Evan McMullin.
Between the Lines / Edited by Peter McDermott
One aspect of Evan McMullin’s biographical summary would not likely warm the cockles of the heart of anyone who leans left of center. And it’s not the years he spent as a CIA operative nor his adherence to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rather it’s his time as chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. However, at the present rate, McMullin will soon be getting a lot of respect far beyond his conservative base in Utah, where as an independent he got 21 percent in the vote in the U.S. presidential election.
It’s not clear if he wants a career in electoral politics, but his foreign policy expertise and that quixotic tilt at Trump should make him a familiar media figure in the short and medium term.
Our winner-takes-all system isn’t designed to aid outside challengers, and indeed most often helps one or other of the major candidates. You could say that both Jill Stein and Gary Johnson’s candidacies combined to work in Trump’s favor. That pair might now have a much higher national profile, but neither have endeared themselves to the electorate at large. Johnson thought Aleppo was the Marx Brother who left after “Duck Soup,” while Stein’s holier- and prolier-than-thou act looked very hollow when her tax returns showed she and her husband aren’t particularly ethical about where they invest their millions.
In reality, the only outside challenger likely to work is one that’s backed by a major faction of one of the two big parties.
As mentioned here before, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat advised the Republican leadership to intervene at the RNC on the grounds that Trump was too much of a threat to democratic norms and that the party should take the loss in November in the national interest.
Instead, Republicans did what conservatives have too often done in history when a leader with autocratic tendencies emerged – they made an alliance in the hopes of controlling him. That may well be a natural response, but it usually doesn’t end well.
McMullin, an unknown 40-year-old who began his campaign in August, inevitably made just a small splash, but his candidacy put down a marker. And more than the Libertarian Johnson and the Green Stein, he can be said to represent a major-party faction. His is that wing of the GOP that, to put it mildly, finds the president-elect hard to take. It’s hawkish on foreign policy, while perhaps a bit more flexible on the domestic front. Most importantly, it’s committed to democracy and the constitutional system.
He joined the CIA after 9/11, and while working in counter-terrorism apparently won colleagues’ respect with his hearts-and-minds approach to winning recruits inside extremist organizations. Not surprisingly then, he was appalled at the proposed Muslim ban as well as the torture and “kill their families” rhetoric of GOP primary candidate Trump.
There’ll be times when McMullin speaks that we’ll be hearing what people such as Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham think.
But later if a political career beckons, he may find, like Churchill and de Gaulle before him, that on the big issues of liberty and democracy his most reliable allies are well to his left
Meantime, here are three tweets McMullin posted last Friday before the U.S. announced its finding that President Putin directly ordered interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Russia's effort has included support for pro-Trump white supremacists, online activists, and traditional propaganda, in addition to hacking.”
“Even after his briefing, Trump continues to actively obscure Russia's multifaceted, ongoing attack on American democracy on his behalf.”
“It's distressing that Trump continues to obscure the truth about this foreign assault on our democracy, a system we need to protect us!”
A lot of people will agree that “distressing” just about sums it up.
