{"id":6232,"date":"2016-06-07T23:31:08","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T23:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=6232"},"modified":"2016-06-07T23:31:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T23:31:08","slug":"donald-trump-obi-wan-gambit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2016\/06\/donald-trump-obi-wan-gambit\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump and Obi-Wan’s Gambit – Article by Daniel Bier"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
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\"The<\/a>Daniel Bier<\/span>
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You Cannot Win By Losing<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n

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In Star Wars: A New Hope<\/em>, the last Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi, is confronted by his former pupil, Darth Vader, as he races to escape the Death Star. The two draw their lightsabers and pace warily around each other. After deflecting some heavy blows from Vader, Obi-Wan\u2019s lightsaber flickers, and he appears tired and strained.<\/p>\n

Vader gloats, \u201cYour powers are weak, old man.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hard-put Obi-Wan replies, \u201cYou can\u2019t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obi-Wan backs away from Vader but finds his escape cut off by storm troopers. He is trapped. He gives a mysterious smile, raises his lightsaber, and allows Vader to cut him in half.<\/p>\n

This is\u00a0Obi-Wan\u2019s gambit, or the \u201cwin by losing\u201d strategy. Lately, it has emerged as a distinct genre of commentary about Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, \u201cThe Article About Trump That Nobody Will Publish<\/a>,\u201d which promotes itself as having been rejected by 45 publications. That\u2019s a credit to America\u2019s editors, because the article is an industrial strength brew of wishful thinking, a flavor that is already becoming standard fare as a Trump presidency looms.<\/p>\n

The authors give a boilerplate denunciation of Trump (he\u2019s monstrous, authoritarian, unqualified, etc.), but then propose:<\/p>\n

What would happen should Trump get elected? On the Right, President Trump would force the GOP to completely reorganize \u2014 and fast. It would compel them to abandon their devastating pitch to the extreme right. …<\/p>\n

On the Left, the existence of the greatest impossible dread imaginable, of President Trump, would rouse sleepy mainline liberals from their dogmatic slumber. It would force them to turn sharply away from the excesses of its screeching, reality-denying, uncompromising and authoritarian fringe that provided much of Trump\u2019s thrust in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our daring contrarians predict, Trump \u201cmay actually represent an unpalatable but real chance at destroying these two political cancers of our time and thus remedying our insanity-inflicted democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t win, Donald! Strike me down and I shall be\u2026 forced to completely reorganize and\/or roused from dogmatic slumber!<\/em><\/p>\n

The authors assert\u00a0these claims as though they were self-evident, but they\u2019re totally\u00a0baffling. Why would a Trump win force the GOP to abandon<\/em> the voters and rhetoric that drove\u00a0it to victory? Why would it reorganize against<\/em> its successful new leader? Why would a Hillary Clinton loss empower moderate liberals over the \u201creality-defying fringe\u201d? Why would the left turn away from the progressives who warned against nominating her all along?<\/p>\n

This is pure, unadulterated wishful thinking. There is no reason to believe these rosy forecasts would materialize under President Trump. That is not how partisan politics tends to work. Parties rally to their nominee, and electoral success translates into influence, influence into power, power into friends and support.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve already seen one iteration of this \u201cwin by losing\u201d fantasy come and go among the Never Trump crowd: the idea that Trump\u2019s mere nomination would be a good thing, because (depending on your politics) it would (1) compel Democrats to nominate Bernie Sanders<\/a>, (2) propel Clinton to a landslide general election victory<\/a>, or (3) destroy the GOP and (a) force it to rebuild as a small-government party<\/a>, (b) split it in two<\/a>, or (c) bring down the two-party system<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But, of course, none of those things happened. Clinton has clinched the nomination over Sanders<\/a> (his frantic protests<\/a> notwithstanding). Meanwhile, Clinton’s double digit lead over Trump has evaporated, and the\u00a0race\u00a0has narrowed to a virtual tie<\/a>. Far from \u201cdestroying the GOP,\u201d Trump has consolidated the support of the base<\/a> and racked up the endorsements of dozens of prominent Republicans<\/a>\u00a0who had previously blasted him, including Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan.<\/p>\n

The GOP is not being destroyed<\/a> \u2014 it is being gradually remade in Trump\u2019s image, perhaps into his dream of a populist \u201cworkers\u2019 party<\/a>,\u201d heavy on the protectionism, nativism, and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, knee-jerk\u00a0partisanship\u00a0and fear of Clinton are reconciling the center-right to Trump.<\/p>\n

Moderates win by defeating the fringe, not by losing to it. Yet, for some reason, conservatives, liberals, and libertarians all like to fantasize that the worst case scenario would actually fulfill their fondest wishes, driving the nation\u00a0into their losing arms \u2014 as though their\u00a0failure<\/em> would force\u00a0<\/em>the party or the public do what they wanted all along.\u00a0This is the bad-breakup theory of politics: Once they get a taste of Trump, they\u2019ll realize how great we were and love us again<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But the public doesn\u2019t love losers. (Trump gets this and has based his whole campaign around his relentless self-promotion as a winner.) Trump\u2019s inauguration would indeed be a victory for him and for his \u201calt-right\u201d personality cult<\/a>, and a sign of defeat for limited-government conservatives and classical liberals \u2014 not because our ideology was on the ballot, but because all our efforts did not prevent<\/em> such a ballot.<\/p>\n

Trump embodies an ideology<\/a> that is anathema to classical liberalism, and if he is successful at propelling it into power, we cannot and should not see it as anything less than a failure to persuade the public on the value\u00a0of liberty, tolerance, and limited government. Nobody who is worried about\u00a0extreme nationalism and strong man politics should be taken in by\u00a0the\u00a0idea that their\u00a0rapid advance somehow secretly proves their\u00a0weakness and liberalism’s strength.<\/p>\n

This does not mean that we\u2019re all screwed<\/a>, or that a Trump administration will be the end of the world\u00a0\u2014 apocalyptic thinking is just another kind of dark fantasy. As horrible as Trumpism may be, it cannot succeed without help. And here\u2019s the good news: Most Americans aren\u2019t<\/em> really enamored with Trump\u2019s policies. The bad news is that they\u00a0could still become policy.<\/p>\n

Classical liberals who oppose Trump should realize that things aren\u2019t going to magically get better on their own. We cannot try to Obi-Wan our way out of this. We will have to actually make progress \u2014 in education, academia, journalism, policy, activism, and, yes, even electoral politics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If this seems like an impossible task at the\u00a0moment, just remember that the long-sweep of history<\/a> and many\u00a0trends in\u00a0recent decades<\/a> show the public moving in a more libertarian direction. It can be done, and there\u2019s fertile ground for it.\u00a0We have to make the argument for\u00a0tolerance and freedom\u00a0against xenophobia and authoritarianism\u00a0\u2014 and we have to win it. The triumph of illiberalism will not win it for us.<\/p>\n

Daniel Bier is the site editor of FEE.org He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Bier You Cannot Win By Losing In Star Wars: A New Hope, the last Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi, is confronted by his former pupil, Darth Vader, as he races to escape the Death Star. The two draw their lightsabers and pace warily around each other. After deflecting some heavy blows from Vader, Obi-Wan\u2019s lightsaber flickers, and he appears tired and strained. Vader gloats, \u201cYour powers are weak, old man.\u201d The hard-put Obi-Wan replies, \u201cYou can\u2019t win, Darth. If you…<\/p>\n

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