If you’ve paid the slightest bit of attention over the past nine years, you know that the Republican Party and the conservative movement at large has been in a fierce internal grappling session. The struggle hasn’t let up, and no matter who wins the election in November, I don’t think it will resolve itself anytime soon.
The below clippings are the perfect illustration of the ideological civil war that has consumed the right.
I will paste a column from New York Times columnist David French, followed by a rebuttal from Dan McLaughlin of the National Review. I have shared articles from both men before in this blog, but their diverging opinions exemplify the different paths both men have taken.
DAVID FRENCH
To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris
Aug. 11, 2024
I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use I.V.F. to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.
But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.
Here’s what I mean.
Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”
What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?
Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naïve; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.
Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. The legal results speak for themselves. A cascade of successful defamation lawsuits demonstrate the severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty. Fox paid an enormous settlement related to its hosts’ relentless falsehoods during Trump’s effort to steal the election. Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia election workers $148 million for his gross lies about their conduct while counting votes. Salem Media Group apologized to a Georgia voter who was falsely accused of voter fraud and halted distribution of Dinesh D’Souza’s fantastical “documentary” of election fraud, “2,000 Mules.”
And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Several additional defamation cases are pending against MAGA networks and MAGA personalities.
Let’s take another assertion that should be relatively uncontroversial: Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.
I know that threats and violence aren’t exclusive to the right. We all watched in horror as a man tried to assassinate Trump; another man threatened Brett Kavanaugh’s life; and no one should forget the horrific congressional shooting, when an angry liberal man attempted a mass murder of Republican members of Congress on a baseball field.
But only one party has nominated a man who was indicted for his role in the criminal scheme to steal an American election, a scheme that culminated in a violent political riot. Only one party nominated a man who began the first rally of his 2024 campaign with a song by violent insurrectionists. He played “Justice for All,” a bastardized version of the national anthem by a group called the J6 Prison Choir. The song features the “Star-Spangled Banner” interspersed with excerpts of Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance.
It’s not just Trump’s lies that are contagious, but his cruelty as well, and that cruelty is embedding itself deeply within one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies, conservative evangelicals. It is difficult to overstate the viciousness and intolerance of MAGA Christians against their political foes. There are many churches and Christian leaders who are now more culturally Trumpian than culturally Christian. Trump is changing the church.
And to what end?
It is fascinating to me that there are voices online who still claim that a person can’t be Christian and vote for Democrats, when the Trump campaign watered down the Republican platform on abortion to such an extent that it’s functionally pro-choice. Earlier generations of the pro-life movement would not have tolerated such a retreat. They would have made it clear that there were some principles Republicans simply can’t abandon without becoming a fundamentally different party.
It becomes even stranger to claim that Christians can’t vote for Democrats when the prime-time lineup at the Republican convention featured an OnlyFans star, a man who publicly slapped his wife, a man who pleaded no contest to an assault charge, and another man who had sex with his friend’s wife while the friend watched — and that’s not even including any reference to Trump himself.
Even if you want to focus on abortion as the single issue that decides your vote, the picture for abortion opponents is grim. Trump should get credit for nominating justices who helped overturn Roe (though the real credit for the decision goes to the justices themselves, including the George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito, who actually wrote the majority opinion).
But when we’re dealing with a complex social phenomenon, political and legal issues are rarely simple. For the first time in decades, abortion rates and ratios increased under Trump. In addition, the best available evidence indicates that abortion rates are up since the Dobbs decision.
Barack Obama was an unabashedly pro-choice politician, yet there were 338,270 fewer abortions in 2016 than there were in 2008, George W. Bush’s last year in office. Though Trump nominated anti-abortion justices and enacted a number of anti-abortion policies, there were 56,080 more abortions the last year of his term than there were in the last year of Obama’s presidency.
Even worse, after Dobbs the pro-life position is in a state of political collapse. It hasn’t won a single red-state referendum, and it might even lose again in Florida, a state that’s increasingly red yet also looks to have a possible pro-choice supermajority. According to a recent poll, 69 percent of Floridians support the pro-choice abortion referendum, a margin well above the 60 percent threshold required for passage.
If the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is to reduce the number of abortions, not just to change legal precedent, then these numbers and these electoral outcomes are deeply alarming. If present trends continue, then abortion opponents will have won an important legal battle, but they’ll ultimately lose the more important cultural and political cause.
Reasonable people disagree with me. I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion. I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes. Time and again we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions. There are truly bad actors in American politics, but we cannot write off millions of our fellow citizens who vote their consciences based on their own knowledge and political understanding.
At the same time, we should make the argument — firmly but respectfully — that this is no ordinary race and that the old political categories no longer apply.
For example, how many Republicans would have predicted that voting for a Democrat would be the best way to confront violent Russian aggression and that the Republican would probably yield to a Russian advance? In many ways, the most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin. By voting for pro-life politicians down ballot, I can help prevent federal liberalization of abortion law. But if a president decides to abandon Ukraine and cripple NATO, there is little anyone can do.
While there are voters who are experiencing a degree of Trump nostalgia, remembering American life pre-Covid as a time of full employment and low inflation, there is a different and darker story to tell about Trump’s first term. Our social fabric frayed. It’s not just that abortions increased: The murder rate skyrocketed; drug overdose deaths hit new highs; marriage rates fell; and birthrates continued their long decline. Americans ended his term more divided than when it began.
I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.
The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.
That was the David French piece from the New York Times. Now, here is the rebuttal from Dan McLaughlin.
What’s Missing from the ‘Conservative Case for Voting for Harris’
By Dan McLaughlin
Our old friend David French writes in the Sunday New York Times, “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris.”
I am deeply disappointed in the effort. There are two very big omissions from this column that destroy its persuasive force.
A vote reflects two kinds of choices: a selection between alternatives in who will govern us, and a statement (in the case of a columnist or a leader, a public statement) of what we endorse. There are often tensions between the two, and we all have our own views of how to resolve those tensions and what lines we won’t cross.
My own view: I’m a longtime Trump critic who voted third party in 2016, voted write-in in 2020, and planned to write in again in the Trump-vs.-Biden race. I’m also still a conservative Republican. I agree with French that Trump has been a menace to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, that he has acted against our systems of law in ways that cannot easily be absolved or minimized, and that he is a corrosive force in our national life. I’ve supported some very bad people who agreed with me, but it’s harder to write off character and fitness for the job in the presidency, given its vast powers. I’ve always said there were only two things that could make me consider a vote for Trump: a Kamala Harris nomination and a serious push for Court-packing by the Democrats. The past month has brought us both. I’m still not sure if I could pull the Trump lever even against Harris, but that’s another day’s argument.
In any event, I’ve tried very hard for eight years to be charitable towards fellow conservatives who felt compelled to vote Trump in the general elections as the lesser evil, and also towards those of us who opposed Trump so fiercely that they felt it necessary to vote Democrat.
But in justifying such a choice, a columnist has a duty to face the truth, and to confront readers with that truth. French fails at the task.
A columnist also has a duty to stay true to principles, or explain why they have changed — given that the profession of principles and their application to situations is the core of the columnist’s job.
This column fails on both counts. On the first, aside from the title and declaration of intent to vote, French mentions Kamala Harris only twice, saying with vast understatement, “I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion,” and adding, “if Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin.”
That’s it. Nothing else is mentioned of Harris’s views on domestic or foreign policy, her approach to law and the rule of law, how she uses power, or what sort of people she might appoint to the executive and judicial branches (Tim Walz is not mentioned). I have laid out the case at length that Harris is a dangerous authoritarian with contempt for law and individual rights, even citing French’s own past work; he addresses none of this, either to defend it or to explain why it doesn’t matter. On foreign affairs, no consideration is given to confronting Xi’s China, or Hamas, or Iran. French treats this as an election on only two issues, and even there he must muffle his acknowledgement that the candidate he supports is as bad as bad could be on one of the two, with enormous cost to innocent human life.
This is a dereliction of duty, even understanding the constraints of word counts (this piece runs some 1,600 words, which is long for the Times) and of what the editors of the Times will permit to be printed. Harris is a menace. If one must vote for a menace for the same reasons Churchill would ally with Stalin, one must at least be honest enough to lay out the consequences and why they are worth it — not least to an audience of readers comfortable in their prejudices against noticing those consequences.
Second, as a matter of principle, French has spent years arguing against binary-choice logic and for the view that one morally must not vote for an unfit character to be chief executive no matter how bad the alternative is. This is an intellectually respectable position. Yet, here, he declares himself for Harris without even bothering to make the case that Harris is fit to be our commander-in-chief, chief magistrate, and defender of our Constitution. I suspect that he does this because he knows that describing Harris as fit for the office is an indefensible position, or at least one whose defense comes at a much more comprehensive cost of one’s principles. And so the principle falls silent.
There are conservative cases to be made for some very hard choices in this world. But one of the central duties of a conservative is to remember, always, that there are trade-offs for everything. To frame a case for Kamala Harris in the presidency only in the negative sense that it avoids another Trump administration is to pretend away those trade-offs. But they will not go away by ignoring them.
That was Dan McLaughlin’s deconstruction of David French’s argument in favor of voting for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. For the record, I’m with McLaughlin. French made an excellent case for not voting for Trump. He did not make a case for voting for Kamala Harris. You wanna save the GOP by forcing Trump out? Fine… But what about the country?
To paraphrase Dr. Pulaski from Star Trek TNG, French’s vote is very much like curing the disease by killing the patient. My own thoughts can best be summed up in my previous entry, but I felt that the points and counterpoints made by these two professional pundits were worth preserving in these pages.
