This is really not that complicated: Pundits establish what should be, while citizens try to make the best of what is.
This is really not that complicated: Pundits establish what should be, while citizens try to make the best of what is.
I n recent months, I have noticed a peculiar reaction to my criticisms of Republican candidates who are not named Donald Trump. I’ll make a strong case against this or that policy, or this or that speech, or this or that political maneuver made by a non-Trump candidate, and I’ll be told in response, as if it represented a clever and consequential rejoinder, “Whatever, you’d still vote for him.”
Er, yeah? Of course I would.
There is a fundamental difference between my job as a political commentator and my job as an American citizen. As a commentator, I seek perfection: Each day, I lay out the contours of my ideal world, argue precisely what I think about issues and candidates, honor my conscience, and try to persuade people to my side. As a voter, I live in the world as it actually exists. A useful analogy is with someone who is trying to make a business deal. When I am writing, I lay out unsparingly what I would get out of politics if I had everything my own way. When voting — when bartering with others, that is — I must inevitably settle for much less. Contra the “you’d still vote for him” crowd, there is no tension whatsoever between these two roles unless I attempt to square my own opinions with the compromises I’m obliged to make as a voter. “I don’t especially like this candidate, but, in the booth, I preferred him to his opponent” is a legitimate take for even the most punctilious of ideologues. “I voted for him so I must now defend him in every particular” is not.
In effect, those who throw around “you’d still vote for him!” are attempting to eradicate this important distinction, and thereby to transmute any criticism of any political figure into the magic bullet that wipes out his candidacy. This is ridiculous, and, were it to be widely adopted by the electorate, it would render our democratic republic flatly unworkable. Like every other American, I am one person within an enormous, complicated, multifarious country that contains hundreds of millions of people. Unless a given candidate has disqualified himself from consideration by doing something genuinely unforgivable — as Donald Trump did when he attempted to stage a coup in 2021 — the important question for me as a voter is not whether I am able to get everything I want from him, but whether I prefer him to his opponents. That I may strongly disagree with him on some important things — that I no doubt will disagree with him on some important things — is immaterial. In the electoral realm, the choice is either/or.
This, obviously, is not true of my writing. My role here at National Review is to explain honestly what I think about any issue on which I feel educated enough to have a useful opinion. Sometimes, this will require me to praise or defend figures whom I do not like and for whom I would not vote. Sometimes, this will require me to criticize or assail figures whom I do like and for whom I would vote. And so it should. During the Trump years, I was continually astonished by the number of people who assumed that good-faith analyses of Trump’s policies or controversies were mere proxies for their authors’ being “pro-Trump” or “anti-Trump” — as if all that ought to matter to one’s ongoing evaluation of the performance of the president of the United States was whether he was likely to earn one’s vote in the next election. They weren’t.
So, yeah: In the case of many of the people of whom I write critically, “you’d still vote for him” is true. I don’t necessarily want to, but if it came down to a choice between President Biden and all manner of other people, I’d vote for the alternatives in a heartbeat. During the last year or so, I’ve criticized Ron DeSantis over Disney, Section 230, foreign policy (to a limited extent), and more. I’d still vote for him for president — just as I voted for him for governor of Florida in 2018 and 2022. The same goes for many others. I’d vote for Larry Hogan. I’d vote for Liz Cheney. I’d vote for John Kasich. Hell, in the right circumstances, I’d vote for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. And then, when I’d done it, I’d go back to throwing darts at them — as I’m damn well supposed to.