Like any sensible person, I assume this Trump stuff is a sideshow to the real Republican race for the nomination. In some odd way, it displays the accidental wisdom of the seemingly misbegotten process that produced our excruciatingly long and, well, somewhat boring race for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations. Following the wisdom of our Mr. Ceaser, I say it would be better if the nominees were chosen, as they once more, by conventions made up of party leaders from the states. The guiding principles of coalition-building, consensus, and electability generally produced better candidates than we’ve been getting recently. But, hey, there are no more party leaders, partly because of the system in place for over forty years that has made our parties so centered on the will of the presidential nominee. Given that, it’s good that we have the elaborate screen testing of the various debates, as well as the sequential arrangement of the primaries and a few caucuses over a good number of weeks. (The process is, it’s true, more front-loaded next time.) Trump, if experience is any guide, won’t make it through that.
A national Republican primary might nominate a Trump! Two arguments against that: He’s not fit for high office. And he couldn’t win in November. Not only that, his fairly bizarre and often shifting array of views is hardly very Republican (or Democratic, for that matter).
But I’m not writing to bash Trump. Much of what he’s said on immigration is wrong or ill considered, but it’s resonating not because so many Republicans are bigoted redneck nativists. It’s that people want an immigration party oriented around citizenship. Our friend Peter Berkowitz had an article in the WSJ about conservatives moving forward. And on immigration he chided conservatives to be for legal immigration, while saying only a bit about the limits to immigration and the truthful grounds for some of the conservative outrage. The genuine conservative concern is about libertarian or oligarchic efforts to think too exclusively beyond national borders in terms of a global free market. The more open our borders are, the theory is, the more productive our job creators will be. There’s a big gap between how the WSJ thinks of immigration and how most Republicans do, and, for the most part, that gap can’t be explained by xenophobia, unless you define a xenophobe as anyone who thinks of citizenship as something more than rent-seeking. Let’s be for a very generous policy of legal immigration. And let’s put all the people here legally on the road to citizenship; “guest worker” is not an American idea. Let’s even do what’s reasonable to make the people who are here illegally (owing to various incentives for which it’s usually wrong or at least cruel to blame them too much) legal and eventually citizens. But let’s not keep around, owing to misguided compassion or simple ineptitude, those who actually pose a danger to our citizens, and let’s get our borders under genuinely political supervision and control. Damn it, how hard could it be to know who’s here in our country?! Finally, let our immigration policy have something to do with not undermining the opportunities for worthwhile and reasonably lucrative work available to all American citizens. Let’s have a properly civic or political immigration policy, never forgetting, as Chesterton wrote, that making America a “home for the homeless” is basically a political romance that is subject to reasonable political limitations.
Peter also wrote, I think, to make us too okay with judicial activism. He explained that the upside of upholding Obamacare a second time is that Republicans now have to give political arguments for overturning it legislatively. Well, that might be right. He added that conservatives should just be okay with the same-sex marriage decision, ignoring the judicial activism that created a fundamental right with little to no warrant in the text of the Constitution or in precedent. Most Americans, he observed, are now for SSM anyway, and there are plenty of conservative reasons to be for it. So “let it go,” don’t campaign against SSM or the Court in general. Well, that’s true to only this limited extent: Nobody in his or her right mind would believe a candidate who says I will appoint justices to turn that decision around. That’s not going to happen. And at this point harping along those lines would seem to be rousing up unreasonable animosity toward gay couples. But . . .
Peter goes on to talk about the religious-freedom issue as the proper concern of conservatives now. And of course, that is a key concern.
But, you know, the experiment of separating “civil marriage” from “sacramental marriage” depends on both views being not only not intrinsically bigoted but actually reasonable. So if there are good reasons for conservatives to be for same-sex marriage (and there are a lot out there), Peter should have given them. And he should have given the good reasons for being against it, ones that have nothing to do with demeaning or degrading gays. Once you conduct that exercise — which is indispensable for preserving religious freedom through the reasonable disagreement of “marriage diversity” — then you can’t let go of the conclusion that the Court preempted unconstitutionally political deliberation through the activist misapplication of constitutional principle. You could easily be for same-sex marriage for a variety of reasons and see that the it was quite a blow against the free exercise of religion for our “national conversation” to be ended by the judiciary. And you could do so while being, with plenty of good reasons, highly attuned to the fact that the Court decision made many gay Americans feel more at home in their country, more fully citizens.
Then there’s the fact that Peter didn’t mention Roe v. Wade as a possible campaign topic, one that, given recent revelations, has more chance than ever of working this time. And let me remind you, you could be somewhat (or even more than somewhat) pro-choice on abortion and realize that it was a mistake with really perverse consequences to think that issue could be resolved by the Court. Then there’s the fact that the average American is — with some good reasons — conflicted on abortion, seeing that the claims for both the liberty of the woman and the life of the unborn baby have some merit. If you really want a policy that mirrors the deliberate sense of the American people . . .
Peter, it’s true, spent some quality paragraphs on the socially conservative issue of the family. But even here, he’s suppressing a tough problem that can’t be covered over. Our Mr. Ceaser included religion as one of the indispensable “hearts” of American conservatism. Why? Religion is an indispensable source of our morality — something our Founders’ natural-rights orientation was unsustainably short on. What happens when conservatives no longer share a common minimalist religous morality? Can we get by one heart down?