-By Warner Todd Huston
NOTICE: This is not a Donald Trump Endorsement piece, Now… Voting for president can be tricky, sometimes, especially if you are a good conservative who feels that the GOP nominee is unsuitable. Many good conservatives are saying this about Donald Trump and feel that they just can’t pull the lever for him. But if you are an anti-Trump conservative who won’t vote Trump and instead are claiming that you’ll pull the lever for Hillary you are neither a Conservative nor an American. Period.
Being a true blue American conservative (or a “red” one in today’s color coding) can be an annoying thing when it comes to presidential politics. As a conservative you’ll instantly understand that the GOP is not a conservative Party but is, rather, the far less liberal of the two national parties… but still essentially liberal in far too many ways to be comfortable. It’s our job as conservatives to drag the center left GOP kicking and screaming farther to the right where they belong. But we don’t always win that argument, especially when it comes to a presidential nominee.
So, deciding for whom to vote in both the primaries and the general is often a choice on the lesser of two evils for conservatives.
Then there is the bromide attributed to one of America’s most famous conservatives, William F. Buckley, who said that a true conservative should vote for the “most conservative” option in any given election. So, conservatives have that hanging over their heads, too.
But there are times when neither candidate from the Democrat or Republican parties is a conservative choice. Mitt Romney was one of those. Others felt the combative and self-loathing John McCain was also in that category. And it goes without saying that the Democrats haven’t had even a remotely conservative choice since Truman. But regardless how you felt about all those particular candidates real conservatives have had few choices for quite some time.
That brings us to Trumpmania.
This piece is not to debate how good or bad Trump is and I won’t bother laying out any of those reasons and I’m not even sure we need to start that discussion just yet. But what we must confront here are those conservatives who claim that Trump is so bad that Hillary becomes the better choice.
The fact is, Hillary can never be a better choice than Trump or any other of GOP candidates. She just isn’t and there can’t be a logical explanation for justifying the claim.
A conservative I saw on Facebook recently, for instance, said that Trump will be such a “disaster” that we must vote for Hillary to save the country from it all. He felt that Trump’s stealth liberalism combined with Trump’s erratic personality would damage the country too much. One has to wonder if this conservative has been paying attention during the era of Obama?
But what about it? Can Trump be that bad? Not likely.
The best we might expect from a Trump presidency is some few policies–of whatever political ideology–but probably no great moves or successes. After all, Trump does not control the reins of party power and has no members of the GOP in his pocket. Even if Trump wins he won’t wield the power of the GOP. He just doesn’t control the party and doesn’t seem interested in developing that power. Trump is a builder, sure, but not of coalitions, and the GOP simply has no compelling reason to fall in line behind him whether he wins in the general or not.
Were Trump to win we’ll likely have little else but a holiday from politics as usual. But it is doubtful that we’ll find Trump to have a transformative presidency. Few candidates who are too far outside the structure of power offer much by way of long standing change simply because they lack the power to bring all forces to bear on policy or to materially alter the culture in power, whether it be Washington or a state legislature. Without the party fully backing your play you just can’t build a whole lot.
On the other hand, voting for Hillary will not only mean yet another Obama-styled reign in Washington, but it will be a reign headed by someone that will be fully able to wield the not inconsiderable power of her party.
Unlike Trump’s likely inability to force the GOP to dance to his tune, Hillary will be able to get the Democrat Party to do just about anything she wants it to do–just like Obama pretty much has.
So, while voting for Trump may result in some bad policy, voting for Hillary will be voting for all bad policy. That is not a conservative choice.
Thee are alternatives, of course. If you are so disgusted with a Trump nomination, the proper conservative choice is to vote for a suitable third party candidate or to stay home and not vote at all (after all, not voting can be a proper choice). But voting Hillary isn’t. It cannot be. Ever.
Lastly, if you claim to be a conservative and you vote for Hillary you are neither a conservative nor a true American because not only will you be purposefully voting for a candidate that directly, loudly, and proudly stands against everything you hold dear but you will be voting for the further destruction of our country.
So, stop acting like an idiot. You cannot vote for Hillary and claim to have principles.
In fact, you can’t vote for Hillary and claim to be a true American who has principles if you are a Democrat, either, but that is another article.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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