A verdict and a question

The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York jury actually raises a number of questions, some trivial and some decidedly not.

From the beginning, Donald Trump's behaviour has appalled me. His casual cruelty disgusts me, and his contempt for the very idea of service angers me at a deep level that frankly surprised me. His profound divisiveness and heedlessness incompetence frightens me, particularly when I consider the power of the office he has held and wants to reclaim. I and others appalled and enraged by Donald Trump should probably ask ourselves how much we really want to celebrate the conviction and possible incarceration of an elderly and by all accounts rather pathetic individual on a relatively minor, if squalid crime. 

On the trivial side, I wonder how the US Treasury Department, which provides security for American presidents and former presidents, will decide which agents have to accompany Donald Trump to prison. Musical chairs, perhaps? Offering danger money or hardship pay?

The jury verdict on Donald Trump does not, in fact, mean he will go to prison or even jail: not soon, and quite possibly not at all. Courts have routinely sentenced people guilty of worse things than any of the charges against Mr. Trump to fines, community service, or probation. As well. Mr. Trump still has avenues of appeal.

 The verdict in Donald Trump's New York trial sharpens the most important question: why do conservatives stick with this one man? One conservative blog puts it in these extreme terms:

We have crossed the Rubicon. Or, this country is finished; it was nice while it lasted. [Italics in original]

The word conservative has a good number of definitions, but I have always assumed these definitions had a common central principle, one all conservatives from ardent reformers to the most tenacious reactionaries could agree on: that some core of our society, tested by time and proved, merits protection. In American society, indeed in almost all of the societies we call Western democracies, that core includes the concept of ordered liberty, the idea of a society bound by both solidarity and by commitment to government resting on the consent of the governed rather than the violence of the governors.

Today, a jury of Donald Trump's peers convicted him of a crime in a court of law subject to all constitutional safeguards, including the right to appeal, a right with which Mr. Trump will almost certainly exercise. The crossing of the Rubicon, by contrast, represented the violation, by a Roman military leader, of one of the basic safeguards of the Roman Republic and presaged his decision to set himself up as dictator. Whey would anyone, much less an American conservative, equate these two events? Even more, why would they view a criminal conviction against one man as the inevitable end of the republic? Abraham Lincoln wrote to the United States Congress in 1862:

We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

When Lincoln wrote those words, the split threatening the future of the United States pitted a fundamental moral principle, freedom and justice, against the vast economic power wielded by the exploiters of an enslaved work force. If the United States had failed in the civil war, it would at least have failed over a momentous question. Expressing a willingness to give up on one's country over hush money payments to a producer and performer of adult films reads less like a statement of political principle and more like the punch line to a Monty Python sketch.

American conservatives have many beliefs and principles on matter large and small, momentous and trivial. Some I agree, or mostly agree with; on most I vehemently disagree with the current American conservative positions. Yet conservatives do have principles and ideas worth discussing. American politics has plenty of contested claims from which a debate could potentially tease the truth, and arguments capable of resolution. The leadership of Donald Trump adds nothing to these discussions; it only removes clarity. In his term as president he accomplished nothing but a major tax cut slanted heavily towards wealthy Americans. Most of his promises went unfulfilled, and when he came to the great test of his leadership, he failed completely, unless you count disclaiming responsibility and suggesting American drink bleach as a cure as a success.

After a failure as great as this, political parties have traditionally gone back to their basic principles and reinvented themselves, as the Democrats did after their failures in the eighties. The current Republican Party has instead doubled down on failure, now going so far as to double down on a failed candidate. The question of why has many answers, and remains one of the major, and important, questions to emerge from this trial and this verdict.