Trump And Public Intellectuals

There was a Spectator piece recently which highlighted right wing intellectuals who, far from disavowing Trump, are actively promoting his candidacy. (Very sadly I have to report that the list included Roger Kimball, a worthy promoter of Walter Bagehot's relevance.) A common factor is their absolute distrust of Clinton and her prim leftish orthodoxy. They point to the Obama administration and in particular its foreign policy failures. They have a point - just when precisely has America conducted itself less resolutely in the global field than during Obama's tenure? Clinton will, for them, simply mean more of the same but with a different face. They almost have a point - The United States has been the enabler in chief for a revivified Russia. Mind you the rest of us have sat pathetically on our hands through the whole immoral process - one of the truths echoing in Trump's general vacuousness is the shameful neglect of NATO by America's western cousins. Anything is, on this analysis, better than La Clinton. I've looked at this from both sides now and, well, it's bollocks.

Symbolism does matter. Ask Walter Bagehot whose two armed test for civilised political systems involved the marrying of the efficient and the dignified. If this wasn't still relevant then why else was Obama awarded a Nobel Prize before he had even done anything? Where, oh where will lie the dignity of the office of the President if Trump occupies it? I'm sorry Donald, I've spent plenty of my life in sporting locker rooms and talk like yours has never been regarded as legitimate 'banter' - rather it is seen by good men as the eruptive bragging of the empty and impotent. It is pathetic and pitiable.

And so Trump's diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump's mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take reposibility for what they've done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.   Washington Post, 11 October