment. I even read a Cruz article that said that over 90% of his superpac donors were large donors.
since we have been absolutely totally screwed by the Republicans and the media, there is no downside to going with Trump. We have nothing to lose. We have lost everything with the Republicans.
In the meantime the Republicans and the media don’t understand what is happening because reality to them is Washington DC and their cushy offices. It is so apparent they have no idea how or desire to understand the electorate which is why they do not understand why Trump is winning. Not even Glenn Beck.
First of all, what Limbaugh does is similar: entertains, in part, to keep people with ADS interested long enough to learn something.
Secondly, how can you not believe a word he says when you have the ability to verify for yourself and see that most of it is in fact true. The commie organizations, their histories, their various front groups, their allies and supporters in the democrap party, their objectives, on and on. This stuff easily checks out. Trust me.
‘. For my entire adult life as a self-described conservative, I always had a sharp trust and faith in the individual over the state. That’s totally died for me in the past handful of years, as I’ve seen the country’s culture and character slide into the sewer. Hence, I now no longer have any faith or trust in the American individual either”
That about nails it for me too.
Is it because they trust Trump? Or because they don’t trust the rest of the people running, most of whom are run-of-the-mill professional politicians?
I believe that’s the picture that God wanted people to get in the first place.
We are all cases of sinnerhood and we can’t even get civic approximations of virtue right.
People still trust truth, though. And if a fellow with a waffler history yet manages to start up a pretty solid fountain of it. they see hope.
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