As I have noted previously, Michael Gerson is one of the very few principled conservative Republicans who have not traded in their ethics (to the extent they had them) for partisanship advantage in the Trump era.
I have become a semi-regular reader of Gerson’s columns, not because I necessarily agree with his policy preferences (in many, if not most cases, I don’t), but because he is intellectually consistent and honest, and his opinions are for that reason worth considering.
In an otherwise unremarkable recent column for the Washington Post, Gerson used a phrase that struck me. The column itself addressed the all-too-obvious GOP effort to delegitimize Robert Muller and his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
This quote will convey Gerson’s general approach to that issue–an approach with which I agree wholeheartedly:
Some of Trump’s defenders are claiming, in effect, that the FBI is engaged in a “coup d’etat” (the words of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz) — a politically motivated attempt to reverse the results of the 2016 election. Their evidence? That some senior investigators donated to Democrats, supported Hillary Clinton and called Trump an “idiot.”
If that last charge were considered a disqualification, we would have the political equivalent of the Rapture (including, apparently, some of the Cabinet).
It was the sentence immediately following this quote that struck me:
Trump Republicans are willing to smear a man of genuine integrity, and undermine confidence in federal law enforcement, for reasons they must know are thin to the point of transparency. This is beyond cynicism. It is institutional arson.
Institutional arson.
That is a perfect description of the current administration’s approach to governing– although, even as I was typing the words “approach to governing,” I realized how misleading that phrase is; it gives Trump and his merry band of vandals far too much credit. Trump is interested in exercising power–and clearly uninterested in governing.
Gerson is certainly correct when he asserts that the strategy employed by Trump supporters against any institution (the courts, the media, law enforcement) that threatens to expose the administration’s deception and corruption is profoundly anti-conservative.
Genuine conservatives have a point when they claim that Trump voters were not conservatives as we have long understood that term. As data has emerged about the motives of those voters, it appears that racial resentment, coupled with disdain for the enterprise of government and general anger at the “way things are going” fueled a desire to elect someone who would “blow it all up.”
If voters wanted to “blow it all up,” they voted for the right candidate. The only consistent thread in this erratic and ignorant Presidency has been Trump’s obsession with overturning anything his predecessor did. If destroying Obama’s legacy requires damaging the institutions of government, or snatching healthcare away from millions of Americans, or trashing America’s image abroad –well, that’s okay with Trump. No wonder people have dubbed him Agent Orange.
As Gerson noted,
Other presidents would be restrained by the prospect of social division and political chaos. For Trump, these may be incentives. He seems to thrive in bedlam. But the anarchy that sustains him damages the institutions around him — a cost for which he cares nothing.
If history and sociology teach us anything, it’s that anarchy doesn’t work. Institutions–even flawed ones– are vitally important to social stability, and they are a lot easier to destroy than to rebuild.
Ironically, the people who voted for institutional arson are the most likely to get burned.
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