The Shaking of the Foundations

On May 31 conservative David Frum wrote, in Donald Trump and the Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy:

One guardrail that Trump’s opponents all assumed would hold fast was the fourth: the guardrail of ideology. Hardline conservatives would surely reject a candidate who barely understood what a principle was! ... Trump may not be much of a conservative by conviction. But he functions as a conservative in silhouette, defined by the animosity of all the groups that revile him. ...

As conservatism’s positive program has fallen ever more badly out of date, as it has delivered ever fewer benefits to its supporters and constituents, those supporters have increasingly defined their conservatism not by their beliefs, but by their adversaries.

Recently William Saletan: wrote, "What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump."

We remarked on this in an article about F.A. Hayek:

The reason may be found in a fundamental characteristic of conservatism: its tropism toward wholesale obstructionism, derived from a fundamental lack of political ideas and a resulting tendency to define itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas and practices. Half a century ago F. A. Hayek, in his landmark "Why I Am Not a Conservative," [PDF] wrote:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. ... Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them. (Emphasis added)

"Why I Am Not A Conservative" argues that conservatism has no "distinctive principles" of its own, and seems to imply that at any given moment it defines itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas. (Even though this leaves conservatives with an incoherent outlook.)

News articles about Candidate Trump have remarked on his indifference the underlying norms of democracy, let alone those of elementary decency. From an article we published in 2013, various aphorisms about norms as such: 

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

Epigraphs from the same article:

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Thus came the era of Trump Chaos. Civilization, "the benign influence of good laws under a free government," as the first president's Farewell Address said, arose from thousands of years of the slow accumulation of the norms of decency and civility. Stuffy things. It's cool to mock them.

Such "habits of the heart"(1) are the very bedrock of all we value.

We, the public, drove Nixon from the presidency for attempting to politicize aspects of the justice system managed by his office, for violating the principle of "a government of laws, not men," (see the firing of Archibald Cox(2) ) in ways that were far less extreme than emerge in Trump's boasting, blustering proclamations every day. Racial bigotry is supposedly not acceptable, yet as William Saletan writes, Trump is a serial exploiter of prejudice. "He has no compunction about using race, ethnicity, or religion for advantage. ... This is the man Ryan, McConnell, Priebus, and other Republicans have endorsed for president. Banning Muslims, smearing Latinos, blaming blacks, mocking disabilities—none of it is disqualifying in today’s GOP."

The guardrails of democracy are endangered by the Trump Chaos which, for the moment, appears to be increasingly legitimized with every newscast.

The fourth guardrail appears at the beginning of this post. Frum's other six appear in the notes below.(3)


-*--

(1) De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

(2) In May 1973, Nixon's Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, appointed Archibald Cox to the position of special prosecutor, charged with investigating the break-in. In October 1973, Nixon arranged to have Cox fired in the Saturday Night Massacre. However, public outrage forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who was charged with conducting the Watergate investigation for the government.

(3) The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act. ...

The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians. ...

A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs. ...

[Fourth, see above]

Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: the primacy of national security concerns. Trump has no relevant experience, no military record, scant interest in the topic—and a long history of casual expressions of sympathy for authoritarian rulers. He famously explained that he gets his military advice from TV talk shows. The most recent Republican secretary of defense, Bob Gates, told Yahoo’s Katie Couric that he would not, at present, feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button. ...

[Sixth guardrail:]

A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against destructive politics. In the words of the 1980 Republican platform: “The truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance.”

Disrespect for targeted groups—including the very biggest of them all, women—has been the recurring theme of the Trump candidacy. ...

[Seventh guardrail:]

Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil. And with that, the last of the guardrails is smashed.

 

Many conservatives and Republicans recognize Trump as a disaster for their institutions and their ideals. Yet they have found it impossible to protect things they hold dear—in large part because they have continued to fix all blame outward and elsewhere. ...

Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong?