HOW CAN REPUBLICANS CLOSE the gap? How can they come up with a strategy for neutralizing the Democrats’ attacks and putting them on the defensive? How can conservatives stop the Democratic Party’s drive to dismantle the constitutional foundations of the nation and reshape its social order?
To answer these questions, Republicans and conservatives first need to know exactly who their adversaries are. That means not just Hillary Clinton or Tim Kaine or Bernie Sanders but the progressive movement they have committed their political lives to advancing. What are the motivations of the millions of Americans who are part of this movement? What are their methods and long-term goals? What is their agenda?
In the first place, this is not just a matter of specific policies and programs any more than it is a movement advanced by individual leaders of the Democratic Party. It is a matter of the powerful, almost religious convictions of the progressive movement. This movement is too powerful inside and outside the Democratic Party for an individual leader to deviate too far from the progressive path. Individual policies and programs are but the tips of the iceberg; what you see is not what you eventually get, for policies and programs can be—and are—tailored to the political moment, then abandoned and revived in more radical forms. Obamacare is a prime example. As Republicans long suspected, it was designed by its architects to fail so that after laying the groundwork for socialized medicine, they could expand Obamacare with a “single-payer” plan—that is, total government control of the nation’s health.1
What is important is not the specific policy but the ideology behind the policy, the long-term vision that a policy like Obamacare is the instrumental means of achieving. Republicans will agree that the failure to name our adversary in the so-called war on terror is a severe—possibly even fatal—handicap when it comes to defeating the enemy. But this is also true of political conflicts. Without understanding the motivations and intentions of one’s adversaries, it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to defeat them. For half a century now, conservatives have been mainly losing the political and culture wars with the left because they do not understand what their adversaries are up to—what drives them and shapes their means and ends.
So we must begin with that. When we set out to defend our country and its constitutional framework, whom are we up against? What is the inspirational goal that underlies their calculations and justifies their deeds? How do they see us? What are they prepared to do to defeat us? What laws will they break, what deceptions will they employ, and what acts will they commit? How many conservatives prior to this election year and the WikiLeaks document dumps would have expected that the Clintons were capable of so many criminal acts and such contempt for the safety of ordinary Americans?
An answer to the question “How do they see us?” was provided by Donald Trump during the second presidential debate. The answer was so harsh in its judgment it was probably unprecedented in the annals of modern presidential politics. Trump turned to the audience at one point to say, “Hillary has tremendous hatred in her heart.” It was the kind of politically incorrect character description that had become a signature reflex of Trump’s election campaign. Never before had one presidential candidate so bluntly confronted another. Never had any Republican dared to characterize a Democratic opponent in such damning moral terms to a national audience. Pre-Trump Republicans were generally too polite to blurt out such conclusions even when they were just.
The same cannot be said for Democrats or Hillary. It was Hillary who provided the occasion for Trump’s remark. His judgment of Hillary’s character did not come out of the blue. It was a direct response to the attacks that had been the focus of her campaign. It was really her core message, which was a vicious and personal attempt to condemn Trump and his supporters as “unfit” to lead the country. The trigger of Trump’s remark was a statement she had made on the campaign trail and had not retracted. Addressing an LGBTQ event a month earlier, Clinton had dismissed Trump’s supporters out of hand. In as casual a way as one could make such dehumanizing comments, Clinton had said that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in her “basket of deplorables,” then added that they were “irredeemable.” Nor did she leave these characterizations hanging in the air for others to imagine what she could have meant by such remarks. Instead, she rattled off an itemized list to clarify exactly what she had in mind: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”2 Reaffirming this demonization of Republicans and their candidate right to the end of the campaign, both Hillary and Obama suggested in ads and appearances that Trump was the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan.3
Out of the other side of her mouth, Hillary regularly invoked her “favorite quote” from Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” Closer to the truth would have been “When they go low, we go lower.”
Of course, such demonizing epithets are hardly peculiar to Hillary Clinton, nor is the reflexive damning of those who disagree with her. These are the familiar anathemas of the politically correct deployed against people whose opinions they don’t like. What her “deplorable” remark tells us is that Hillary Clinton is not alone in having tremendous hatred in her heart for Republicans and for all those who do not share her political views. What the anathemas tell us is that Democrats, and progressives generally, harbor the same hatred for their political opponents. Republicans don’t really need to be told this, since they have ample personal confirmations. What Republican has not had these same hateful words applied to them by a Democratic opponent?