San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Nothing conservative about Trump or mob
The conservative movement was born in reaction to the mob. Its foundational document is Irish statesman Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
“Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour,” Burke wrote, “than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” Or 245 years, in the case of the United States.
No one who has read Burke, no true conservative could have watched what happened in Washington on Jan. 6 without understanding precisely why events unfolded as they did — and with horror and profound sorrow that it was taking place here in our country.
Burke devoted a considerable amount of his writing and speeches to the idea that virtue and tradition go hand in hand with law and order. Without these foundations, our freedoms are always one step away from being trampled by the mob.
“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue,” Burke asked. “It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice and madness, without tuition or restraint.”
If President Donald Trump knows who Burke is, he is almost certainly unfamiliar with Burke’s writings or their import. Virtue, wisdom, tradition, restraint — these are conservative concepts one does not associate with Trump.
Trump may not be a conservative, but there are still 74 million Republicans and conservatives — not the same — who voted for him in November and who are
enamored of his brand of politics. “When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service,”
Burke observed. “They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.”
He became president and took over the Republican Party because of one accident of history and one important insight. The accident of history was that in 2016, he faced a deeply flawed opponent in Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party cleared the deck for her candidacy, failing to
properly vet her for national election and alienating many of its own progressive voters.
The important insight was that for the better part of three decades, both the Republican and Democratic parties had abandoned a large segment of the American population. As jobs went overseas and immigrants illegally crossed the border, Republicans shrugged their shoulders and said these were the prices to be paid for a global economy and free markets. Democrats scolded the same people, telling them that the United States was irredeemably racist and a malicious actor on the
world stage.
In 2016, Donald Trump gave voice to these forgotten Americans. Guided by a little virtue and wisdom, Trump might have capitalized on his economic and foreign policy accomplishments to create something greater than himself, reshaping our politics with conservative principles of incrementalism, accountability, subsidiarity and civility.
Instead, unbound by the restraints of virtue or tradition, he squandered those accomplishments in a bonfire of self-absorbed outbursts, personal attacks and assaults on common decency. He fueled the final
Irish statesman Edmund Burke, a statue of whom stands in the U.S. capital, believed that without virtue and tradition, freedoms are in danger of trampling by the mob.
conflagration in front of the White House, encouraging a mob to march on Congress and upend the constitutional transfer of power on his behalf.
Our nation and its institutions, bruised and sullied, will survive the mob. The wisdom and virtue of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution are far greater than the vindictiveness of the man who has occupied the Oval Office for the past four years and the extremists who attacked the Capitol. “All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author and Founder of society,” Burke wrote.
The Trump Republican Party has, in succession, lost the
House, the White House and now the Senate. The words and actions of the president and his enablers, aside from the loss of life and destruction at the Capitol, have done long-term, perhaps irreparable harm to the Republican Party and the conservative cause. If Republicans have hopes to reverse these electoral failures any time in the near future, and for the good of the nation, they will need to return to Burke and the conservative principles that once guided some of them.