I believe in democracy, and that means that I believe that we reason best when we reason together. A good government strives to find the best ways to get good policies is to consider the impact of a policy from the point of view of all the citizens in our diverse world. I don’t think that people of my political group should dominate—my ideal political world is not one in which everyone agrees with me. My ideal political world is one in which people of all sorts of views engage in political argumentation with one another.
Conservatives share that value of an inclusive realm of argumentation, and they believe that we should be careful to conserve the traditions we have, and that we should move slowly when we come up with a new idea. Eisenhower, for instance, supported the Supreme Court in rejecting white supremacy, and insisted on respecting the Constitution, even when he didn’t like what it required him to do.
Eisenhower believed that being conservative meant that you worked as hard as you could to get your political agenda effected by using processes you would think legitimate if the other party used them. You conserved the processes.
The problem is that people who now identify as “conservative” (who perhaps are actually “neo-conservative” or paleoconservative) don’t believe that we should be cautious about social change, nor that the restraints of the constitution should apply. They are trying to conserve their group, and their group’s status, and not the processes. Being conservative used to mean having a consistent principle about how to reason regarding social and fiscal policy. That isn’t what it means now. Now, calling yourself “conservative” means that you are irrationally committed to your party’s political policy and hate “liberals,” even when the policy flips (increasing the debt is bad if Dems do it, but fine if the GOP does it). Conservatives cannot express a principle that operates logically across all their claims.
Here’s what I’m saying: “conservatism” has ceased to be a principle or set of principles from which one decides policy, and has instead become a claim of rabid and irrational factional attachment to whatever benefits the current claims of the Republican Party.
So, to defend this policy, supporters of the current GOP will reason one way, but reason in a different—contradictory—way to support another GOP policy. This incompatible reasoning is particularly clear with the Second Amendment—that absolutist reading is not applied to the First Amendment, nor is there a consistent argument about the impact of bans. In addition, to support the reading of the Second Amendment that it’s all guns all the time, GOP supporters ignore the qualifying phrase “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” Paying attention to that phrase would imply that gun ownership is connected to militia duties—a militia that is regulated. And the absolutist reading of the Second Amendment ignores the historical context of the amendment (such as the lack of police force, its importance for slaveholders, and its role in wars against Native Americans). [1]
But, when it comes to do with the 14th Amendment, suddenly there are arguments for thinking carefully about the historical context , and they’ve suddenly discovered the importance of a claim being grammatically (and logically) qualified.
Were the current talking points about the 14th Amendment part of a principle of how to read the Constitution, then they would be made by people who also pay attention to the qualifying phrase and historical context of the Second Amendment, but they aren’t. So they’re what scholars of rhetoric call “post hoc reasoning”—you have a position, and then you go looking for ways to support it. Post hoc reasoning is irrational.
Rabid supporters of the GOP, in their race to provide talking points to justify Trump, have missed the most disturbing aspect of what Trump is saying and doing: he wants to undo a long history of Supreme Court decisions by executive order. A sophomore in high school should know that the President can’t do that. It’s not just a violation of the Constitution, but of the principle on which the Constitution is based–of checks and balances.
If Obama had suggested such a thing, or shown such ignorance of the Constitution, the very people who are supporting Trump would have hit the streets screaming. A President who doesn’t understand his own powers, who wants to be able to control every aspect of the government, is an ignorant authoritarian. If he gets his way, and gets appointed hot-tempered rabidly factional justices who will make decisions that protect the President from being called in front of a grand jury (a tactic the GOP used against Bill Clinton)[2], from being required to be transparent about financial dealings that might violate the emoluments clause, and that would allow a President to pardon anyone in order to keep people from testifying about his dealings, he will set in place decisions that would benefit any corrupt President, regardless of political party. No sensible person wants that, regardless of party.
[1] The NYTimes article overstates the connection, in that the idea of having an armed populace that trained regularly and could be called up–a state militia–was not just for slavery. It was also related to fears of the British again attacking, a desire not to have a standing army, and conflicts with Native Americans. But, in the South, the main function of the militia was to protect against slave revolts and to attack Native American tribes who might have escaped slaves.
[2] And here I will confess to a deep and abiding loathing for Bill Clinton. So I’ll point out that, because paleoconservatives and neoconservatives like Trump’s political agenda, they’re letting him put in places processes that would prevent any investigation of a President like Clinton. Processes matter more than the immediate outcome.