Trump is a catastrophe for conservatism

Making America great again starts with principled conservatives, and ends with Donald Trump.

Our country has faced a shrinking middle class, skyrocketing debt and an international standing that has been bastardized. We feel continuously let down by our representatives to the point that we have internalized the notion that there can’t possibly be someone else to serve the people.

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why outliers, such as Trump, thrive.

As Americans have tried — and failed — to find solutions by casting their votes every four years, we have directed our growing anger, quite rightly, at our countless failed leaders in Washington.

Trump has exploited these conditions brilliantly, and he has wielded his newfound powers of populism and nationalism with a kind of skill and boldness that many Americans have never experienced before in their lifetimes. Promises of building a wall funded by Mexico, ending all Muslim immigration, taking China to task and shaking up the political establishment have imbued many Americans with populist and nationalist fervor and stirred them to action.

Trump’s forte seems to be his uncanny ability to tap into the real and legitimate fears and frustrations of the nation that very few politicians have managed to grasp.

Unfortunately, my praise for him ends here — at a point between articulating the fears and frustrations of a nation, and something far more dangerous.

Despite masterfully listing the many unsolved problems that have disillusioned his supporters, Trump has done little else. It is true that he offers things that some will call solutions, but they nearly always range from the incomprehensibly vague, “I want to get rid of Obamacare and get you something great” to the comically absurd, “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”

But do Trump’s supporters really believe that “something great” is a legitimate health care plan? Of course not. And this gets to the heart of the problem and the thing that makes Trump dangerous — his supporters aren’t usually interested in his ideology or policy when they decide to support him, they’re interested in Trump. In other words, they have decided that the only solution to the problems plaguing our country is Trump. Anyone else is an obstacle — a member of “the establishment.”

As a man who, like many in Trump’s party, sees conservatism as the only way to reverse the downward slide our country is in, I am profoundly disturbed by this line of thinking.

Yes, it is true that our representatives who were hired to reverse the tide of leftist policies have failed at every step.  From failing to defund the Affordable Care Act to blocking the president’s executive amnesty, our leaders have done an exceptional job of doing nothing. Our mistake, however, comes not from trying to compel our political leaders to act, but from taking our eyes off the real enemy.

As conservatives, we see one threat as exceeding all others ­— that is the rising tide of government. Additionally, we understand that the constitution was specifically designed to prevent this, and that it is our powerful tool in doing so.

This is what makes American conservatism so different as compared to the “conservatives” the media tells us exist in Europe and other parts of the world. The Constitution and the great thinkers behind it serve as the building block for American conservatism, a building block that is absent in every other country.

With very few exceptions, conservatives outside the United States lack any meaningful guiding ideology regarding the protection of the rights of the individual and the diffusion of power away from the top. At the end of the day, the political parties and leaders of both the right and the left in almost all the world are united in seeking a single goal power. It is for this reason that when we imagine the far right in an American context, we are likely to think of libertarians, while if we do so in a European context we are likely to think of fascists or other authoritarian ideologies.

The left, unfortunately, does not change in the same way — progressivism and socialism mean more or less the same thing in America as they do in other parts of the world.

The reason for this tangent is very simple — Trump represents a complete departure from what actually made American conservatism so great. As Trump picks up supporters and trudges toward the nomination, he increasingly threatens to redefine the conservative movement in a way that disfigures it beyond recognition.

By placing one man and his bloated ego ahead of the future of the conservative movement, we are putting him ahead of the future of our country as well. It is not because some states allow people to buy a Whopper with food stamps that America is exceptional, nor is it because the Catholic schools and hospitals are required to help subsidize contraceptives for employees.

America is exceptional because it continues to retain, at least to a significant degree, its founding principles — principles that only the American conservative movement has successfully protected.

Trump will not do the same. His populist brand of conservatism embraces the use of tariffs and trade barriers to protect manufacturing jobs, wasteful subsidies to support failing industries and entitlements. Additionally, Trump advocates surveilling mosques, going “tougher than waterboarding” and, of course, making Mexico pay for a wall and deporting all illegal immigrants.

These are not the proposals of someone who will build on the legacies of Goldwater, Buckley and Reagan. These proposals are better suited to the likes of George Wallace, Marine Le Pen and Vladimir Putin.

For conservatives, the solution to Trump is simple.  We must prevent him from becoming the Republican Party’s nominee. If this does not happen, Trump will dramatically grow his influence over the conservative movement and  turn it into something unrecognizable.

For the sake of our movement, we have no choice but to stump the Trump.

Arnaud primarily writes about politics and public policy for The Pitt News. 

Write to Arnaud at awa8@pitt.edu