Only Trump could destroy Republican Conservatism

Oct 10 2016

By guest columnist Al Rodbell

Over the last few weeks, while sitting for dozens of hours of interviews on television and newspapers, only one by The Washington Post provided the full audio recording of an hour long conversation that almost magically put the candidate at ease to be more candid than he has ever been. With his defenses down, listening to it confirms the limits of his knowledge of statecraft, but also something he does not allow to be seen, which is his freedom from the constraints of either of the two parties' ideology.

The mixture of inexperienced showman and potential president is truly disconcerting, and he acknowledges that absent his realty show persona, he would not be the presumptive candidate of his party.

It was a tell-all interview, including how he would have occupied the oil fields of Iraq with a permanent U.S. military-guarded Guantanamo-like enclave never before described. We all know that the era of colonialism ended a while ago, but Trump being unsteeped of this history, is comfortable advocating its return, which given the instability of the world, just may in a modified form be something to investigate.

His statement in March that women should be punished for having an abortion is only incoherent if we don't think about the assumptions that would criminalize the doctor, but not the woman. This is a reversion to woman as dependent, not deemed to be an adult with full rights, which also implies not burdened by responsibilities.

The pro-life myth is not benign or even coherent. It is based on a concept of patriarchy, where a women who for her own reasons, perhaps economic, or a fetus who will suffer from disabilities, chooses not to give birth. Actually, far from conservative theory, only extreme communitarianism would deign to usurp such a decision from the mother. So, in the metaphor of pro-lifers, it is the doctor who "murders" the child in her womb. Certainly, she hires the person to do the actual killing, and in circumstances such as this, the person who initiates the crime is always culpable.

This was not an example of Trump having "mis-spoke" or even a reversal of his position. In his revised statement which was comically a claim to be like the Republican saint, Ronald Reagan, he tacitly affirmed that his thinking through the principles and consequences of being "pro-life" would logically lead to criminalization of the instigator of the killing, the mother. Trump, on-the-fly, enunciated the above principle, and only then did he learn that being pro-life incorporates this myth of the evil doctor, as if he is descending on vulnerable pregnant women and persuading them to kill their child. It is telling that Trump had previously been pro-choice, and by internalizing its principles just assumed that being a pro-life Republican was also logically coherent.

It could be that anyone who checked all the boxes to become a "legitimate" candidate of one of the two parties has also internalized their truisms and the toxic partisanship that follows. We are fixated on Donald Trump not only for his showmanship, but how this performance has demonstrated the rigidity of our two party system. For him to implement the changes that he so glibly advocates will take a personal transformation from carnival barker to scholar-administrator that as of now are only capacities he has hinted at. Anger at this hubris for promising more than is possible, or admiration for his courage to destroy our current system? It will be an interested choice for the American voter.

                       Al's other essays can be found at AlRodbell.com.

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