I attended both the Republican and Democratic conventions. As a libertarian conservative, there was little libertarian or conservative about either.
They were awful.
If the opposite of libertarian is authoritarian, we haven’t seen anything in modern politics quite like the explicit fear mongering of Donald Trump. Whatever else Trump said in Cleveland, you couldn’t listen to his speech without taking away the ominous message that immigrants, Muslims and black activists are out to kill you.
And that Trump will protect you.
That’s really his platform. Nothing about liberty, the Constitution, smaller government or even the kind of free market pitches you might expect from a successful businessman accepting the Republican nomination. Not that these libertarianish issues alone would suffice for a comprehensive and effective convention speech, but neither did Trump’s actual speech.
Don’t misunderstand: Damning Trump is not a defense of the old Republican guard that he’s challenged and defeated, for now. It wouldn’t bother me one bit to see the GOP of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain go by the wayside. Each are big government anti-liberty Republicans in their own way. Many in the Never Trump movement also seem to long for that not-so-grand old party.
Not me. But Cleveland convinced me thoroughly that Trumpism is even worse.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton.
One of my favorite parts of the Democratic convention was watching Hillary Clinton take the problem of police brutality in the black community seriously.
But it was also hard to take Hillary seriously, remembering her own record particularly when her husband was president. Michael Harriot at The Root had the same reaction I did to the hypocrisy of at all:
“I remember how (Hillary Clinton) sold black men out for a few more slivers of power. I remember how she campaigned for the law that sentenced black men to sentences 10 times longer than those for equal amounts of cocaine. I remember how she crisscrossed the country ginning up white fear, calling for ‘law and order,’ the same as Trump did last week. I remember her saying that we need to be brought ‘to heel.’”
“We superpredators do not forgive easily,” Harriot said.
Then there was Clinton’s foreign policy — a complete 180 from where her party was just a decade ago.
Throughout the aughts, thousands of progressives marched to protest George W. Bush and the Iraq war. One globally coordinated 2003 antiwar protest was called the “biggest in world history.” Vice President Dick Cheney was a top villain, and opposition to that Republican administration largely defined the left and the Democratic Party.
Hillary is not only significantly more hawkish than most in her party, but has long been a favorite of the neoconservatives who dominated Bush’s first term. More than a few are openly supporting her.
No one in Philly seemed to care.
Watching both conventions, I tried to imagine what kind of president the nominees would be based on the policies they were proposing or would be likely to propose.
That’s not what most convention-goers cared about. I’m not the first to note that modern political conventions are love fests where partisans project their own hopes and fears onto the candidates, despite what those candidates might actually say.
Between Trump’s demagoguery and Clinton’s neoconservatism, Cleveland and Philly unsettled me more, not less. It sunk in that with either as president, liberty and the country would suffer.
I’m not a fan of President Obama. But after the 2016 conventions, I see a future where, in comparison, today’s Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters will soon long for the days of Barack Obama.
Disclosure: I co-authored Senator Rand Paul’s 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington.
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