In Slate recently, Seth Stevenson proposed a thought experiment: "If a dopey populist surge somehow contrived to foist a wackadoo lefty nominee on the American electorate, how many of my fellow Democrats would feel obliged, for the sheer safety of the nation, to vote for an especially hated but well-qualified right-wing opponent?"
Stevenson believes most Democrats would rationalize a way to support Sean Penn--his designated "wackadoo"--over Ted Cruz in a hypothetical race.
Let's leave Penn out of this. He's done some silly things (El Chapo) but doesn't strike me as wackadoo, at least not in the same sense as Donald Trump does. Penn's a leftist, with certain core beliefs and convictions. I admire him in some ways; he does his job well and there are firsthand stories about his genuine heroism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He seems to be a serious person unlikely to become a gadfly candidate.
Trump believes in his own superpowers. He alone can diagnose and heal America. While, so far as I know, Penn doesn't want to be president, Trump may genuinely believe he'd be the best boss this country ever had.
So let's do our own thought experiment. Let's imagine that Donald Trump had decided to run for president as the Democrat he used to be.
While Hillary Clinton's fundraising capacity and the Democratic National Committee's home-team bias would have posed significant problems for Trump, she proved in 2008 that she was susceptible to a grass-roots campaign by a political newcomer. There's no doubt the Balkanized GOP represented the path of least resistance; could Trump have done better than Bernie Sanders? I can envision a scenario where Clinton might have finished third in a three-way race. It seems likely the presence of Trump in the race would have benefited Sanders, but given Trump's apparent willingness to say absolutely anything, he might have siphoned off enough die-hard Bernie voters to put him over the top.
What if Trump attempted a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party? What if it had worked? Would most rank-and-file Democratic apparatchiks stand behind their nominee?
I don't think there's any question they would if the GOP nominee was an ideologue like Cruz. During the primaries, lots of Democrats expressed the sentiment that Cruz "was even worse than" Trump. And, maybe faced with such a situation, Trump would be the moral choice.
What if the nominee were perceived as more moderate, as someone like Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush or John Kasich?
That depends on how much Trump had moderated his rhetoric, which he surely would have had he run as a Democrat. But if Democratic Donald Trump was saying exactly the same things as Republican Donald Trump, most notable Democrats would probably behave like most notable Republicans are now. They wouldn't publicly disavow him, but they'd seek to distance themselves from his most outrageous statements. They'd probably privately look for ways to get the guy off the top of the ticket--they might be looking around for some way to buy him off--but only a few of them would take the brave and honorable actions that so many of us think necessary.
Most of them would be saying things similar to what Mike Huckabee said about GOP Trump recently: "[I]t's not so much what Donald Trump says when he's a candidate, it's what he's going to do if he's president .... he's going to be surrounded by a whole lot more people than he is as a candidate ... I think he probably won't have his own Twitter account when he's president."
As lame as that sounds, it's probably what the collaborationist Democrats would say in public even as they privately sought to do something, anything about the candidate about to wreck their party. Even if they understood Trump was a disaster, they'd be scrambling for a way out that preserved their personal viability. Because strange things can happen in elections ("Your people, sir, is a great beast," Henry Adams quoted Alexander Hamilton as saying, though Hamilton had the good sense not to write that down) and you don't want to be the disloyal one when the Big Man comes to power.
And a few would say the same things that a few Republicans have said. That Trump is unfit for the office. That what he espouses is un-American. That people ought to vote their conscience.
But not many. Politicians are by nature careful poker players who tend to accept whatever incremental gains they can acquire while avoiding catastrophic losses. For them, saying nothing risks less than telling the truth about Trump, so they say nothing and trust that "the system" will hold, that he won't win, and if he does he'll be checked by bureaucracy and wiser heads. ("At least he's not the witch," they whisper, knowing full well that whatever her weaknesses as a candidate Hillary Clinton is a mainstream American moderate who has withstood a more than 30-year siege on her character by Republicans and their darker operatives.)
And so it is up to those of us who have little to lose by telling the truth to say loudly what those who imagine themselves our leaders will not say. This man is a horror and a disgrace, a product of American laziness and cynical appeals to anti-intellectualism.
The only thing he has to do with the party of Lincoln and Reagan is that he has occupied it. He has presented real Republicans with an unique opportunity to demonstrate genuine courage and leadership. It's a shame so few of them have done the honorable thing, that so many of them seem to believe their backroom games worth more than their country.
But Stevenson is right; most of us are lucky we're not called upon to be brave.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 08/07/2016