"A Guide for the Perplexed" --Prof. Hadley Arkes in The Catholic Thing

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By The James Wilson Institute • Posted on May 4 2016

Without any other Republican candidates other than Donald Trump holding a viable path to the party's presidential nomination, many Republicans are left with a difficult choice in the general election. Prof. Hadley Arkes reflects in The Catholic Thing on the sobering realities which render Mr. Trump a weak figurehead for the conservative cause, while also noting the concrete merits of supporting a Republican candidate in November. "My late professor, Leo Strauss, used to say that we do less violence when we view the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. The local mayor may be involved in things like cleaning the streets and giving clearances for zoning. But at the heart of political office, nevertheless, there is a need to deliberate about the policies that could elicit consent and approval, for there is a strain to be fair and principled in dealing with rival groups and coming out with decisions that seem to do a decent and rough justice." "But Donald Trump has brought no comparable level of reflection, very little beyond the mantra of 'making America great again,' building a wall at the Mexican border, and risking a trade war by slapping on tariffs. My academic friend is usually the most critical essayer of texts and candidates. Why then the willingness to relax those demanding standards here? For my friend, I think it’s a reflection of his contempt for our political class, and a willingness to see things “shaken up.” But once things are shaken up, where are they supposed to land? To what ends will this shakeup be directed?" "Just what there is in the nature and dynamics of a party system that produces those systematic and principled differences, is something I might take up at a later time. But one would have to be blinded in a certain way not to notice those differences now. Even if the candidate of the Left were winsome and squeaky clean, an Administration of the Left would be unrelenting in its war to make Catholic institutions fund abortions and contraceptives and recede from any moral objections to same-sex marriage." Read the article in full here.