Posted on 01/26/2016 12:55:02 PM PST by MacNaughton
National Reviewâs special issue, âAgainst Trumpâ was courageous and important.
There is no way to do good in this world without risking making enemies. That National Review was prepared to do that â among its own readers, no less â in this day of great financial challenges to newspapers, magazines, and news and opinion websites, was an act of courage.
In opposing Donald Trump for president â which, it happens, I did in a column I wrote four years ago â I face the same issue among some in my radio audience. I receive emails from listeners who say they can longer to listen my show because of my opposition to Trump (though I do regularly distinguish between Trump and his supporters).
Interestingly, the two issues â one being the listeners and readers who will no longer listen to or read anti-Trump Republicans whom they have admired for decades and the other being an important reason Trump is unfit to be president â are the same.
It is something vitally significant in life â the concept of the moral bank account.
Every human being has one. The moral bank account is identical to a monetary bank account with the obvious exception that one measures moral activity while the other measures financial activity. We make deposits and withdrawals in each account.
âWeâ is every one of us. We all make moral deposits and withdrawals.
Hopefully, of course, our balance is always in the black, meaning that we have done more good than bad.
This rule applies to the personal as well as the political. If a person in our lives â a spouse, a friend, a family member â does something that angers or disappoints us, and we donât take the personâs whole moral bank account into consideration, we will lose every important relationship in our lives.
I have explained this to listeners on a number of occasions during my more than 30 years as a radio talk show host.
The vast majority simply understand that at some point on some issue, I will disappoint them and they therefore continue to both respect me and to listen to the show. But others donât. They write, âI can no longer listen to youâ because I took a position that troubled them. Some of them note that they have been listening for many years, even decades. But in their eyes my one withdrawal from my account with them was enough to close that account.
A personal example in the other direction: I have been an admirer of George Will for decades. One week he wrote a column in opposition to the death penalty. As one who is deeply committed to retaining the death penalty for some murders, I was disappointed that a moral hero of mine took the opposite position. But his moral bank account with me was so large that this âwithdrawalâ had no impact on my respect for him, let alone on whether I would continue to read him every week.
That is how admirers of National Review who support Donald Trump should react. In their view, National Review, that magnificent defender of conservative values for all of their lives, made a withdrawal. But so what? Should that deplete National Reviewâs moral bank account with them?
In fact, conservatives who support Trump should do something else â ask themselves why nearly every conservative they have admired for so long is opposed to Trump.
Finally, the moral bank account concept should also apply to the candidate himself. In terms of conservative values, the man either has no moral bank account or it is in the red. He has made very few conservative deposits, but has made a fair number of significant withdrawals (support for nationalized health care, support for the Clintons, support for partial birth abortion, opposition to free trade, personal defamation and mockery of political opponents, among others). For a Republican candidate, that is saying something.
Nor do I have confidence that he would nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court â perhaps the most important thing the next president will do. Nevertheless, I will vote for Trump if he is nominated â because I do not believe he will do nearly as much damage as another Democratic president. But he must not be nominated. Moral bank accounts matter.
Nothing says more than “Prager” as an Establishment guy.
From the article:
“In fact, conservatives who support Trump should do something else - ask themselves why nearly every conservative they have admired for so long is opposed to Trump.”
Excellent article by a brilliant conservative.
In life, sometimes solutions aren’t pretty.
We need a strong man right now. We have some nation-killing things on the agenda, and we need a man who can turn them around.
He’s going to have to be forceful, walk on some people withe help of the public, and get these things addressed.
I admire Dennis Prager a great deal. I wouldn’t stop listening to his show if I did, but I understand where he is coming from.
We don’t have time to pussy-foot around for four or eight more years say, we’ll some day we’ll do something, but not today.
Trump will do it today.
That’s good enough for me.
He is innovative. He brought up issues we wouldn’t even be talking about, if not for him, or at the very best in so muted a tones it would have been like not talking about them.
Trump!
As far as a lot of us are concerned the 20 something journos coming out against Trump have jumped the shark.We have long memories NRO.
He is not part of the political process or part of K street.He is an ethical monotheism that is conservative. People who see something different could be warped by blindness of the mind for various reasons.
Prager is a brilliant conservative. One of the few in whom I have a large emotional bank account with.
That’s a line Dennis should drop.
Some pretty good Conservatives are backing Trump.
Phyllis schlafly is as sound a Conservative as there is.
There are others.
This is one of those moments when sound Conservatives disagree.
What else do they do besides write? Drink the DC coolaid?
Well looks like Trump got 2 backers today who hope to help him improve his moral bank account.
Is this a spin on a Jewish belief?
If surely is not Christian.
Prager, another rabid hate-filled neocon checking the I Hate Trump box. What a surprise.
I’m a Cruz supporter.
And I hate what NR did.
Trump has a legitimate point and candidacy.
Trump is running as a populist, not a conservative.
Trump, like Cruz, is doing so in part to stick a knife in the Establishment.
NR appears to BE the Establishment by attacking him. And charging NR with being the Establishment is so close to perfectly supported by the evidence, it undermines anything they might want to say.
Better that the Establishment had shut up, figured out why Americans hate them so much, and correct their behavior.
NR has no capacity for self-reflection on why everyone hates them.
What does that mean?
“Nothing says more than âPragerâ as an Establishment guy”
There they go. Flame on.
I’d rather have Cruz than Trump, but without Trump’s spear-catching Cruz wouldn’t even be in the running.
We need a strong man now? You mean like Julius Caesar? Napoleon? Or maybe Stalin, or Chavez. I think I really understand the Trump support. The need to follow a strong man. How many “strong men” ever gave up power once they have it? Constitutional limits? I haven’t heard Trump talk about that at all.
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