Republicans, has Trump been a good conservative president?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Maybe the more thoughtful ones who recognize the need (as did Edmund Burke) to ensure that people have something worth conserving so that there be no reprise of the French Revolution of 1789 -- or worse, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Nazi Revolution of 1933, or other overthrows of capitalism as in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959.

There seems to be an incomplete thought here, "Maybe the more thoughtful ones who recognize the need...cited examples of need not being met..."


Maybe what? What do you expect them to do or explain?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Maybe the more thoughtful ones who recognize the need (as did Edmund Burke) to ensure that people have something worth conserving so that there be no reprise of the French Revolution of 1789 -- or worse, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Nazi Revolution of 1933, or other overthrows of capitalism as in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959.

There seems to be an incomplete thought here, "Maybe the more thoughtful ones who recognize the need...cited examples of need not being met..."


Maybe what? What do you expect them to do or explain?

Very basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- food, shelter, clothing, protection from climatic extremes, basic dignity of life...

Happy people do not need revolutions.   

that is not what I meant. Are you asking said people to explain a Conservative justification for Trump?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Doing nothing is still better than a third term of Obama.

After Trump, many of us will want the first term of the political equivalent of an Obama clone.

I am trying to understand how conservatives can support someone who does and says what he does. Maybe the more thoughtful ones who recognize the need (as did Edmund Burke) to ensure that people have something worth conserving so that there be no reprise of the French Revolution of 1789 -- or worse, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Nazi Revolution of 1933, or other overthrows of capitalism as in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959.

Religious conservatives? Obama is the man of faith, his actions consistent with Christianity tempered by the rule of law. He does not wear his religion on his sleeve. Donald Trump is as godless as a Stalinist. Obama has apparently a very conventional family life. Could he get away with anything else? Donald Trump is a serial philanderer, twice divorced and twice remarried. It is true that men and women make wrong choices in selecting a mate and must get divorces if one or the other is to have any dignity. There can be cultural clashes, but  Obama dealt with that well. (Obama's father was an African and his mother was a white American; his wife had no connections to Africa except her genes, as is true of most slave-descended American blacks).

Let me address another aspect of conservatism: conservatives are anti-fascists. Conservatives as a rule recognize Mussolini, Hitler, and most Ku Kluxists as the thugs that they are. Shake hands politically with them or people who believe what those creeps like them believe, and you may be lucky to lose only a hand. Fascism is the antithesis of every noble tendency in American life from the Founding Fathers of the American political experiment to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The pogrom, the torture chamber, and the site of mass killings are all un-American. Religious bigotry does more harm than good. In the town in which I live there is a sizable Muslim community. Would I prefer that this community build a mosque or that someone establish a whorehouse or even a strip club? You guessed it!

There is no moral equivalency between the fascistic Alt Right and the vast majority of people. People who believe that slavery or the Holocaust were good things (or in the latter case did not happen and Jews are exploiting a non-existent injustice for... I need not go into that absurdity).  Most conservatives are good people who have no use for the evil-doers in history.

I don't often agree with you but I think this is an excellent post. Conservatism is supposed to be about keeping a steady ship, resisting momentary whims of the masses, protecting individual rights, and governing resposnsibly. While not everything Trump has done is bad, he (and much of the current GOP) don't represent what conservatism should be in a society.

Amen.  This Jacksonian version of "conservatism" that cultural reactionaries are latching onto is, well, not conservative.

Neither is economic libertarianism.  Amazing how one produced another.