Boxing People In

I have a friend who talks the same way about Donald Trump voters, except on the male/female rather than white/black divide.

...the deepest rift is with the apologists, the “good” Trump voters, the white people who understand that Mr. Trump says “unfortunate” things but support him because they like what he says on jobs and taxes. They bristle at the accusation that they supported racism, insisting they had to ignore Mr. Trump’s ugliness. Relying on everyday decency as a shield, they are befuddled at the chill that now separates them from black people in their offices and social circles. They protest: Have they ever said anything racist? Don’t they shovel the sidewalk of the new black neighbors? Surely, they say, politics — a single vote — does not mean we can’t be friends.

I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.

From June of last year, we were in a binary choice between surrendering the Constitution or accepting Donald Trump as President. The Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court was going to be filled by the next President, and a President Clinton was going to appoint a fifth doctrinaire "living Constitution" Justice. The 'living Constitution' is of course no Constitution at all; if the Constitution means whatever the powerful would like it to 'evolve' to mean, then it means whatever the powerful want. A constitution that means whatever the powerful want it to mean is not in fact a constitution at all, because a constitution's purpose is to restrain the government's use of power. The choice really was between the end of a Constitutional form of government, or this bullying blowhard from Manhattan.

That's not a great choice. Some went one way, and some went the other. It disturbs my friend, and this writer, that some could stomach voting for Trump in spite of his 'unfortunate' remarks. It disturbs me that some could stomach voting for Clinton in spite of the fact that it would have meant the end of a system of Constitutional limited government; indeed, I think they saw that as a feature rather than a bug of a prospective Clinton presidency. At long last, the Constitution would never hobble them from using the government to pursue the goods they wanted. We would hear the Supreme Court rule that the Constitution existed only to limit Americans' freedom to exercise racism or sexism or whatever-else-ism, never that it forbade the government from exercising some power 'to do good.' Rather than restraining the government, the Constitution would have been nothing more than one more weapon for the government to exert itself against the people.

What I just said will sound to them as if I meant, "I couldn't vote for Clinton because she would have turned the Court into a weapon against my right to exercise racism and prejudice." The real issue is completely opaque to those making these arguments. Indeed, I think this writer is so invested in the identity politics that it might not be possible to sever the issues conceptually. Perhaps the writer imagines that this sense of the indivisibility of identity from justice, which seems so self-evident to him, must necessarily be equally in the minds of everyone else as well.