The consequences of a Biden-Harris victory, especially if the Democrats take the Senate
After the first presidential debate, I received an email from a friend inclined to vote for President Trump. “Trump managed to make a stronger case for his personality disorder than for Biden’s mental incapacity,” he wrote.
David French, a writer of exemplary character and intellect, took up a similar theme — the baleful example set by the president during the first debate with Joe Biden in a piece entitled, “The Debate Showed the Truth: Trumpism Is Bullyism.” French accused Trump of conflating bullying — e.g., “attempts to create chaos, interruptions, and insults” — with toughness, when, in reality, it is its opposite. At every turn, Trump had missed opportunities to be “substantively tough” on Biden’s policy agenda.
Real toughness, argued French, requires “discipline, preparation, and persistence. It requires knowledge, reason, and — yes — even manners.” The Trump style is seductive because it “is simply easier than substantive toughness. It doesn’t require discipline. It doesn’t require knowledge. And it actively shuns the manners and decency that are often indispensable to the project of persuasion.”
Similar concerns were expressed in “Sinai, not Washington: An Open Letter to the Torah Community,” jointly authored by figures whom I respect greatly. The authors decried the current political climate, in which “good character and benevolent governance are devalued, contrition is seen as weakness, and humility is confused with humiliation.” They warned that even the absence of revulsion at “shameless dissembling and personal indecency acted out in public before the entire country” undermines the Torah values with which we seek to imbue our children and represent to the world. It did not take a weatherman to guess to whom they might be referring.
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