Perhaps predictably, the Colorado supreme court decision throwing Donald Trump off the ballot on the theory that he engaged in an insurrection has led to three different sets of responses on the right. Some of us have criticized the decision’s legal reasoning, and/or worried aloud (as Ron DeSantis did) about where this reasoning could lead. Some have more bluntly attacked the decision as undemocratic and part of a larger pattern of lawfare against Trump. But then there are people — including some elected Republicans such as Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick and prominent commentators such as Sean Davis of the Federalist — who argue that red-state Republicans should retaliate by ginning up excuses to throw Joe Biden off state ballots in retaliation.
Now, there is a time and a place for retaliation in kind. But trying to eject Biden from state ballots in response to the Colorado decision smacks of the most brain-dead sort of MAGA strategy, which consists of three elements:
First, always imitate the other side’s mistakes. You may know the adage, variously attributed to Sun Tzu or Napoleon, “Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake.” Forget that — if you see your opponent making a mistake, move as fast as you can to make the same mistake, while telling everybody that’s what you’re doing. If Democrats do something that makes them seem stupid, crazy, immature, petty, vindictive, and untrustworthy with power, why would you want to capitalize on that with voters repelled by the tactic, when you can reassure those voters that you’re all of those things, too? The Colorado decision is a mistake: it divided an all-Democrat court 4–3, with the chief judge dissenting and one of his colleagues writing that the court was “risking chaos in our country” and that “what took place here doesn’t resemble anything I’ve seen in a courtroom.” Even hardened Democrat partisans have warned that this is a bad idea. Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to draw any distinctions with Democrats in those circumstances, would we?
Second, never think ahead. The Colorado decision is nearly certain to be reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. (If by some chance it isn’t, there will be time to live under any new constitutional rules the Court writes.) So, any stunt to throw Biden off the ballot will be tossed out with it. But if you have a chance to look like a jackass and a loser at the same time, why would you pass that up? Always forfeit the high ground for some advantage you won’t even get to enjoy.
Third, conserve nothing. Always be on the lookout for ways to break down all the legal, social, and institutional restraints on your opponents, even if only for a benefit that you will enjoy for just a news cycle or three. What could go wrong?
A jeer sometimes directed at conservatives is “what have you conserved?” It’s often a hard one to answer in part because it’s easier to point to bad things that happened than to bad things that didn’t happen, and it’s also often just a bad-faith question that will ignore every answer, because people want an excuse to behave badly. The biggest mistake the MAGA elements of the American Right tend to make in this regard is to forget that the American system itself is a positive good worth conserving. We have a wonderful written Constitution, the oldest in the world, and it still very much matters in an age when hardly anybody else on the globe takes seriously a founding charter from the 18th century. We have a whole system of ways of deciding things built around that charter — elections, courts, written laws, free markets, liberal norms of governance and behavior engrained in our sense of “this is America,” etc. The system itself has value. Its components are precious and sometimes fragile things. They have taken a lot of damage from the progressive assault of the past 110 years, but what remains of them is still enough to make us the greatest country the world has ever seen. They are our American patrimony, as surely as Disraeli saw the crown, the Church of England, and the landed aristocracy as the patrimony of 19th-century England. Conserving them for our posterity is worth far more than scoring some momentary points for Team Red over Team Blue that hardly anybody will remember a year later.
Or, you can just see the failure of your enemies and always think, “I want a piece of that action.”