In justifying such a choice, a columnist has a duty to face the truth, and to confront readers with that truth. David French fails at the task.
Our old friend David French writes in the Sunday New York Times, “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris.”
I am deeply disappointed in the effort. There are two very big omissions from this column that destroy its persuasive force.
A vote reflects two kinds of choices: a selection between alternatives in who will govern us, and a statement (in the case of a columnist or a leader, a public statement) of what we endorse. There are often tensions between the two, and we all have our own views of how to resolve those tensions and what lines we won’t cross.
My own view: I’m a longtime Trump critic who voted third party in 2016, voted write-in in 2020, and planned to write in again in the Trump-vs.-Biden race. I’m also still a conservative Republican. I agree with French that Trump has been a menace to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, that he has acted against our systems of law in ways that cannot easily be absolved or minimized, and that he is a corrosive force in our national life. I’ve supported some very bad people who agreed with me, but it’s harder to write off character and fitness for the job in the presidency, given its vast powers. I’ve always said there were only two things that could make me consider a vote for Trump: a Kamala Harris nomination and a serious push for Court-packing by the Democrats. The past month has brought us both. I’m still not sure if I could pull the Trump lever even against Harris, but that’s another day’s argument.
In any event, I’ve tried very hard for eight years to be charitable towards fellow conservatives who felt compelled to vote Trump in the general elections as the lesser evil, and also towards those of us who opposed Trump so fiercely that they felt it necessary to vote Democrat.
But in justifying such a choice, a columnist has a duty to face the truth, and to confront readers with that truth. French fails at the task.
A columnist also has a duty to stay true to principles, or explain why they have changed — given that the profession of principles and their application to situations is the core of the columnist’s job.
This column fails on both counts. On the first, aside from the title and declaration of intent to vote, French mentions Kamala Harris only twice, saying with vast understatement, “I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion,” and adding, “if Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin.”
That’s it. Nothing else is mentioned of Harris’s views on domestic or foreign policy, her approach to law and the rule of law, how she uses power, or what sort of people she might appoint to the executive and judicial branches (Tim Walz is not mentioned). I have laid out the case at length that Harris is a dangerous authoritarian with contempt for law and individual rights, even citing French’s own past work; he addresses none of this, either to defend it or to explain why it doesn’t matter. On foreign affairs, no consideration is given to confronting Xi’s China, or Hamas, or Iran. French treats this as an election on only two issues, and even there he must muffle his acknowledgement that the candidate he supports is as bad as bad could be on one of the two, with enormous cost to innocent human life.
This is a dereliction of duty, even understanding the constraints of word counts (this piece runs some 1,600 words, which is long for the Times) and of what the editors of the Times will permit to be printed. Harris is a menace. If one must vote for a menace for the same reasons Churchill would ally with Stalin, one must at least be honest enough to lay out the consequences and why they are worth it — not least to an audience of readers comfortable in their prejudices against noticing those consequences.
Second, as a matter of principle, French has spent years arguing against binary-choice logic and for the view that one morally must not vote for an unfit character to be chief executive no matter how bad the alternative is. This is an intellectually respectable position. Yet, here, he declares himself for Harris without even bothering to make the case that Harris is fit to be our commander-in-chief, chief magistrate, and defender of our Constitution. I suspect that he does this because he knows that describing Harris as fit for the office is an indefensible position, or at least one whose defense comes at a much more comprehensive cost of one’s principles. And so the principle falls silent.
There are conservative cases to be made for some very hard choices in this world. But one of the central duties of a conservative is to remember, always, that there are trade-offs for everything. To frame a case for Kamala Harris in the presidency only in the negative sense that it avoids another Trump administration is to pretend away those trade-offs. But they will not go away by ignoring them.