In a recent Washington Post column, Former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson warns that should Republican voters so disregard his counsel as to nominate Donald Trump, it “would rip the heart out of the Republican Party.”  By the end of the piece, it emerges that upon Trump’s nomination, Gerson and his “compassionate conservative” friends would rip the heart out of the party by running one of their own against the Republicans and putting the Clintons back in the White House.

Gerson does not deny that Trump might defeat Hillary Clinton (that is, unless Gerson, et al. contrive his defeat and her victory by splitting the vote).  Neither is Trump’s ascent some ephemeral event, transitory in effect.  No, the nomination of Donald Trump would mean “the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the [Republican] [P]arty and its history.”  There follows the invocation of Lincoln, from whom Gerson claims to derive his “humane ideal.”  Lincoln’s creed was “human dignity, honored by human freedom and undergirded by certain moral commitments, including compassion and tolerance.”  Lincoln proclaimed that “in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and … all should have an equal chance.” Lincoln, furthermore, “admitted no exceptions to the Declaration of Independence” and got to be the Republican presidential candidate by appealing to “anti-slavery German immigrants.”  One supposes that he perhaps did that by being anti-slavery himself.  It might even have worked on anti-slavery descendants of the Mayflower voyagers – who knows? 

Then how has Donald Trump run afoul this code of the Republican Party, drawn up for us by Michael Gerson upon the authority of Lincoln?  Trump has put forth an odious immigration policy: deportation of the millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico, a wall to prevent further illegal immigration, and a temporary moratorium on Moslem immigration and visas (until the problem of terrorism is stabilized).  He has apparently also stoked “angry resentment” against “invading Hispanics and Muslims.”  This assaults “universality.”  It is “ethno-nationalism” and implies that the country “is being weakened by the other.”  It is like “European, right-wing, anti-immigrant populism.”  And at last, we get to Gerson’s idea of conservatism, which Trump’s immigration policy is indubitably not.  Conservatism is “respect for institutions and commitment to reasoned, incremental change.”  It also has something to do with an Edmund Burke, no aspect of whose political philosophy is vouchsafed, but who is said not to be the “grandfather” of British nationalist leader Nigel Farage.

Now let us try to take seriously Gerson’s version of conservatism and Republicanism.  It appears that the rule of law is not among the institutions to be respected, and that hundreds of thousands of persons pouring across the southern border, at least some of them violent criminals, looks like “reasoned, incremental change” to Mr. Gerson.  As to compassion and tolerance, has he any for such victims of violent aliens as Kathryn Steinle and the dead of San Bernardino, or for schoolchildren and medical patients already here whose access to resources is taxed by the unchecked influx of foreign persons?

True conservatism weighs compassion on the scales of justice – a check on compassion’s great danger, its inherent selectivity (see Clifford Orwin, “Compassion,” The American Scholar, Winter 1980).  Justice, whether understood as a legal or a moral phenomenon, demands a dispassionate and rational inquiry into the merits of opposing positions.  In its most famous image, justice is a blindfolded woman carrying scales and a sword.  She is sensible only to the weight of the evidence and the law.

Compassion (or equity, or mercy) may represent a refinement of justice, made in the final analysis.  But as a starting point and basis for public policy, it is nothing but an inducement to go off half-cocked, borne away by emotion.  Take Mr. Gerson.  His head is filled with sympathy for Syrian refugees and impoverished  Mexicans, and so he forgets to have sympathy for citizens already here, whose lives will be disrupted, if not imperiled, by the intrusion.  We may credit his altruism, but the altruism has a price that others will pay.  The “universality” he touts is bereft of all moderation and prudence.

A nation’s policies can never be directed at the simultaneous interest of all mankind, and the visionary demand that love of foreign nationals animate American lawmaking is exactly the kind of thing against which Burke inveighs.  Burke’s conservatism emerges as opposition to the governance by universal theory of the French revolutionaries.  A country is a tangible, specific, living being.  Its institutions and laws acquire respect and fealty by prescription, by their evolution over a long period, during which a certain people in a certain place becomes accustomed to them, and ultimately prejudiced in their favor.  What is more, the worth of policies and laws is revealed in their actual effects and not in their conformity to universal theories.  The prescriptive evolution of laws and ways of life is a process of perfection, based upon a people’s actual experience.  Universalism is precisely antithetical to that process.

Turning back to this country and the example of Lincoln, Gerson reminds us that Lincoln extolled the precepts of the Declaration of Independence as applying to all human beings of all races.  From this, Gerson wants to draw the conclusion that the government of the United States should be the one to secure the “unalienable rights” of anyone who wants to come here.  Immigration to the United States is an unalienable right.  Gerson imputes this view to Lincoln – to Lincoln, who, before the Civil War, wanted to return the enslaved Africans to their native continent, undoing the slave trade and forestalling the proximity of the races that it portended.

There is an evident divergence between Burke’s position and that of American conservatives, who, with Lincoln, are defenders of the founding principles contained in the Declaration.  The Declaration is nothing if not a statement of universal natural rights, of a theory applicable to everyone.  But the intricate mechanisms of the Constitution, as explicated in the Federalist, are there to channel the application of those principles, preventing the kind of calamity that was to occur in France.  In any case, the idea that something in the Declaration requires the deliberate radical amendment of our demography, and the wholesale importation of possibly harmful persons, without regard to national security, is bizarre.  If we do not find it refuted in the writings of Lincoln and the Founders, it is because they never even considered such a thing.

We close with a sentence of Lincoln’s, from his last debate with Stephen Douglas: “I confess, when I propose a certain measure of policy, it is not enough for me that I do not intend anything evil in the result, but it is incumbent upon me to show that it has not a tendency to that result.”  The reader will recognize in this a concise defense of prudence as a guide to politics, one with which Burke certainly would have concurred.  It may not express the conservatism of Mr. Michael Gerson, an open borders advocate, but it does express mine.