The alternative is awful, but not even conservatives should back Trump

After Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 – the attempt by Czechoslovakian prime minister Alexander Dubcek to introduce a more “liberal” type of communism – the socialist world was deeply split.

Some of the hard-line communists who remained steadfast with Moscow dusted off an old slogan, the origins of which are traceable to the French Revolution: “No enemies on the left.” In the teleology of the left, notwithstanding differences about ideology and tactics, ultimately all socialists were on was the same side in the greater struggle.

A right-wing demagogue Trump may be. The most scornful and effective scourge of the condescending and censorious liberal elite, he surely is.Credit: AP

In recent years, we have seen a strikingly similar phenomenon emerge among elements of the right. Its most obvious current manifestation appears in attitudes to Donald Trump in the United States.

With Trump now the presumptive Republican nominee, comfortably ahead of Democrat President Joe Biden in almost all the battleground states, many on the right are anticipating a second Trump presidency with unabated glee.

Trump has long had a following among elements of the right in Australia, some of whose high-profile identities, such as Gina Rinehart, attended the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in the US state of Maryland last month.

In years gone by, CPAC was a gathering of orthodox conservatives; it has now become a jamboree of MAGA Republicans. As the presidential election nears, we will see more Australian conservatives jumping on the Trump bandwagon. Elsewhere, this has begun to happen: recently, Boris Johnson endorsed him.

Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart attended CPAC, the gathering of American conservatives, last month.Credit: Michael Quelch

Politics is binary. Ultimately, one has to pick a side. For many, especially political activists, it is also tribal. For people on the conservative side of politics, even those with deep misgivings about Trump, the instinct is to stick with the tribe.

But sometimes, it is not enough to embrace a candidate for no better reason than the alternative is awful. Mimicking the old left by adopting the posture of “No enemies on the right” demands a complete abdication of critical and moral judgment.

Much of Trump’s appeal can be explained by the fact that the modern American left has become so ghastly. Weaponised by social media, political correctness and identity politics have evolved from niche attitudes into powerful vehicles for censorship, moral bullying and intimidation. Anyone who does not conform to social values deemed acceptable is marginalised and “cancelled”.

The ghost of George Orwell haunts the country’s college campuses, as prestigious American universities have degenerated from havens for free thinking to licensors of orthodoxy.

No wonder that Trump, as the left’s most despised hate-figure, is a hero not just to his evangelists, but has remained popular with so much of middle America. On other familiar conservative causes, too, including abortion, gun ownership, border control and taxation, Trump is an effective champion.

But Trump is not a conservative. A right-wing demagogue he may be. The most scornful and effective scourge of the condescending and censorious liberal elite, he surely is. But that alone is no excuse for conservatives to turn a blind eye to the threat Trump poses to values which they have always considered sacrosanct.

Those values include respect for constitutional government. A failed candidate who stubbornly refused to accept the outcome of an election, encouraged his supporters to disrupt the proceedings of Congress to prevent the result being declared, and propagated without a shred of evidence the fantasy that the election had been stolen, is no conservative.

Nor is a person who is openly defiant of both the criminal and civil law, and seeks, in a similarly mendacious way, to discredit the US justice system as a political conspiracy against him. (Perhaps the motivation of some of the prosecuting authorities may be questionable. But all of them?) Nor is someone who openly countenances a “revenge presidency”, with all the abuse of executive power that threatens, a person conservatives should find acceptable.

It is, however, in foreign policy that Trump is most radically at variance with the honourable traditions of American conservatism. (Not for nothing did Biden, in his State of the Union speech, evoke the memory of Ronald Reagan.)

Trump’s insouciant remarks about encouraging Russian aggression against NATO (of which America is the principal security guarantor); his refusal to criticise the killing of Alexei Navalny; his indulgent attitude to Vladimir Putin; the near certainty that, if elected, Trump would pull the rug from under Volodymyr Zelensky, and thus retrospectively endorse the worst violation of international law since World War II, are the most dangerous, and revealing, telltale signs about Trump.

Yet, he is merely channelling what the Republican Party has become, some of whose loopier members buy Putin’s line about the decadence of the West, and seem to prefer his style of authoritarian government to Western liberal democracy.

In a thoughtful contribution to The Spectator last week, Tony Abbott expressed his alarm at how many Trump Republicans seem mesmerised by admiration for Putin, whom he rightly described as “pretty close to evil”.

No enemies on the right? For principled conservatives, who believe in constitutional government, liberal democracy, respect for the rule of law, and a foreign policy which stands up to aggressors and autocrats, there certainly can be. Those enemies include the demagogues who threaten those values. Donald Trump is one of them.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general.

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