Most conservatives publicly eschew intellectuals or even the smell of intellectualism. So it’s always amusing, and often nauseating, when a smart conservative, desperately in search of a reason, begins citing obscure intellectual claptrap.
And so it was with Cal Beverly’s editorial on Donald Trump’s so called “transformative ideas,” cited in his editorial on Sept. 21. Putting aside the seeming redundancy (borders matter, immigration policy matters — as though the two concepts are separable) and the obvious choosing and limiting of ideas (No mention of Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick, for a start), what I really saw was an otherwise reasonable guy looking for a reason to vote for an odious person.
If Donald Trump hadn’t actually obtained the Republican nomination for President, no one in his right mind would ever believe he could obtain the Republican nomination for President.
He isn’t just brash, he’s a terrible person. He isn’t just uninformed, he’s dangerously and purposefully ignorant. He doesn’t just prey on people’s fears, he drives them to unjust action. He isn’t just lacking in principle, he is anathema to the concept of a measured, dispassionate executive.
Good and smart people have backed bad guys in the past, probably believing that the bad guy’s further actions would be controlled by immense responsibility and his place on the world stage.
But history is unforgiving and, if it teaches us anything, it is the fact that bad guys get worse when they hold public office. I’ll skip the comparison to a certain Austrian corporal and go to a lesser known bad guy for comparison.
Slobodan Milosovic was elected President of the Serbian Republic in 1989 and one of the first things he did was to make a speech at the site of a great defeat by the Serbian army to the Ottoman Turks 600 years previously. “Never again” he told the crowd assembled on Kosovo Polje. He convinced the Serbs that historic borders matter; that ethnicity matters (though he never admitted it); that they were under siege, and he was the man to deal with those forces.
The rest is history of course, although much of that history was carried out by surrogates. Eventually Serbian anxiety, continually fueled by Milosevic, led to the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at a town called Srebrenica, in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Bosnian Serbs under the command of General Ratko Mladic.
It also led to ethnic cleansing in parts of Bosnia and Kosovo by both Bosnian Serb, and regular and irregular Serb forces. Milosevic was indicted, brought to the Hague for trial, but died before judgment was rendered. Serbia was bombed by UN forces to end the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
So Cal tells us he’s voting for the U.S. Supreme Court. That sounds a lot better than, “I’m voting for racism, sexism, and xenophobia.” It’s better than, “I’m voting for dangerous and purposeful ignorance and inexperience.” It’s better than, “I’m voting to end all pretense of civility in public discourse — I’m voting for a guy I hope gets a lot better when he’s elected.”
It’s better than the truth, which is that Donald Trump is an actual threat to the Republic in a way no other Presidential hopeful has ever been.
Timothy J. Parker
Peachtree City, Ga.
