Joining the growing chorus of Never Trumpers, the Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial page editor, Bret Stephens, defied the apparent sentiment of the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News and favors Donald Trump, and wrote a scathing editorial Monday night advising conservatives to rebuff Trump in order to save the conservative movement.
Stephens commences with what he and other staunch conservatives believe is the best hope for the country:
The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan. What isn’t survivable is a Republican president who is part Know Nothing, part Smoot-Hawley and part John Birch. The stain of a Trump administration would cripple the conservative cause for a generation.
Stephens then articulates a point central to conservatives’ philosophy, after noting the GOP had consistently slammed both Clintons, Bill and Hillary, for their lack of character: “Endorsing Mr. Trump means permanently laying to rest any claim conservatives might ever again make on the character issue.”
He adds, “Conservatives are also supposed to believe that it’s folly to put hope before experience; that leopards never change their spots. So what’s with the magical thinking that, nomination in hand, Mr. Trump will suddenly pivot to magnanimity and statesmanship? Where’s the evidence that, as president, Mr. Trump will endorse conservative ideas on tax, trade, regulation, welfare, social, judicial or foreign policy, much less personal comportment?”
Confronting former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s op-ed in the Journal in which he argued that voting for Trump would be “the second-worst thing we could do this November,” Stephens notes:
Mr. Jindal holds out the hope that Mr. Trump, who admires the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision on eminent domain … might yet appoint strict constructionists to the bench. Mr. Jindal also seems to think that a man whose preferred style of argument is the threatened lawsuit and the Twittertantrum, can be trusted with the vast investigative apparatus of the federal government.
Then Stephens probes farther: “The deeper mistake that Mr. Jindal and other lukewarm Trump supporters make is to assume that policy counts for more than ideas—that is, that the policy disasters he anticipates from a Clinton administration will be indelible, while Trumpism poses no real threat to the conservative ideas he has spent a political career championing. This belief stems from a failure to take Trumpism seriously, or to realize just how fragile modern conservatism is as a vital political movement.”
“Conservatives need to accept that most conservative of wisdoms—sometimes, losing is winning, especially when it offers an education in the importance of political hygiene.”
Bret Stephens
Stephens concludes:
Mr. Trump’s nomination not only gives his Democratic opponent the best possible shot at winning the election (with big down-ballot gains, too), but of permanently discrediting the conservative movement as a serious ideological challenger. They should be careful what they wish for. Mr. Trump could yet win, or one of his epigones might in four or eight years. This will lead to its own left-wing counter-reactions, putting America on the road to Weimar. For conservatives, a Democratic victory in November means the loss of another election, with all the policy reversals that entails. That may be dispiriting, but elections will come again. A Trump presidency means losing the Republican Party. Conservatives need to accept that most conservative of wisdoms—sometimes, losing is winning, especially when it offers an education in the importance of political hygiene.
Stephens has guts, unlike his most of his journalistic counterparts at Fox News, who also work for Murdoch. He is unafraid of standing up for conservatism even though the powers-that-be would like nothing more than his capitulation.
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