John McCormack of the Weekly Standard has urged social conservatives not to vote for Donald Trump. The costs of supporting Trump, McCormack argues, outweigh the benefits.
Princeton’s Robert George, a leading social conservative, cites concerns about Hillary Clinton’s prospective Supreme Court nominee in order to justify voting for Trump. “The best argument for holding our noses and voting for Donald Trump,” George says, “can be summed up in two words: Supreme Court.” Even if Trump’s recent support for partial-birth abortion were set aside, McCormack replies, he “could degrade the culture and discredit the moral authority of his supporters, their organizations, and their party for a generation.”
Trump supporters like Laurua Ingraham have provided unsatisfactory responses to these concerns. Ingraham implausibly compared Trump’s serial adultery to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Both men, she argued, “had to do some really immoral things.” Comparing Lincoln, who once wrote that his highest ambition in life was to render himself worthy of other men’s esteem, and Trump, who referred to his avoidance of venereal disease during the 1980s as his “personal Vietnam” and belittled Senator John McCain’s experiences as a POW, is an egregious species of sophistry.
Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelicals in Civic Life program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, faults prominent Trump supporters like Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson whose published books extol the importance of character. “Evangelical social conservatives,” Cromartie argues, “are going to lose any cachet in bringing up character questions in the future about anything.” Maggie Gallagher, formerly the president of the National Organization for Marriage, has made the cost-benefit analysis for social conservatives more explicit. McCormack writes, “she fears that a Trump presidency could do more to hurt the conservative project in the long run than a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court appointment.”
Cromartie and Gallagher seem to be representative of evangelicals who take their faith seriously. As McCormack attests, Trump lost Missourians who attend church weekly by a 20-point margin, chatter about his appeal among evangelicals notwithstanding.
McCormick’s piece on evangelicals complements Andrew C. McCarthy’s criticism of Texas judge Andrew Hanen. In response to Justice Department lawyers who lied to him about the progress of President Obama’s DAPA directive, Hanen has ordered that the attorney general implement mandatory ethics training for the next five years. Hanen, McCarthy argues, has no authority to do this, for the case is now before the Supreme Court. The proper response to extra-constitutional behavior, he insists, is not extra-constitutional behavior.
Conservatives should not get in the habit of citing the end of a particular action as a way to justify the means used to achieve it.
The Southern Unionist 