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Against Never Trump … By Rich Lowry?
The title is provocative: The Never Trump Delusion.
And this time the writer can’t be distanced from the title. Because the author is the editor. The editor of National Review and the force behind the well-timed but glancingly effective December 2015 “Against Trump” edition that laid the foundation stones, wittingly or not, for the Never Trump movement amongst many conservative intellectuals. (Personally, I think the “Against Trump” edition was gutsy and helped to provide Rubio his one shot at the end zone, but he fumbled and repeatedly kick the ball in NH when hit by a New Jersey lineman.)
To be fair, Lowry was never truly Never Trump. His support was always seemingly waylaid by yet another appalling Trump stunt. Yet Lowry often emphasized that Trump’s populist and nationalist conservatism was far closer to the mainstream of Republican politics than many of his fellow pundits often pretended. At NR, he occupied a painful space with Michael Brendan Dougherty (one truly fine thinker and writer).
Lowry’s piece pulls few punches. And he should expect some haymakers in return.
Yes, he notes the carnival aspects of Trump, but he’s pretty squarely in support of Trumpism, praising the version prevailing today with fighting words for many of his own fine writers: “…usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia.” (Lowry can drop 500 words on you.)
And his verdict on outstanding Never Trumpers is pretty unsparing: “the coterie of critics on the right — loosely referred to as Never Trump — often sound like they are in denial.”
Lowry’s quick tour of recent GOP successes downgrades “textbook libertarian economics” and highlights the departures made from orthodoxy by Buckley, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush (he neglects W and gay marriage but then everyone does today, don’t they?).
One can share Lowry’s lament at Trump’s personal shortcomings and his hope for a “more fully thought-out and integrated conservative populism.”
Yet his conclusion is not likely to be shared by many at his own magazine (Lowry’s an outstanding editor and probably knows how to get his writers back to work on a holiday weekend):
But make no mistake: On immigration and China trade, Trump is closer to the national Republican consensus than his conservative detractors.
A realistic attitude to Trump involves acknowledging both his flaws and how he usefully departs from a tired Reagan nostalgia. By all means, criticize him when he’s wrong. But don’t pretend that he’s just going away, or that he’s a wild outlier in the contemporary GOP.
What says Ricochet?
Published in General
I love the notion that we need to keep the people Trump brought into the coalition but do it without Trump (or someone like him). People just don’t understand that we need more people like Trump to deal with the media. The Lilliputians in the Republican Party simply won’t or can’t deal with the media — and they don’t seem to want to learn.
If no one here talks about the media’s incessant, unfair, evil, and biased “reporting” then you can’t talk meaningfully about what Trump means and how Trumpism works.
Really, Republicans now in office are mostly bystanders watching the real battle take place well away from the safe circle of light where they didn’t lose their keys but it’s easier to search there.
Here’s an area where I find Lowry both right in his analysis and wrong in his implications:
China trade.
Lowry is 100% correct that the GOP electorate is closer to Trump’s protectionist position on trade in general, and especially with China, than that of conservatives in government or punditry. However, implied in this piece is that we should, therefore, go along with this preference no matter how wrongheaded it is or what negative impact it will have on national policy. I’m sorry but we’re conservatives, consensus does not equal fact and we don’t go along with the crowd just because it’s popular. The old adage that in a democracy the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard is the distillation of the conservative aversion to mob rule. It is the job of conservatives not to bend to the will of the mob but to educate and persuade people towards the path of liberty.
Anyone with knowledge of US History and the intellectual roots of the founding would understand how conservatism in America is all about preserving the classical liberal tradtion.
Is it boring or is it a fault line, which is boring until things break. Merkel is pretty boring, but she defines a fault line in Europe that could break wide open.
I don’t pretend to know. It won’t be healed during the Trump administration I imagine. But maybe the next primary between Cotton, Rubio, Cruz and Haley results in that better synthesis of views Lowry clearly hopes for and better sportsmanship all around.
Agree or disagree, one of the reasons that divides in conservatism often persist is that some conservatives can flat out write great paragraphs!
Perhaps it is memory failure and old age, but I am pretty sure that I have seen a variety of “takes” on Trump in National Review over the past few years. One of the things that keeps me a subscriber to NR is that they seem open to differing opinions on many conservative issues, and that so far they seem willing to acknowledge some of the good things that have resulted from President Trump, but are equally willing to criticize some of his less “conservative” moves. I tend to mistrust people who are in such lockstep that no variants on any given ideology are accepted – so far NR has kept the tent open to quite a few conservative perspectives on Trump, on potential policy, and on the Republican party in general.
This is the entire strategy of co-opting in a nutshell.
The reasons that people in the Republican Party subscribe to it are:
You are an old Tea Party hand, @larrykoler Please read the following, written in 2010. It is from an unusual source to be quoted on Ricochet – Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.
And what exactly did the Trump rebellion accomplish in its first year? And which one Trump-ian initiative has propelled the otherwise silent Republican Congress into vocal opposition? Why, that would be free trade!
And on Trump’s core issue? Here’s The Atlantic:
Having better media fighters is doubtless important, but the battle to make the party responsive to the people is still primarily an internal one.
Evidence ? He left during the Michael Mann lawfare episode that is not over yet. I think Lowry separated the legal teams but Steyn disappeared from NR shortly after.
Do you know him ? Has he told you that he left on his own? Has he written that somewhere ?
I agree. I see the GOP Congress as a coequal member of the “Swamp” and now we see many in the ranks I cannot name here blaming Trump for the Congress’ fecklessness. I see assertions that the “Omnibus” monstrosity was his fault because his “Legislative team was part of the writing of this bill.”
We got Trump because the Republican Party was sliding toward the globalist left.
I was not originally a Trump supporter https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/50860.html
but he sure has the right enemies.
Bill and Hillary Clinton and their army of supporters ended the “moral transgression” aspect of politics.
Do I support all of Trump’s behavior? No But I also don’t recoil to my fainting couch when he attacks the malignant left in crude terms. “Sin” was used in it’s secular sense, if you will.
Well, I guess. BTW, I’m all for the two party thing. I’ve always said that, because of our system, we form our coalitions before the election and other countries’ systems form theirs after the election. That’s not the cause of our problem (although you probably aren’t claiming that it is).
I also remember that we kind of wanted the GOP to take all this new energy into the party and use it. Instead, they took the votes and tried to divert the energy — you know, the energy that wanted to drain the swamp.
Also, notice that you cut my explanation right before the mention of the media issue which is what the Tea Party didn’t have and Trump does. This is essential.
Trump’s main appeal is how he deals with the swamp and the media. Of course, issues that have been relegated to the ash heap are important, too — secondarily. But, the reason the public can’t have nice things is because of the media, the Praetorian guard around the Dems and the swamp. The issues are used as a bludgeon against the swamp and the media.
Steyn left the magazine because he disagreed with an editor who responded to something he had written. He also separated his legal defense because he disagreed with the direction NR’s legal team was going in. Steyn has stated both of these things himself as have numerous editors at NR. There’s no conspiracy here.
In a recent essay in The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson wrote about the understandable inability of regular American citizens to defend themselves from the armies of activists who dominate the social professions of psychology, education, medicine and psychiatry. Faced with experts imperiously wielding the studies of social science, studies which invariably tell them that the world really is whatever people think it is, most everyday Americans will shrug and agree with the nice-sounding platitudes of the presentation and the nice-sounding, if weird, agenda that is prescribed.
That is, until the boy walks into the girls’ shower room.
In a similar way, regular Americans have been subjected to an unceasing campaign from our media, our culture and our soi-disant elite, including many in the so-called conservative movement, that massive immigration is a boon to America, that we should “welcome the stranger” and that the free movement of peoples, like the free movement of capital, is a principle of Classical Liberalism. Some leading conservatives (Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, Jeb Bush) have even stated that today’s immigrants are an improvement over the current crop of Americans.
And then the Goths appear en masse across the river.
From Buzzfeed News, March 30, 6 AM
“A Huge Caravan of Central Americans Is Headed for the US, And No One In Mexico Dares to Stop Them”
Tell your friends.
Yes! (My initial response was “Revit!” but I thought I would lose everyone on that one.) With this and the “fainting couch” line, you are on a roll…
Jamie, don’t you see how this attitude is one of the catalysts for the divide you find so repellent. Is preserving the classical liberal tradition often one of the principal components of conservatism in America?
Sure, and it’s the aspect you cherish (and the one that I find most appealing when given federalist depth).
But is American conservatism “all about” classical liberalism? You seem to believe that anyone who objects to this lacks knowledge.
Well, two of the most esteemed historians of American conservatism — Russell Kirk and George Nash — present a view of pre-war and post-war conservatism that outlines and details a much more complex picture of American conservatism. Nash finds the definition of the conservative tradition so daunting he chooses not to advance one, relying on what was understood to be conservative during a given period. Kirk is no one’s avatar of classical liberalism.
For you, free trade with China seems to be a no-brainer.
Free trade with the Soviets wasn’t a no-brainer for a generation of conservatives, including Buckley and Will.
A conservative coalition without real classical liberal and federalist influence doesn’t appeal to me. But insisting that conservatism is “all about” classical liberalism is a recipe for narrow factionalism.
It most certainly is essential, but Trump’s abilities here are not enough. His skill is primarily driving his enemies into overreaction – pushing them to the proverbial Spinal Tap “11.”
Why do you think so many of us remain angry at the Brotherhood of Offended Sensibilities? Because, despite their political irrelevance, the Never Trump forces continue to hold sway in the major print and think-tank organs of the conservative movement – platforms that we created and subsidized for decades and which now contain a large proportion of polemicists who spend too much damned time criticizing the current Republican president.
Reagan famously said that a person who disagreed with him 20% of the time was an 80% supporter. Given Trump’s actions in office, repeatedly listed by Victor Davis Hanson and others, why does the Brotherhood persist in cataloguing their disagreements with his mostly rock-solid conservatism, instead of attacking his ferocious, malign adversaries on the Left?
Why the compulsion among so many conservatives, who backed loser after loser, to now “call balls and strikes” when Trump is facing spitballs, beanballs and the biggest strike zone in history while carrying out that 80% agenda?
Trump fights back, @larrykoler, that’s for sure. And he’s not above throwing a little “chin music” himself – hardly. But he’s just one player; the other team has a full lineup and powerful bench behind it. It would be nice if our self-proclaimed umpires decided that winning really was important to them and got into the game. Why else do they think we gave them those platforms?
No one ever went to a ball game to see the umpires.
Yes. He wrote that on his own website, when he separated with NR. You can spend the time to go read through his archives. Mark Steyn was right to leave NR.
Of course I do, but as a human being I am flawed and simply responded in kind. Unhelpful sure, but I hope understandable.
Yes there are different elements to conservatism, and the fusionism of Buckley is different from the Rockefeller conservatism that preceded it and the other varieties of Pre-War conservatism that preceded that. Even those differences all possessed a reverence for the founding and its principles. This is the common thread that binds the right and the root of the fusionism of Buckley.
Kirk may be no avatar of classical liberalism but as an heir to the Burkean tradition it was an important element of his philosophy.
I don’t see free trade with China as a no brainer, I see free trade in general as a no brainer. One of the things that undermines despotic regimes is access to goods and culture that they don’t control – which is why they restrict trade. That said the soviets did trade with the west.
A conservative movement without classical liberalism isn’t preserving anything of the American founding. It lacks a common thread that binds economic libertarians to nationalist populists to foreign policy hawks to social conservatives. When one faction of the right gets their gander up and insists that we jettison this or that faction we are all poorer for it and the coalition crumbles.
@freesmith, I think we are in agreement on all this.
You think that the NTs (elites, anyhow) are going to continue to run things after Trump is gone. I suspect that there is a high risk of this. And this is why I want these people cordoned off from influence and leadership in the GOP electoral efforts. In a way, Trump has already done the first part of that — he’s shown us the ones we can’t trust. That’s really a lot of the work that must be done. These people have no influence on many people like me who used to read them. I used to like them — except on one point and that was their recommendations around the media, which was to not go after them, leave them alone and let the media take their pot shots — we can handle it. That was swamp advice — as we now know. It was a recipe for failure.
Well, I can tell you what I mean by it: Criticizing the president and Congress when I dislike what they are doing from my conservative and moral perspective, and supporting the president and Congress when I like what they are doing from my conservative and moral perspective. It’s as simple as that. And despite your contention that it’s a “substitute for judgment”, it consists entirely of judgment. I think I can say that I have done so since I first started paying attention to politics, regardless of who was in office (my first vote at age 18 was for Reagan, so you can see I’m ancient).
What is new to me is this fierce loyalty to Trump that brooks no dissent. I don’t recall seeing this before with other GOP presidents, though I think we saw some of it in the Democrat party with both Clinton and Obama. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. I suspect some of this is a reflection of Trump being a TV celebrity – we do have a celebrity-loving culture.
After the last couple of crazy months, I’ve decided that I just won’t vote for the guy, but I’m happy to give him credit when it’s due.
I didn’t say there was. You explanation is pretty close to my understanding but we disagree on how “voluntary” Steyn leaving was.
The reckoning is coming and pretty soon. It’s usually worthwhile to read Conservative treehouse, to get the facts on complex issues. Some of the commenters are conspiracy theorists but the facts are usually there. Like now.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/03/30/deal-or-no-deal-theres-a-transparency-within-two-factions-of-doj-and-fbi-political-small-group/comment-page-3/#comment-5188931
The Grand Jury has been working with Huber for months.
AG Sessions, while responding to an irrelevant congressional request for a special counsel, told us yesterday that Huber is in charge of a “team” of prosecutors. Yet some weird and seemingly illogical reason, many people don’t seem to understand that.
There’s already a team of prosecutors reviewing all the evidence of criminality collected by Inspector General Horowitz. FULLSTOP.
There’s no need for a special counsel. Jonathan Turley understands this.
It is nonsensical to demand a Special Counsel when there has been a team of federal prosecutors reviewing the evidence for over six months. The outcome of their collective effort goes directly to federal indictments; there is simply no need for a special counsel.
Remember, the IG is looking at gross misconduct of official DOJ and FBI policy and practices. The prosecutor is looking at criminal misconduct from within those offices. The IG releases findings to the public, the prosecutor does not – until the courtroom. There is an overlap within the parallel of the IG and Prosecutor, but both have entirely different objectives.
There’s also evidence of an existing Grand Jury.
Stay tuned.
I agree, so one question is, why don’t neocons like to concede this?
That Trumpism also has a history of painting neocons as The Enemy might have something to do with it.
I think, too, that Trumpism has attracted some very unsavory types. Trump himself might not be a white supremacist, but as Charlottesville showed, he thinks they’re “good people”. Conspiracy theorists, especially of the Jews-Control-The-World stripe, seem to find comfort in Trump.
Related to this – rhetoric suggesting Fishtown and Belmont can’t be allies, that the well-being of one depends on crushing the other, rather than both being part of America together.
Though Trump is in many ways quite Belmont, he has successfully portrayed himself as the Fishtown champion. Which is fine as far as it goes – Fishtown sure could use a champion. But what should championing Fishtown mean? Tearing down Belmont? Often no distinction is made between championing Fishtown and tearing down Belmont, and yes, I have a problem with that.
As Charles Murray notes, those in Belmont typically fail to preach what they practice, while those in Fishtown typically fail to practice what they preach. If the ideal is both preaching and practicing, then it seems like Belmont and Fishtown could each learn from the other. So often, Trumpism seems to use as a litmust test, how badly do you want to give Belmont the finger? Does the prospect of sticking it to Belmont fill you with glee? If your glee is insufficient, you’re not part of “real America”.
I’m a mom now, and if I were forced to choose between raising kids who practiced well but failed to preach, or kids who preached well but failed to practice, I’m sorry to say I would choose the former. Of course, we’re not forced to choose, but that we aren’t is precisely my point: I don’t think building up Fishtown equals tearing down Belmont.
While I might tolerate rhetoric that tears down Belmont to build Fishtown up, on the grounds that rhetoric is a necessary evil and that’s just how rhetoric works, I’m not going to root for such rhetoric. Now, if 80% agreement truly is enough, my toleration should be enough.
But so often, I get the impression that it isn’t – that it isn’t enough to be 80% on board, while demurring on the zero-sum rhetoric, but instead that 80% agreement should be rounded up to 100% support, including for things (like excessively zero-sum thinking) which simply strike me as wrong. And since when have I ever 100% supported any particular politician or faction? Since never. It’s just unrealistic to expect that kind of support from everyone in your coalition. I don’t want to encourage my coalition to make such unrealistic demands, because ultimately I think it’s bad for the coalition.
Trump’s ‘partner in crime’ as far as Media Put Downs and Takeovers is one Roseanne Barr. The stomping that woman gave to the “major TV channels” was well deserved.
Of course, Rosie couldn’t have accomplished that stomping without the fact that so many in America relate to her. That is one indicator that as you state, the Republicans now in office are indeed bystanders watching the real battles take place. I suspect many of them are setting up the usual slush fund deals, and jobs after their ‘retirement’ from office, as what thinking Congress critter wants to be forced to live on their Congressional pension?
Meanwhile the awakening continues.
Especially the latter. The Swamp is deep quicksand, and can only be approached in the company of Lassie and a strong rope, or a solid 60-vote Senate majority.
The linear (a/k/a “legacy”) media of print columnists and their talking heads are forever trying to contextualize the soul out of our bold and ballsy President Trump, and inflate their own shriveling importance. Ask most Trump voters who Rich Lowry is, they won’t know. And Rich knows even less about us.
Better to consider the daily output of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Lou Dobbs, who understand that the battle for the electorate is being waged in the electronic media, and theirs are the best battlefield reports.
While Trump deals brilliantly with the media, it may fall to others to conquer and re-align the entities of media control. And while populism works nicely in an invisible but pervasive medium like major market radio, there are major forces which can only be transformed by top-down capital purchase.
With the Murdoch empire slowly beginning to sink, watered-down by generational change, other similarly endowed families and ultra high net worth individuals must step forward to recast, reform, and revolutionize how American voters receive news and culture. Whenever a faltering brand (from Tribune and Time to Yahoo and Facebook) is displaced, a powerful advocate for capitalism and freedom should be laying in wait to restore a brand or capture a niche.
The daily ratings tell us that the media wars are populist battles, but the teams on the playing field are most often gigantic, profit-driven talent aggregators. We need more of them on our side, with far less attention paid to insignificant players like subsidized magazines.
Excellent — good points all, and I am entirely in agreement with you. What I find especially grating is the attitude I see in the arena of decency, decorum, and character: The suggestion that these things are important and perhaps even paramount is seen as proof positive that one resides in Belmont and therefore is deserving of contempt.