One of the ongoing gags in Peanuts involves Lucy enticing Charlie Brown into attempting to kick a football while she acts as the placeholder. Lucy, of course, pulls the ball away at the last second, and the comic strip ends with Charlie Brown flat on his back, ruminating about how he had once again been tricked. Even though the reader knows what’s coming, the gag always works.
As readers, we cheer for the perpetual underdog, yet eternally optimistic, Charlie Brown. Even though we know that Lucy is going to pull the ball away, we still harbor tiny seeds of hope that she won’t. Charlie Brown’s after-the-fact meditations while flat on his back are our after-the-fact meditations. Over the next four years, I’m afraid that President-elect Donald Trump is going to prove to be the conservative movement’s Lucy.
There are two types of Trump supporters: the first group consists of those who realize that they and their new savior are not conservatives. They proudly and loudly embrace the aberrant ideology of nationalism. The second group includes people who claim to be conservative, yet who continue to demonstrate that they do not understand what conservativism actually and historically means. Regarding the first group, I have a separate article in the queue about (for?) them. It’s the second group that is causing me to put pen to paper, so to speak, at this moment.
Proving that things like gay marriage only matter to them when Democrats talk about it, confessing social conservatives have continuously turned a blind eye to Trump’s support for gay marriage. Abortion, however, is one of the issues that Trump supporters continuously beat me and other Never Trumpers over the head with during the campaign. We were told that not voting for Donald Trump demonstrated tacit support for abortion. Well, as I carefully listened to President-elect Trump’s 100-Day Plan speech on YouTube, I had trouble hearing even the briefest mention of abortion or defunding Planned Parenthood. Trump has yanked the pro-life football away just as those who voted for him specifically to save babies from being murdered thought they were going to make a connection with it and do some real damage to the pro-abortion movement.
https://youtu.be/aAP_WTNZyYY
I get it, Obamacare is a failure and needs to be dealt with (more on Obamacare in a bit though), but saving the lives of babies should take precedence over everything else. President-elect Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress should be making sure that their pens are full of ink in order to begin dealing deathblows to Planned Parenthood and the entire baby-murdering industry. The fact that Donald Trump isn’t even discussing abortion in any substantial terms justifies the #NeverTrump position that I and others held throughout the entire 2016 election season.
I do hear him frequently talking about how he’s going to create wealth and jobs for America, though. But, here’s the thing: if you believe that one of the roles of the president of the United States is to create jobs, you might not be a conservative. Further, if you think that more government regulations—allow me to repeat that … MORE GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS—are the answer to the loss of jobs in the Rust Belt, well then, you are most definitely not a conservative. The number of self-professing conservatives who yell at me that I’m a liberal because I support free trade is mind-boggling to me. However, don’t take my word for it. At least give the highly esteemed conservative economist Dr. Thomas Sowell a hearing:
Jobs are always disappearing. The big question is why they are not being replaced by new jobs. Rust belt policies that drove out old jobs also keep out new jobs. NAFTA makes it easier for politicians to blame the problem on foreigners. In fact, foreigners make ideal scapegoats for politicians. After all, people in Japan or India can’t vote in American elections. Americans who can vote would do well to start spending more time thinking about economic realities, instead of being swept away by political rhetoric.
Speaking of more government regulations, President-elect Trump is apparently planning on replacing Obamacare with a “different” government-run health care system. Not long after meeting with President Obama, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump promised, “either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced.” In plain English, Donald Trump has promised, at best, to replace one set of unwieldy, contra-conservative government regulations and free market interferences with another set of unwieldy, contra-conservative government regulations and free market interferences. Strangely, professing conservatives continue to wildly cheer their new “conservative” savior. As for me, I dumbfoundedly continue to declare: “Conservative” my sagging, middle-aged butt!
Sadly, I predict that over the next four years, Donald Trump will pull the conservative football away so frequently that many conservatives will become concussed to the point of surrender. At that point, Donald Trump and his business cronies will be free to remake the conservative movement into a lobbying arm for their self-interests. As evidenced by his 100-Day Plan, Trump’s self-interests and those of his cronies rarely run parallel with the beliefs of the conservative movement, or the good of the country in general. As predicted, Donald Trump is slowly yet surely dismantling the conservative movement in America.
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