Some thoughts on conservatism, part two: the unraveling of the movement
This is a depressing time to be an American who does his or her own thinking.
There are more of us than it sometimes seems. Somewhat surprisingly, Gallup found last month that registered Republicans are slightly more common than registered Democrats, by a margin of 27% to 26%. But 43% of registered voters are independents. With a few exceptions, recent surveys had shown the Democrats to be ahead among those voters declaring a party preference.
Even more surprising is that the increase in the percentage of voters who are independents (from 36% to 43%) seems to have been at the expense of the Democrats, who had 31% of the registered voters in November of 2016. The Republicans had the same 27% they have today.
I find those numbers depressing because they confirm my worst fears about Republicans. Somehow, it seems that very few of them have been particularly put off by Donald Trump. And that is scary. The Democrats are just as crazy, of course. But I had thought that common sense and intellectual integrity ran a bit stronger in my former party than it seems to.
Mr. Trump's erratic and childish behavior, his bizarre and often patently false claims, and the very fact that his base remains the ugliest and most extreme parts of the lunatic right are all things I would have hoped would influence Republicans more than they have. There is simply no avoiding the ominous message in the fact that the percentage of voters who are registered Republicans is the same as the percentage the day that Donald Trump was elected.
Today's Republican party is simply not the same party it was before. Stop and think for a moment about the fact that all four of the previous Republican presidential nominees refused to endorse and presumably to vote for Mr. Trump not only because of his repeated and consistent demonstration of personal unfitness for the job but because they recognized the dangers involved in the person holding the office they once held being someone at once as personally erratic and as uninformed (or, more problematic, misinformed, and unwilling to accept the possibility that he's wrong) as he. Our president seldom lets reality get in the way of a good narrative. Sure enough, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his false claim that our NATO allies have not met their financial obligations to the alliance. When the president "shot from the hip" and attacked the mayor of London because of a quotation he took out of context and which said almost exactly the opposite of what Mr. Trump assumed it meant, it didn't do any good to point the mistake out. Rather than apologizing and perhaps resolving in the future to read things before reacting to them, Mr. Trump simply repeated his attack!
It's a disturbing pattern. It's not just that so many of the claims which Donald Trump makes are untrue. It's not just that he's so ignorant about things a president really has to know about. That would be bad enough. The real problem is that when the mistake is pointed out, instead of correcting it, he doubles down on it.
Perhaps the GOP has lost more voters than the numbers seem to indicate. Perhaps the numbers of the departed have been made up by the tinfoil hat crowd, the conspiracy theorists, the believers in simple solutions to complex problems, and the racist and authoritarian types who seem to have crawled out from underneath every available rock and become the new face of the Republican party in the Age of Trump.
A rebellion on the right had been brewing for some time. All the signs were there. Disgusted even in a time of gridlock by the willingness of the relatively moderate conservatives who had been the party's face for most of my life to compromise and to depart from the norms of strict ideological purity, the Tea Party and those like them had been clearly the coming thing for years. The nomination of Ted Cruz in 2016 would not have surprised me a bit, and had it happened I would have gritted my teeth and voted for him.
But nobody foresaw the rise of Donald Trump, a demagogue capable of rallying the clueless, the angry, the haters, and the irresponsible and turning them into a plurality of the Republican primary voters. The takeover of the GOP by the Trump base would have been depressing enough if it had been an aberration, a temporary glitch in the history of a party which as a whole was still the party of Reagan and the Bushes and McCain and Romney and even Cruz. But such is not the case.
From conservative columnists to the Republican rank-and-file, the party has enthusiastically embraced an immature, ill-mannered ignoramus who until shortly before he decided to seek the presidency as a Republican was a pro-choice, pro-immigration fan of Hillary Clinton, a lifelong liberal Democrat who voted for Barack Obama and publicly crowed about how much better Democratic presidents were for the economy than Republican ones. Donald Trump has never been either a conservative or a Republican until he decided that the Republican party was his path to power and self-glorification. Nor was he elected as a conservative, despite changing his lifelong convictions about abortion and turning from Hillary Clinton's admiring supporter into her fiercest critic, all in a matter of months. He was elected as a nativist, a fearmonger, a candidate who appealed to those very dicey and dubious folks who are the new face of the Republican party- a face which people with whom I'd previously stood in campaign after campaign are apparently content to have as their own.
I myself am not.
I might have accepted Ted Cruz, however reluctantly. Cruz, at least, is a principled conservative. But Donald Trump is no conservative. Donald Trump is what he clearly and unambiguously has always been: an unprincipled narcissist loyal to no principle but the greater glory of Donald Trump.
Conservatives traditionally have valued truth and integrity. But they have embraced as their leader a pathological liar, a person given to making up "facts" on the spot to fit the convenience of the moment. And they have chosen to consistently support him in his dishonesty.
Conservatives traditionally have valued patriotism. True, there has always been an isolationist streak in paleoconservatism, and nobody is surprised when Pat Buchanan advocates a withdrawal from our responsibilities to the world and to our allies. But I don't think any of us ever expected that tendency to replace the lively defense of American interests recent Republican administrations have stood for in our relations with the rest of the world, and their commitment to our alliances, including NATO, which Mr. Trump continues to devalue and trivialize even as he insults and slanders our allies. Nor would it hitherto been thinkable that a "conservative" president would make quite as much of his consistent admiration for murderers, strong men, and dictators, from Vladimir Putin to Rodrigo Duterte to Kim Jong Un.
Freedom is a conservative value. Authoritarianism is not, and totalitarianism even less so. And nobody a few years ago could have conceived of a Republican president putting the interests of our nation's adversaries ahead of its own, to the point of siding with them against the FBI and the CIA in the matter of the Russian hacking of the DNC computers, only admitting fairly recently that they had been right and that he had been wrong- softly enough that many of his supporters have yet to get the message and are still repeating the old version of the party line!
Could anyone have foreseen that a Republican president would go on North Korean radio and sing the praises of the cruelest and most repressive Communist dictator on the planet? When the Christian right would watch with satisfaction as their hero betrayed the confessors and martyrs who suffer such savage persecution under the regime of Mr. Trump's new buddy, whose advisors were apparently savvy enough to tell him that all one has to do to get a narcissist to do anything you want is to lavishly and publicly praise him?
Conservatives traditionally value civility and courtesy. But now, they embrace a crude, tactless buffoon and have made him their beau ideal. In recent years, conservatives have rightly criticized the ongoing coarsening and dumbing down of our society. Who would ever have foreseen that they would become its leading exponents?
Admittedly free trade has not always been a cardinal principle for the Buchanan wing of the Republican party. But Republican economic policy certainly in the modern era has embraced free markets. That not all trade agreements have been to America's optimum advantage is an undeniable fact, and to express dissatisfaction with them and even seek to renegotiate them is only reasonable. It is also only reasonable that we do not renew such agreements when they expire without obtaining better terms. But to break our national word and unilaterally renounce them does not make for healthy relationships with our trading partners.
Interestingly, it's generally the Democrats who are big on the "buy American" business as a way of supporting and appealing to their base in organized labor. Conservative confidence in the natural laws of economics and in free markets have generally caused them as a matter of principle to oppose protectionism (again, the paleos and Buchanan types might be an exception). But now, protectionism seems to be the hallmark of our trade policy. Have we so lost confidence in American workers and the quality of the products they produce that we no longer believe that they can prevail in fair and open competition on world markets?
Nothing Donald Trump has done- including the abandonment of all those regulations his supporters credit- could have affected the economy sufficiently in so short a time as to account for the current economic boom, which is simply the continuation and natural acceleration of a trend which began under Mr. Trump's predecessor combined with a few savvy maneuvers by the Federal Reserve. Mr. Trump and his supporters were actually trying to take credit for the economy only months into his administration, something which ought to have raised the eyebrows of anyone who knows anything at all about economics. But after all, it's the nature of politicians to try to take credit for whatever they can, whether or not they deserve it.
Just as Republicans and conservatives traditionally eschew protectionism, they try to avoid trade wars. History teaches us that, contrary to Mr. Trump's claim that they are "easy to win," nobody wins trade wars. Already the one Mr. Trump has begun with China has savaged the American midwest so badly that the Trump administration itself has promulgated aid programs to help American farmers withstand its effects. Whatever might ultimately happen with regard to trade with Europe, the opening stages of Mr. Trump's trade war on that front saw Harley Davidson close a plant in Michigan and reopen it in Europe in order to escape the retaliatory tariffs.
That's what happens with trade wars. They don't protect people's jobs; they cost people their jobs. That has been a core conviction of Republican trade policy for decades. That is the lesson of history. But it's a lesson Mr. Trump has never learned, and his trade policy, if he persists in it, seems likely to reverse the progress the economy has made and plunge us back into recession. And if that happens, there will be no question as to who is responsible- though I am sure that Mr. Trump and his supporters will find some way of blaming someone else.
After all, Donald Trump never does anything wrong. The hero of the Christian right famously doesn't even apologize to God. Nothing is ever his fault. He admits, in the abstract, that sometimes he makes mistakes, but it would be hard to find an example of his ever actually admitting one.
He seems to actually believe that he is infallible. I find it hard, though, to believe that many of his supporters really do. Some of them are exactly the type to put their blind and unwavering faith in a demagogue who pushes the right buttons. But a great many of them are intelligent people who have shown a capacity for critical thinking in the past. Alas, when defeating the other side becomes more important than your own principles, you tend to turn into something other than what you think of yourself as being.
Conservatives traditionally stand for openness and transparency and the rule of law. But now they support a president who (for some reason) is the first in recent memory to refuse to release his income tax returns and who despite a series of indictments and guilty pleas in the Mueller investigation join him in calling for its early termination and support him in stonewalling it at every turn, seeking to portray Mueller as well as the FBI as somehow engaged in an illicit conspiracy for simply seeking to maintain the rule of law. These are not the tactics of folks who are confident that there are no reasonable grounds for suspicion, especially when so much fire has already been discovered amid the smoke. And despite the loud denials, there is no question but that we have more than reasonable cause for an investigation of Mr. Trump's own behavior and that of his associates. But rather than favoring a thorough and complete investigation in order to clear the air with regard to the Trump campaign and administration's links to Russia, both the president and his supporters are eager to end it. This is anything but reassuring. It seems to imply that they fear that something serious is waiting to be discovered if the investigation continues.
Yes, it certainly is the case that a certain guardedness and even hostility has existed in the FBI and the CIA toward Donald Trump for the beginning. But why is this either surprising or disturbing? Their job, after all, is the protection of America's interests- and in Donald Trump, America's intelligence professionals knew from the outset that every secret America had would be in the hands of a man with no filters, who might blurt it out to anyone, and that policy would be made as a matter of impulse rather than informed deliberation. Our nation's intelligence community would have been derelict in its responsibilities had it not been concerned about Donald Trump becoming president. He is a man who- as he has amply demonstrated in "burning" at least one Israeli intelligence asset in order to brag to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister about how knowledgeable he was- simply cannot be trusted to keep a secret.
Yes, having a man renowned for his shoddy ethics long before he reached the Oval Office at its head can do strange things to a political party. But to ignore the manifest corruption in the Trump administration while talking endlessly about "Crooked Hillary," a figure from American history who will never again matter in American politics, is not the kind of thing we would have expected from the party of Eisenhower and Ford and Reagan and the Bushes.
And then, there's the Constitution, a document sacred to conservatives to the point where in recent years it has become fashionable for them to specify that they are "constitutional conservatives." One would think that before taking an oath to "support and defend the constitution of the United States," Mr. Trump would at least have read it. But I wonder whether he's ever laid eyes on the document.
The day Donald Trump took office he was in violation of the Emoluments Clause. In 1789, the word "emolument" referred to any financial profit accruing to a person by virtue of an office he held. Leaving aside the financial advantages Mr. Trump's hotels, particularly the one in Washington, have enjoyed due to his office, Mr. Trump has, in his son's words, a "disproportionate" proportion of his assets invested in Russia. Given his policy toward that country, to say that this creates the appearance of impropriety would be, to put it mildly. If a Democratic president stood to profit financially from favorable treatment of an unfriendly government, count on it: conservatives would be apoplectic. But not a peep, since it's Donald Trump.
Of course, Congress has the authority to waive the emoluments clause and doubtless would have in Mr. Trump's case. Except that to do so would be to admit that there was an issue and there can never be an issue where Donald Trump is concerned.
In the ordinary course of events, a public official would divest himself of such investments before taking office. That would also apply to Mr. Trump's investments in Iran, North Korea, and other unfriendly nations. But he has chosen not to take that course, and instead put his foreign investments in a "blind trust-" administered by his children!
How has this not been a major scandal? Is it surprising that the FBI has concerns?
And then, there's the Bill of Rights. During the campaign, Mr. Trump- apparently unaware that it is Congress and not the president that makes laws, and equally unaware of the First Amendment repeatedly vowed to "change the law" to enable him to sue journalists who publish "knowingly false" information. Leaving aside the question of who would decide what is "knowingly false," he seemed unaware not only that presidents can't legislate, but that libel laws are matters of state rather than Federal laws and the can of worms which would be opened by his proposal. Who would decide what is "knowingly false?" During the campaign, he promised to pay the legal bills of any supporter who beat up a peaceful demonstrator at one of his rallies. Since his election, he has followed the standard playbook of totalitarian and authoritarian leaders by labeling a free press (in principle, any source of information which he or his allies do not control) as "enemies of the people."
The leftist bias of the media as a whole is beyond dispute, no matter how often the left disputes it. Survey after survey has shown that eighty and ninety percent of working journalists consistently vote Democratic, and the incestuous nature of American journalism (moving in the same circles, talking mostly to one another and reinforcing their own prejudices attending the same parties, and living their lives more or less in a shared echo chamber where they are seldom if ever challenged to question their assumptions or worldviews) guarantees that such would be the case despite every effort at honesty and balance on the part of the working press. But in a democracy, the way to fight such bias is with information, correcting its fallacies and holding its assumptions up to examination. Instead, Mr. Trump chooses the dictator's trick of trying to discredit the media en masse- and all those "constitutional conservatives" back him up!
All of this would be depressing if all of this was merely a temporary aberration. It would be one thing if American conservatives could be expected some day to recover their integrity. But a line has been crossed here which will be difficult if not impossible for them to recross. Having sacrificed one's intellectual integrity, regaining it is easier said than done.
How can we ever again regard them as people of integrity? How can they ever again see themselves that way? How I wish that I could look forward to a day when Trump was gone and the conservative movement could be itself again. But what all the conservative journalists and rank-and-file Republicans who have climbed aboard the Trump Train seem not to realize is that the transformation of the conservative movement and of the Republican party from Reaganism to Trumpism is permanent. When one crawls into bed with alt-right dogs, one gets fleas. But when a movement renounces as many of its core values as the conservative movement has renounced in order to ally with Donald Trump, it is permanently changed. This is a stain that will not wash away. Never again can either the conservative movement or the Republican party claim to stand for the things they have renounced in order to ally with protectionist, nativist, authoritarian, fear-mongering Trumpism.
The Republican party will never again be a place where the George Wills, the Bushes, the Romneys, the grownups will have a home. It will never again be a place where I can have a home, nor can I ever see those who have abandoned so much of principle because their most important concern is defeating the left rather than in standing for the Constitution and for decency is their driving concern. And having sold out its principles out of partisanship to embrace a demagogue, the conservative movement has done itself damage from which it may take fifty years for it to recover.
And partisanship is the issue. Conservative men and women of integrity have become the partisans of an authoritarian populist demagogue because of their conviction that it is necessary in order to defeat the left. The irony is that they are right to be concerned. I am as delighted as any Trump supporter with the nominations of Justice Gorsuch and Judge Kavanaugh and recognize right along with the Trump people that a great deal more than an unsubstantiated allegation by a political partisan will be needed to legitimately cast doubt upon the nomination of the later. We are indeed at a moment at which the integrity of marriage, of education, and of many of the basic building blocks of a civilized society are at risk.
Not the least civility. Not the least reason. Not the least the ability precisely to transcend partisanship for the common good.
It is exactly because of the seriousness of the crisis we face that conservatives needed to maintain their integrity and their witness to the very values of fundamental honesty and realism which the left and in large measure our society have abandoned. Instead, Republicans and conservatives- whether or not they can see it yet, or at least are willing to recognize it- have discredited themselves and their movement at the very hour at which the Republic most needs them, and left the cultural left effectively without any credible opposition.
There are a few of us left. There are still the George Wills, the Ben Sasses, the Evan McMullins, the Mindy Finns. the Jeff Flakes- and even, as compromised by his own timidity as he is, the man who might have saved conservatism and the nation from the current crisis by standing up and running as an alternative to Trump and Clinton in 2016, Mitt Romney.
The embers of decency and principle still glow in the conservative movement. But the brightest flames have gone out, and never will burn again. The Frankenstein's monster that is the Trump Republican party will go down to defeat in November and again in 2020, and it may be a generation before the barbarians at the gates will be effectively opposed by people who have not compromised themselves beyond credibility or recall.
And by then, it may be too late not only for conservatism but for America. In supporting Donald Trump rather than mounting a primary challenge to him in 2020, America's conservatives will find themselves not only disgraced but their movement a shambles, having backed a losing horse and quite reasonably no longer taken seriously by the American people.
There are more of us than it sometimes seems. Somewhat surprisingly, Gallup found last month that registered Republicans are slightly more common than registered Democrats, by a margin of 27% to 26%. But 43% of registered voters are independents. With a few exceptions, recent surveys had shown the Democrats to be ahead among those voters declaring a party preference.
Even more surprising is that the increase in the percentage of voters who are independents (from 36% to 43%) seems to have been at the expense of the Democrats, who had 31% of the registered voters in November of 2016. The Republicans had the same 27% they have today.
I find those numbers depressing because they confirm my worst fears about Republicans. Somehow, it seems that very few of them have been particularly put off by Donald Trump. And that is scary. The Democrats are just as crazy, of course. But I had thought that common sense and intellectual integrity ran a bit stronger in my former party than it seems to.
Mr. Trump's erratic and childish behavior, his bizarre and often patently false claims, and the very fact that his base remains the ugliest and most extreme parts of the lunatic right are all things I would have hoped would influence Republicans more than they have. There is simply no avoiding the ominous message in the fact that the percentage of voters who are registered Republicans is the same as the percentage the day that Donald Trump was elected.
Today's Republican party is simply not the same party it was before. Stop and think for a moment about the fact that all four of the previous Republican presidential nominees refused to endorse and presumably to vote for Mr. Trump not only because of his repeated and consistent demonstration of personal unfitness for the job but because they recognized the dangers involved in the person holding the office they once held being someone at once as personally erratic and as uninformed (or, more problematic, misinformed, and unwilling to accept the possibility that he's wrong) as he. Our president seldom lets reality get in the way of a good narrative. Sure enough, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his false claim that our NATO allies have not met their financial obligations to the alliance. When the president "shot from the hip" and attacked the mayor of London because of a quotation he took out of context and which said almost exactly the opposite of what Mr. Trump assumed it meant, it didn't do any good to point the mistake out. Rather than apologizing and perhaps resolving in the future to read things before reacting to them, Mr. Trump simply repeated his attack!
It's a disturbing pattern. It's not just that so many of the claims which Donald Trump makes are untrue. It's not just that he's so ignorant about things a president really has to know about. That would be bad enough. The real problem is that when the mistake is pointed out, instead of correcting it, he doubles down on it.
Perhaps the GOP has lost more voters than the numbers seem to indicate. Perhaps the numbers of the departed have been made up by the tinfoil hat crowd, the conspiracy theorists, the believers in simple solutions to complex problems, and the racist and authoritarian types who seem to have crawled out from underneath every available rock and become the new face of the Republican party in the Age of Trump.
A rebellion on the right had been brewing for some time. All the signs were there. Disgusted even in a time of gridlock by the willingness of the relatively moderate conservatives who had been the party's face for most of my life to compromise and to depart from the norms of strict ideological purity, the Tea Party and those like them had been clearly the coming thing for years. The nomination of Ted Cruz in 2016 would not have surprised me a bit, and had it happened I would have gritted my teeth and voted for him.
But nobody foresaw the rise of Donald Trump, a demagogue capable of rallying the clueless, the angry, the haters, and the irresponsible and turning them into a plurality of the Republican primary voters. The takeover of the GOP by the Trump base would have been depressing enough if it had been an aberration, a temporary glitch in the history of a party which as a whole was still the party of Reagan and the Bushes and McCain and Romney and even Cruz. But such is not the case.
From conservative columnists to the Republican rank-and-file, the party has enthusiastically embraced an immature, ill-mannered ignoramus who until shortly before he decided to seek the presidency as a Republican was a pro-choice, pro-immigration fan of Hillary Clinton, a lifelong liberal Democrat who voted for Barack Obama and publicly crowed about how much better Democratic presidents were for the economy than Republican ones. Donald Trump has never been either a conservative or a Republican until he decided that the Republican party was his path to power and self-glorification. Nor was he elected as a conservative, despite changing his lifelong convictions about abortion and turning from Hillary Clinton's admiring supporter into her fiercest critic, all in a matter of months. He was elected as a nativist, a fearmonger, a candidate who appealed to those very dicey and dubious folks who are the new face of the Republican party- a face which people with whom I'd previously stood in campaign after campaign are apparently content to have as their own.
I myself am not.
I might have accepted Ted Cruz, however reluctantly. Cruz, at least, is a principled conservative. But Donald Trump is no conservative. Donald Trump is what he clearly and unambiguously has always been: an unprincipled narcissist loyal to no principle but the greater glory of Donald Trump.
Conservatives traditionally have valued truth and integrity. But they have embraced as their leader a pathological liar, a person given to making up "facts" on the spot to fit the convenience of the moment. And they have chosen to consistently support him in his dishonesty.
Conservatives traditionally have valued patriotism. True, there has always been an isolationist streak in paleoconservatism, and nobody is surprised when Pat Buchanan advocates a withdrawal from our responsibilities to the world and to our allies. But I don't think any of us ever expected that tendency to replace the lively defense of American interests recent Republican administrations have stood for in our relations with the rest of the world, and their commitment to our alliances, including NATO, which Mr. Trump continues to devalue and trivialize even as he insults and slanders our allies. Nor would it hitherto been thinkable that a "conservative" president would make quite as much of his consistent admiration for murderers, strong men, and dictators, from Vladimir Putin to Rodrigo Duterte to Kim Jong Un.
Freedom is a conservative value. Authoritarianism is not, and totalitarianism even less so. And nobody a few years ago could have conceived of a Republican president putting the interests of our nation's adversaries ahead of its own, to the point of siding with them against the FBI and the CIA in the matter of the Russian hacking of the DNC computers, only admitting fairly recently that they had been right and that he had been wrong- softly enough that many of his supporters have yet to get the message and are still repeating the old version of the party line!
Could anyone have foreseen that a Republican president would go on North Korean radio and sing the praises of the cruelest and most repressive Communist dictator on the planet? When the Christian right would watch with satisfaction as their hero betrayed the confessors and martyrs who suffer such savage persecution under the regime of Mr. Trump's new buddy, whose advisors were apparently savvy enough to tell him that all one has to do to get a narcissist to do anything you want is to lavishly and publicly praise him?
Conservatives traditionally value civility and courtesy. But now, they embrace a crude, tactless buffoon and have made him their beau ideal. In recent years, conservatives have rightly criticized the ongoing coarsening and dumbing down of our society. Who would ever have foreseen that they would become its leading exponents?
Admittedly free trade has not always been a cardinal principle for the Buchanan wing of the Republican party. But Republican economic policy certainly in the modern era has embraced free markets. That not all trade agreements have been to America's optimum advantage is an undeniable fact, and to express dissatisfaction with them and even seek to renegotiate them is only reasonable. It is also only reasonable that we do not renew such agreements when they expire without obtaining better terms. But to break our national word and unilaterally renounce them does not make for healthy relationships with our trading partners.
Interestingly, it's generally the Democrats who are big on the "buy American" business as a way of supporting and appealing to their base in organized labor. Conservative confidence in the natural laws of economics and in free markets have generally caused them as a matter of principle to oppose protectionism (again, the paleos and Buchanan types might be an exception). But now, protectionism seems to be the hallmark of our trade policy. Have we so lost confidence in American workers and the quality of the products they produce that we no longer believe that they can prevail in fair and open competition on world markets?
Nothing Donald Trump has done- including the abandonment of all those regulations his supporters credit- could have affected the economy sufficiently in so short a time as to account for the current economic boom, which is simply the continuation and natural acceleration of a trend which began under Mr. Trump's predecessor combined with a few savvy maneuvers by the Federal Reserve. Mr. Trump and his supporters were actually trying to take credit for the economy only months into his administration, something which ought to have raised the eyebrows of anyone who knows anything at all about economics. But after all, it's the nature of politicians to try to take credit for whatever they can, whether or not they deserve it.
Just as Republicans and conservatives traditionally eschew protectionism, they try to avoid trade wars. History teaches us that, contrary to Mr. Trump's claim that they are "easy to win," nobody wins trade wars. Already the one Mr. Trump has begun with China has savaged the American midwest so badly that the Trump administration itself has promulgated aid programs to help American farmers withstand its effects. Whatever might ultimately happen with regard to trade with Europe, the opening stages of Mr. Trump's trade war on that front saw Harley Davidson close a plant in Michigan and reopen it in Europe in order to escape the retaliatory tariffs.
That's what happens with trade wars. They don't protect people's jobs; they cost people their jobs. That has been a core conviction of Republican trade policy for decades. That is the lesson of history. But it's a lesson Mr. Trump has never learned, and his trade policy, if he persists in it, seems likely to reverse the progress the economy has made and plunge us back into recession. And if that happens, there will be no question as to who is responsible- though I am sure that Mr. Trump and his supporters will find some way of blaming someone else.
After all, Donald Trump never does anything wrong. The hero of the Christian right famously doesn't even apologize to God. Nothing is ever his fault. He admits, in the abstract, that sometimes he makes mistakes, but it would be hard to find an example of his ever actually admitting one.
He seems to actually believe that he is infallible. I find it hard, though, to believe that many of his supporters really do. Some of them are exactly the type to put their blind and unwavering faith in a demagogue who pushes the right buttons. But a great many of them are intelligent people who have shown a capacity for critical thinking in the past. Alas, when defeating the other side becomes more important than your own principles, you tend to turn into something other than what you think of yourself as being.
Conservatives traditionally stand for openness and transparency and the rule of law. But now they support a president who (for some reason) is the first in recent memory to refuse to release his income tax returns and who despite a series of indictments and guilty pleas in the Mueller investigation join him in calling for its early termination and support him in stonewalling it at every turn, seeking to portray Mueller as well as the FBI as somehow engaged in an illicit conspiracy for simply seeking to maintain the rule of law. These are not the tactics of folks who are confident that there are no reasonable grounds for suspicion, especially when so much fire has already been discovered amid the smoke. And despite the loud denials, there is no question but that we have more than reasonable cause for an investigation of Mr. Trump's own behavior and that of his associates. But rather than favoring a thorough and complete investigation in order to clear the air with regard to the Trump campaign and administration's links to Russia, both the president and his supporters are eager to end it. This is anything but reassuring. It seems to imply that they fear that something serious is waiting to be discovered if the investigation continues.
Yes, it certainly is the case that a certain guardedness and even hostility has existed in the FBI and the CIA toward Donald Trump for the beginning. But why is this either surprising or disturbing? Their job, after all, is the protection of America's interests- and in Donald Trump, America's intelligence professionals knew from the outset that every secret America had would be in the hands of a man with no filters, who might blurt it out to anyone, and that policy would be made as a matter of impulse rather than informed deliberation. Our nation's intelligence community would have been derelict in its responsibilities had it not been concerned about Donald Trump becoming president. He is a man who- as he has amply demonstrated in "burning" at least one Israeli intelligence asset in order to brag to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister about how knowledgeable he was- simply cannot be trusted to keep a secret.
Yes, having a man renowned for his shoddy ethics long before he reached the Oval Office at its head can do strange things to a political party. But to ignore the manifest corruption in the Trump administration while talking endlessly about "Crooked Hillary," a figure from American history who will never again matter in American politics, is not the kind of thing we would have expected from the party of Eisenhower and Ford and Reagan and the Bushes.
And then, there's the Constitution, a document sacred to conservatives to the point where in recent years it has become fashionable for them to specify that they are "constitutional conservatives." One would think that before taking an oath to "support and defend the constitution of the United States," Mr. Trump would at least have read it. But I wonder whether he's ever laid eyes on the document.
The day Donald Trump took office he was in violation of the Emoluments Clause. In 1789, the word "emolument" referred to any financial profit accruing to a person by virtue of an office he held. Leaving aside the financial advantages Mr. Trump's hotels, particularly the one in Washington, have enjoyed due to his office, Mr. Trump has, in his son's words, a "disproportionate" proportion of his assets invested in Russia. Given his policy toward that country, to say that this creates the appearance of impropriety would be, to put it mildly. If a Democratic president stood to profit financially from favorable treatment of an unfriendly government, count on it: conservatives would be apoplectic. But not a peep, since it's Donald Trump.
Of course, Congress has the authority to waive the emoluments clause and doubtless would have in Mr. Trump's case. Except that to do so would be to admit that there was an issue and there can never be an issue where Donald Trump is concerned.
In the ordinary course of events, a public official would divest himself of such investments before taking office. That would also apply to Mr. Trump's investments in Iran, North Korea, and other unfriendly nations. But he has chosen not to take that course, and instead put his foreign investments in a "blind trust-" administered by his children!
How has this not been a major scandal? Is it surprising that the FBI has concerns?
And then, there's the Bill of Rights. During the campaign, Mr. Trump- apparently unaware that it is Congress and not the president that makes laws, and equally unaware of the First Amendment repeatedly vowed to "change the law" to enable him to sue journalists who publish "knowingly false" information. Leaving aside the question of who would decide what is "knowingly false," he seemed unaware not only that presidents can't legislate, but that libel laws are matters of state rather than Federal laws and the can of worms which would be opened by his proposal. Who would decide what is "knowingly false?" During the campaign, he promised to pay the legal bills of any supporter who beat up a peaceful demonstrator at one of his rallies. Since his election, he has followed the standard playbook of totalitarian and authoritarian leaders by labeling a free press (in principle, any source of information which he or his allies do not control) as "enemies of the people."
The leftist bias of the media as a whole is beyond dispute, no matter how often the left disputes it. Survey after survey has shown that eighty and ninety percent of working journalists consistently vote Democratic, and the incestuous nature of American journalism (moving in the same circles, talking mostly to one another and reinforcing their own prejudices attending the same parties, and living their lives more or less in a shared echo chamber where they are seldom if ever challenged to question their assumptions or worldviews) guarantees that such would be the case despite every effort at honesty and balance on the part of the working press. But in a democracy, the way to fight such bias is with information, correcting its fallacies and holding its assumptions up to examination. Instead, Mr. Trump chooses the dictator's trick of trying to discredit the media en masse- and all those "constitutional conservatives" back him up!
All of this would be depressing if all of this was merely a temporary aberration. It would be one thing if American conservatives could be expected some day to recover their integrity. But a line has been crossed here which will be difficult if not impossible for them to recross. Having sacrificed one's intellectual integrity, regaining it is easier said than done.
How can we ever again regard them as people of integrity? How can they ever again see themselves that way? How I wish that I could look forward to a day when Trump was gone and the conservative movement could be itself again. But what all the conservative journalists and rank-and-file Republicans who have climbed aboard the Trump Train seem not to realize is that the transformation of the conservative movement and of the Republican party from Reaganism to Trumpism is permanent. When one crawls into bed with alt-right dogs, one gets fleas. But when a movement renounces as many of its core values as the conservative movement has renounced in order to ally with Donald Trump, it is permanently changed. This is a stain that will not wash away. Never again can either the conservative movement or the Republican party claim to stand for the things they have renounced in order to ally with protectionist, nativist, authoritarian, fear-mongering Trumpism.
The Republican party will never again be a place where the George Wills, the Bushes, the Romneys, the grownups will have a home. It will never again be a place where I can have a home, nor can I ever see those who have abandoned so much of principle because their most important concern is defeating the left rather than in standing for the Constitution and for decency is their driving concern. And having sold out its principles out of partisanship to embrace a demagogue, the conservative movement has done itself damage from which it may take fifty years for it to recover.
And partisanship is the issue. Conservative men and women of integrity have become the partisans of an authoritarian populist demagogue because of their conviction that it is necessary in order to defeat the left. The irony is that they are right to be concerned. I am as delighted as any Trump supporter with the nominations of Justice Gorsuch and Judge Kavanaugh and recognize right along with the Trump people that a great deal more than an unsubstantiated allegation by a political partisan will be needed to legitimately cast doubt upon the nomination of the later. We are indeed at a moment at which the integrity of marriage, of education, and of many of the basic building blocks of a civilized society are at risk.
Not the least civility. Not the least reason. Not the least the ability precisely to transcend partisanship for the common good.
It is exactly because of the seriousness of the crisis we face that conservatives needed to maintain their integrity and their witness to the very values of fundamental honesty and realism which the left and in large measure our society have abandoned. Instead, Republicans and conservatives- whether or not they can see it yet, or at least are willing to recognize it- have discredited themselves and their movement at the very hour at which the Republic most needs them, and left the cultural left effectively without any credible opposition.
There are a few of us left. There are still the George Wills, the Ben Sasses, the Evan McMullins, the Mindy Finns. the Jeff Flakes- and even, as compromised by his own timidity as he is, the man who might have saved conservatism and the nation from the current crisis by standing up and running as an alternative to Trump and Clinton in 2016, Mitt Romney.
The embers of decency and principle still glow in the conservative movement. But the brightest flames have gone out, and never will burn again. The Frankenstein's monster that is the Trump Republican party will go down to defeat in November and again in 2020, and it may be a generation before the barbarians at the gates will be effectively opposed by people who have not compromised themselves beyond credibility or recall.
And by then, it may be too late not only for conservatism but for America. In supporting Donald Trump rather than mounting a primary challenge to him in 2020, America's conservatives will find themselves not only disgraced but their movement a shambles, having backed a losing horse and quite reasonably no longer taken seriously by the American people.
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