The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues-immigration, trade, and war-right from the beginning.īut let us back up. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer-“even if had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”-is unwarrantedly ungenerous. Not to pick (too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives.
They will even-as Charles Kesler does-admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high-except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. There are no guarantees.Įxcept one: if you don’t try, death is certain.
You-or the leader of your party-may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. For his many other writings, visit his Claremont Review of Books author page.Ģ016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. Publius Decius Mus was the pseudonym of Michael Anton, who in January of 2017 left the private sector to serve on the National Security Council.
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