Things are getting interesting. How long until we collapse into hot civil war? The replacement of the rule of law with the rule of lawfare is a bad sign. The following repost, slightly redacted, is from January 2022, and more relevant that ever.
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This from a reader:
It would be very interesting to hear your take on Trump — why do you think that his leadership of the country, despite obvious personality flaws, is less risky for the US and the world than a reasonable alternative? Yes, the ideological, thoughtless, and totalitarian far-left is dangerous, but isn't unprincipled, pugilistic and me-and-my-family first leadership any better? Is your thinking driven by "the lesser of two (or three) evils"?
1) I avoid talk of the lesser or least of evils. I prefer to speak of the better or the worse.
2) Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two, despite the fact that politics is informed by political theory. Politics is a practical game! It is not mainly about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And no one with practical sense lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect. Politics is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances with the best implementable ideas.
3) And which ideas are those? The ideas, values, and principles of the Founders. They arrived as close as anyone ever has to a sound and viable political theory.
4) Now if you accept (2) and (3), then the choice is clear: you support Trump over Hillary, and Trump over Biden. For Trump, unlike Hillary and Biden, supports those values and not just with words. He proved his support for them in the teeth of vicious opposition by pseudo-cons and leftists alike in his four years as POTUS. A long list of his accomplishments could be inserted here. To mention just one, and a very important one: the SCOTUS appointments.
5) If you complain about Trump's character, I will agree that he is flawed but go on to point out that the same is true of Hillary and Biden. Character-wise, either the three are on a par, or the two Democrats are worse. This fact is invisible to many because Hillary and Biden are professional politicians deeply practiced in the arts of deception: mendacious to the core, they know how to hide their flaws, faults, and foibles. But anyone with life-experience and knowledge of human nature can see that Biden is a fraud and a phony rooted in no principle except that of the promotion of himself and his family's interests. The same goes for Hillary to a lesser extent. But as I said, they know how to don masks and play the game. Trump, on the other hand, crudely lets it all hang out. He tells you what he thinks. He is blunt, brusque, boorish, and sometimes pointlessly brutal. (I am thinking of that nasty slur he hurled against Carly Fiorina.) He probably knows that his alpha-male strut and swagger is off-putting to many, but he refuses to play the game.
6) What decides the question for me is that Trump alone supports the American system of government whereas this is plainly not the case with Hillary or with Biden who is the puppet of puppet masters out to undermine the American system. That should be blindingly evident to anyone who has been paying attention.
7) There comes a time when a corrective is needed, an outsider self-powered, un-owned, and unafraid to kick the asses of the Dementocrats to his Left and expose the fecklessness of the cuckservatives to his Right. A corrective and a clarifier. No more of the usual Left versus Right. The battle for the soul of America is now a contest between the borderless globalism of the greedy elites and an enlightened nationalism, populist and patriotic. Hillary/Biden versus The Donald, to personify it.
But 'the virtuous' and the upholders of 'norms' are too scrupulous to rouse the people against their tyrants.
Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”
Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.
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