I find myself going back, as I review these years, to a crisp, dark evening in December 2016, in Manhattan, where I’d joined a visiting friend, a Catholic activist, for a drink. She had been ardently anti-Trump, was heartbroken at his election and struggling to come to terms, to find some higher meaning. “Maybe this is God’s way of giving us a last chance,” she said. “I think when God gives you a last chance he gives you John Kasich,” I said, and we both laughed. The 2016 election to me felt more like a chastisement, a judgment from on high of who we are and what we are becoming.
Where did Donald Trump come from? I think now what I wrote then. He was produced by both parties’ collusion in refusing to stop illegal immigration, carelessness about war, and confusion as to how to avoid, then how to deal with, economic calamity. The Republicans were afraid to lift their wagons out of ruts formed half a century ago. Mr. Trump was clever enough to see an opening that wouldn’t harm him either way (victory or a branding opportunity) and won.
In the time since everyone has felt tested—personally, in terms of higher loyalties, in our national life. Some maintained their poise, good cheer and judgment. Others wobbled, some a lot. It’s been a hard time. Everyone but the stupid feels wounded in some way.
Twenty sixteen was raucous and wild—the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit, Make America Great Again. Twenty twenty is altogether different—subdued, determined. As if a steely decision is being made and executed. I believe Mr. Trump is about to be fired, most spectacularly by the women of America. Those long lines at the early-voting places—they are the rallies Mr. Biden didn’t hold. They happened anyway.
Regular readers know where I stand. Repeating it feels redundant and impolite. He is not a good man who became not a good president. He has had achievements: three sober Supreme Court choices, a strong economy until the pandemic, an attitude toward regulation unhostile to economic growth. Beyond that, bills of damning particulars have been done, some brilliantly. Kevin Williamson in National Review has it exactly right that conservative resistance to Mr. Trump is not about style and aesthetics. The president’s personal flaws are governance flaws. “Trump’s low character is not only an abstract ethical concern but a public menace that has introduced elements of chaos and unpredictability in U.S. government activity. . . . Trump’s problem is not etiquette: It is dishonesty, stupidity, and incompetence.” Ramesh Ponnuru in the same magazine notes something especially important to conservatives: Mr. Trump is an unwitting ally of political correctness. “It posits that the only alternative to left-wing views is bigotry, and he lends credence to that conviction. His presidency has accelerated the growth of our divisions and so been a gift to radicals of the Left and of the Right.”
I add only two things. For 20 years this column has had at the back of its mind fear of a terrible and immediate crisis that could befall America from its foes. We have seen Mr. Trump’s crisis management in one that unfurled not over minutes but months. Last February I wrote I had a feeling the 2020 election was being settled then, that Mr. Trump had finally met a problem he couldn’t talk his way out of. I believe that’s what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can’t afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe. He would only be worse, more dangerous, more careless, in a second term.
You look at that White House and you know nobody’s really there inside. It’s a hollow government mostly populated by second- and third-rate people, with the seasoned and competent fired and fled. It’s all so dangerous.
A vote for him is not possible for me.
Of the two presidential candidates Joe Biden is more normal, and God knows that has appeal. But normal isn’t “normalcy.” We’ll never return to political normalcy again; we won’t wake up Nov. 4 and say, “Wow, things are sturdy and placid again, like they should be!” We’re in an age of drama and extremes. There are too many ways to avoid the problems of being alive, and the problems of your life, through politics now. The political tribe is the only family a lot of people have, the only religion they have too. And as government has taken up more space in our lives, a weird attentiveness has come to feel not like neurosis but like necessity.
The Democrats in their current construction are animated and being pushed internally by a progressive left that punches above its weight and numbers, and will continue to do so until it achieves full party dominance. In the next few years, especially if Democrats have the Senate, the new administration looks to become a runaway train with Joe Biden its hapless and reluctant conductor.
The progressive left endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union to pick up Senate seats. The left is animated by a spirit of historical vandalism seen most lately in the “1619 Project” and the attitudes it represents.
The political philosopher Edmund Burke, a man great enough to address a revolution personally, said to radical France in 1790: “You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” Burke knew that society, as his most recent biographer, Jesse Norman, emphasizes, is the product not only of reason but of affection. Burke: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society . . . is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” Only from warmth of heart—not with it alone, but it must be there—can you build what will last. Donald Trump doesn’t have it in his words, the progressives don’t in their policies.
Those policies aren’t a way out, which is what you want in a policy—a way out of a mess or a way to avoid it. They won’t build on and undergird America; they’ll only continue to fracture it.
I spent 2016 being lectured by hopped-up partisans about binary choices. I didn’t vote for either candidate then and will not now. Is abstaining an honorable choice? For me it is the only one.
Sometimes you just have to hold up your hand and say no, bad choice, bad paths.
I thought I might leave the line blank as a statement: Neither. Then I thought no, make a gesture that shows what you mean to hold steady to. And so if on some readout of the recorded vote in northern Manhattan you see Edmund Burke, that was me.