Clinton belongs in jail, and her walking around free threatens the rule of law and is thus extremely destructive of basic constitutional norms. But campaigning on a promise to jail your opponent, and/or actually jailing her, also threatens the rule of law and is thus extremely destructive of basic constitutional norms.

So get elected, give a big speech laying out the evidence proving her guilt, then pardon her.

That’s what to do about Clinton.

What to do about Trump? Listen to Josh Hammer.

After the election, when conservatives reckon with the future of their movement, we must avoid comforting illusions such as that being advocated last week by Peter Spiliakos: that pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives need not worry about burying the hatchet and moving forward after 2016, because the only problem in 2016 is that we are merely “friends divided by prudential differences.” (After NBC released its notorious tape, Spiliakos’ tone has turned more sour, but he has continued to advocate pretty much the same view.) On the contrary, given the depth and intensity of the divide over Trump, the future existence of conservatism in any recognizable form is looking more doubtful every day.

The problem is not only that prudence is a moral virtue, so differences that are “only” over prudence are often of titanic importance. But let’s talk about that for a moment anyway, because the merely prudential difference is such a gulf that this alone would seem to threaten the conservative marriage.

NeverTrumpers generally contend that Trump was allowed to take the GOP nomination due to a catastrophic moral failure among Republicans, especially among those leading Republicans whose professional responsibility it was to be electoral gatekeepers and exercise the authority that was theirs by both law and custom to prevent race-baiting, dishonest, illiberal, misgynistic reprobates from acquiring the nomination. It is not clear to me how a political movement can contain those of us who see things this way and also those who think GOP leaders were faithfully doing their job by allowing Trump to take the nomination. Even if this is “only” a difference of prudential judgment, it reveals a fundamental divide over what politics is and what political parties and movements exist to do.

That fight is in the past, but the decision to support Trump now that he has the nomination is still present. Here again, NeverTrumpers view those who endorse Trump as failing (though to a lesser degree) to exercise the virtue of prudence; they seem to us to think that a very weak and tentative connection to a president is worth the catastrophic sacrifice of moral credibility and social solidarity voting for Trump entails. This, too, is “only” a difference of prudential judgment, yet one that would seem to indicate an almost total difference in our understandings of what politics is and how it works.

Consider judges as a case study, especially because “But, judges!” is by far the most common pro-Trump conservative argument. Trump was pro-abortion and, at a more general level, anti-rule-of-law right up to the moment when he decided he wanted to swindle the cheapest date in American politics, social conservatives. Five minutes after the election results are in, he will be pro-abortion and anti-rule-of-law again, and will appoint judges accordingly. To us NeverTrumpers, the inability of pro-Trump conservatives to see this seems to indicate that we are living in different political universes.

However, foreboding as all of this is, I cannot help but think the divide in conservatism may go even deeper. The deeper division between pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives may be one not of prudence but of principle—of ends, not just of how we connect means to ends.

What is conservatism for? It seeks to conserve something, obviously, but what? I am increasingly convinced that if pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives are so bitterly divided over how to conserve, it may be because we differ over what to conserve.

I will not presume to speak for the pro-Trump side. I will simply say that I do not understand how they can endorse Trump if they are seeking to conserve the same things I’m seeking to conserve.

For the sake of space, I will limit myself to one example. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I will not use the example currently occupying our national attention. But it is an example representative of a foreboding of unbridgeable differences on a dozen other issues.

Whatever others may be trying to conserve, I am trying to conserve a polity that has been laboring, for two hundred years, to free itself from the legacy of racism, slavery, and ethnic oppression. Badly as we have often betrayed them, our national founding principles are clear on this point; so clear that Martin Luther King unreservedly took his stand upon them in fighting for civil rights. “America has written the negro a bad check,” he said, referring to the Declaration of Independence with its self-evident truths about the equality of all human beings.

Donald Trump has a decades-long record as a virulent racist and practitioner of racial discrimination in business. He refused, three times, to denounce the Ku Klux Klan. He later blamed that incident on a bad earpiece, but the video makes it clear this is a lie. 

You can’t decline to oppose the KKK on national television and then just take it back. The damage to our polity is already done. The wave of openly racist support for Trump attests to this.

Ian Tuttle makes it clear why the fundamental principles of the American experiment are at stake:

Adherents of the Alt-Right not only conceive of the “Establishment” as traitorous; they also seem to think that liberal democracy itself was an abstraction tyrannically imposed on an unwilling populace. It wasn’t. It was a slowly and painfully forged response to centuries of challenges. The Western, liberal-democratic order is wracked with problems, of course; but it always has been. The question is, Has it been more fruitful, more liberating, more constructive in promoting the common good than have the various orders that came before it? And if so, is there a compelling reason for throwing it over in favor of the ancient belief that some men are, indeed, born with saddles on their backs, and a favored few born booted and spurred, entitled to ride them?

This is the question the Alt-Right poses. As it happens, it’s an old question, and one to which our forebears gave powerful answers. But every generation has to relearn them. The larger the Alt-Right grows, the clearer it is that ours hasn’t.

I don’t think Trump particularly likes the KKK. But I do think he wants the votes of their supporters. And I know he wants the votes of the larger pool of “alt-right” racists who live in their socio-political neighborhood.

That is detestable, but it is also politically consequential. Every increment of success for Donald Trump, every additional vote or endorsement, contributes to the relegitimization of white nationalism.

How many years did we labor, with how much painful sacrifice, to delegitimize white nationalist politics? Pro-Trump conservatives are throwing all that away. If conservatives vote Trump, how do they look their neighbors in the face and tell them we’re fighting for the conservation of the American experiment in equality and freedom for all people?

Or, to put a finer point on it for the post-2016 marital counseling: If significant numbers of conservative leaders endorse Trump, how can those of us who want to look our neighbors in the face and tell them we’re fighting for the American experiment in equality and freedom for all people continue to call ourselves “conservatives”?

Now multiply that by every other issue on which Trump tramples upon the principles of the American experiment.

I don’t know whether the marriage of American conservatism can be saved. I do know that there won’t be much hope for it if those who vote for Trump and those who vote for honor indulge the comforting illusion that we are only “friends divided by prudential differences.”

Let us all give thanks that the Mall of America is closing its offices for Thanksgiving and encouraging the stores inside it to do the same. Apparently it cannot legally compel the stores to close, but it seems to be sending a pretty strong signal that they should – and businesses do tend not to want to tick off their landlords.

A small – or is it? – sign of renewal in the recognition that businesses should not treat people as mere units of commercial activity. Business takes place within the higher structures of culture and civilization, and must operate within some boundaries of respect for them (even if that fact is often abused in the other direction by businesses’ enemies who work in the “culture” racket).

Reading the account I was struck by two further thoughts:

• I may have been too harsh in my long-held judgment that opening businesses on Thanksgiving is a particularly scandalous act. I still think it’s bad, but there is something really sympathetic about business owners struggling to make ends meet, keep the lights on and paychecks flowing to employees, in an environment where they cannot assume their competitors will be high-minded. If I had to talk to a store owner deciding whether to open on Thanksgiving I would be ill-advised to address him as if he had no legitimate pressures operating to keep him open.
• There really is a harmony between treating people humanely and economic flourishing. Yes, sometimes the tension between these values can’t be resolved. But often they can! In this case, part of the motivation for closing on Thanksgiving is to create a more appealing context for Black Friday shopping. So is this move not a recognition of human cultural needs, but merely a ploy to protect profits? I think it would be morbid scruples to assume so. Let us rather open the book of Proverbs (we can keep Ecclesiastes handy, too) and admire the harmony of God’s design in making us creatures who flourish when we do what is right.

Part 3 of my series on education in a pluralistic society is now up at EdChoice. Previous parts covered how we want transcendent things from education and how schools deliver them even in a pluralistic context. I now turn to why our growing use of technocratic accountability systems gets in the way – and why this danger is perennial in a pluralistic society:

Ask yourself why this kind of standardizing technocracy didn’t exist before the rise of the modern world with its freedom and pluralism. Disagreement about transcendent things was unthinkable in older, tradition-bound societies. They did not need to worry, as we do, about what might happen if we admit that we don’t agree about the things that matter to us most.

This is also why the temptation to embrace technocracy never goes away, no matter how many times we try these kinds of systems and find they don’t work. Once we claim our freedom to think for ourselves, we are always tempted to flee from our responsibility to think for ourselves.

Debating what is good, true and beautiful is hard. Giving power to a class of technocrats who promise us we won’t have to settle such uncomfortable questions is much easier…while it lasts.

As always, your thoughts are appreciated!

OK, so in going through old docs, I found a small document called “MISC.TXT” and had to see what I’d left in such an odd little file. What I found was a transcript of a bunch of material from some of my earliest journals (started in my middle teens). In fact, some of the material in those journals, including at least a few of the items that follows, were first jotted on school book covers or clipped for my bulletin boards and later transcribed at least twice.

Anyway, if you really want to know a few of the things I thought were pellucid utterances that got at the heart of reality in my angsty teen years, here you go. I spared you the bad poem from the top of the page. You’re welcome.

If we will not die for freedom, we will die of slavery.

The hour of departure has arrived,
and we go our ways–
I to die,
and you to live.
Which is better, God only knows.The Apology of Socrates

The duty of government is to defend the freedom of all of its citizens by
enforcing justice.

There is a limit, however, at which tolerance ceases to be a virtue.Edmund Burke

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
for loan oft loses both itself and friend.Shakespeare: Pollonius’ advice to Laertes; Hamlet

Depression is the hangover after a pity party.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.Emerson

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a
favored few booted and spurred, by the grace of God.Jefferson

Equal and exact justice to all men … freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial
by juries impartially selected– these form the bright constellation which has
gone before us.Jefferson

Yes, the un-cited ones are what I believe to by my own original apothegms. I shall probably rest uneasy in my grave, one day, until at least one of these has been popularly attributed to Churchill, Lincoln, Disraeli, la Rochefoucauld, or Talleyrand.