Intentional Conservative

So I’m re-posting below what I wrote exactly two months ago about how I’d feel if Donald Trump did indeed win the election. I haven’t changed the date, but if there’s any doubt about when I originally wrote it, please note the date of the National Review article included with it. You can go back on my timeline and check, too, just to be clear.

Actually, we’re all in for a rough time, sad to say.

​”In My Selfish Moments I Imagine a Trump Victory”

As I said when I posted this originally, don’t expect complete gentility here:
“If Candidate Trump Can’t Be Managed, What Makes You Think President Trump Would Be?”

So the question for now is: how much influence did Russia exert in our Presidential election? I listen to and read a wide selection of sources and I have to tell you that there is a common perception that, while our election was not “rigged,” it was most certainly nudged or swayed in the direction that Vladimir Putin wanted it to go: a Trump victory. Our President-elect’s admiring attitude about this vicious, power-hungry demagogue is extremely troubling. I mentioned in an earlier post that, while the Republican Party platform is admirable it was not the product of any input from the Trump campaign but instead put together by a platform committee. The only input from the Trump people, according to a number of sources, was a request to soften the language of how much help we were willing to give Ukraine in maintaining its independence from Russia. The day after the election Trump had an unsupervised half-hour phone chat with Putin, an action with John McCain (bless him!) strongly condemned. Here’s what McCain home state newspaper, the Arizona Republic, had to say:

“Donald Trump and the Rise of Alt-Reality Media”

And a corollary article from last week by Jonah Goldberg, which I read but for some reason did not post:

​“This Is How It Starts”

Exodus 1:17–But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, but let the boys live.

Acts 5:28-29–We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us responsible for this man’s blood.” But Peter and the other apostle replied, “We must obey God rather than men.”

In political theory and theology,to immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the eschaton (the final, heaven-like stage of history) in the immanent world.

And here’s what Goldberg had to say about it:

The Trump team is ecstatic — and they have every right to be. They pulled it off. The philosophical and political sacrifices they made, the grief they took: It was all worth it. Congrats! But now they have to lead their own herd of shiny unicorns into the light of day. For example, Trump vowed that, if elected, he would make “make every dream you ever dreamed for your country come true.” Now, if you know anything — anything! — about conservatism, or human nature, or just plain reality, then you know in your heart this is balderdash of the highest order. It’s a less poetic version of Obama’s crazy talk about reversing the rise of the oceans because “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” As I’ve been writing for years and years, politics can’t immanentize the eschaton any more than basset hounds can fly.

Well, I’m tempted to quote paragraph after paragraph, so it’s only fair to stop here and just give the link to the entire article:

“The Election Is Over–Now Trump Must Govern”