Now that the Alabama primaries are over, I am only too happy to be spared the constant onslaught of t.v. and radio campaign ads, veritable forests of campaign mailers, and unsolicited campaign text messages. I understand that all of those things are necessary to a good campaign (I was actually a campaign manager for a local Republican candidate for a hot minute until my candidate dropped off the face of the earth). But that doesn’t mean I think they’re awesome.
Quick sidebar: the word “awesome” really sucks now. I mean, someone says “Baskin Robbins is selling ice cream cones for $.50,” and someone else says “Awesome!” Is that really awesome? I like ice cream as much as the next guy (if, by the next guy, you mean someone who really likes ice cream a lot — particularly Moose Tracks!). But I’m not sure I’d call that awesome. Even Moose Tracks aren’t awesome, although they come close. “Awe” means an emotion combining dread, veneration and wonder, inspired by the sacred or sublime. At least, that’s how Webster defines it. And as good as Moose Tracks are — almost sublime — I’m not sure they rise to the definition. So the word has been devalued, almost beyond recognition.
Which brings me back to the campaign stuff. What interests me most about all of that gobbledygook is the schizophrenic inconsistency inherent in the messaging. Here in deep red Alabama, every candidate wants to be known as the most “conservative” candidate. But most of them also want to associate themselves, to greater or lesser degrees, with Donald Trump. (In my opinion that should be insulting to the populace, but that’s a topic for another time.) But here’s the rub: Trump isn’t conservative by any traditional standard of conservatism. More on that in a minute.
Now this isn’t intended to be a diatribe against Trump — I’ve already made my thoughts on him pretty well known. It’s simply a recognition that Trump isn’t conservative as that term has traditionally (read: pre-2016) been understood. Trump actually racked up some pretty significant accomplishments which I applaud (i.e. moving our Israel embassy to Jerusalem, negotiating normalization accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and significantly deregulating our business sector, to name just a few). But none of those accomplishments mean that Trump himself was a conservative, even if his judges seem to be. A politician can (and many have) do some wonderful things without actually being conservative.
It is pretty much uncontestable by any reasonable person that the “conservative” label was co-opted by the Republican party, and for good reason. Historically the Republican platform has rested on the basic pillars of conservatism. Put your hand down — I’ll get to that. Conservatism was the ideological inspiration for Republican politics. Pre-Trump, conservatism used to be the standard by which a Republican candidate was judged. However, ever since the nomination of Trump as the Republican candidate in 2016, the label “conservative” has become simply shorthand for “supports Trump.” Not even “supports Trump’s agenda” (to the extent he can be said to have a coherent agenda). Just support for Trump himself, the man. Many Republicans who would describe themselves as conservative believe that the more loyal a senator was to Trump, the more conservative he was. There are actually studies that have confirmed this:
Romney, Toomey and Sasse were all rated as fairly liberal Republicans despite their conservative voting records in Congress, according to DW-Nominate, which quantifies the ideology of every member of Congress based on roll call votes cast in a legislative session. Staunchly pro-Trump politicians (or Trump-adjacent politicians), like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sens. Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham, and Trump were all clustered together on the more conservative end of the spectrum, even though there is quite a bit of difference, ideologically speaking, between these men. Pence, for instance, stands out for having established a very conservative track record pre-Trump whereas Cotton, Graham, Hawley and DeSantis’s claims to being so conservative are more closely linked to their connection to Trump. What seems to matter more is not so much one’s voting record in the pre-Trump era as one’s relationship to Trump.
In order to understand how the meaning of conservatism has changed (or, really, hijacked), it is helpful to know where conservatism as an ideology, or at least as a movement, came from, and what it stood for. Many of the old time traditional conservatives were classical liberals (small “l”), libertarians and traditionalists such as Edmund Burke, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton (pre-Broadway), & co. This was the first leg of the conservative triad. Classical liberals were very jealous of individual liberty, and worked to preserve and increase it. These early conservatives resisted the threat of the ever-expanding state to individual liberty.
The second leg of the conservative triad was composed of traditionalists who were angered by the rise of totalitarianism and the decline of religious orthodoxy. This arm of conservatism was primarily the moralists and what would now be termed the “religious right” (although that term would not be coined until the ’70s). They wanted to bring back traditional values and ethics, often through political means, and resisted the moral relativism that was, in their view, corroding Western civilization and creating a vacuum into which secular totalitarianism could enter.
The third and final leg of the conservative triad was composed of former communists who came to fear the power of the party and the state. These people were identified primarily as anti-communists. They operated on a profound conviction that America and the West were engaged in a titanic struggle with Communism, with nothing less than the fate of the world at stake. To these conservatives, modern progressivism was relativistic, secular, anti-traditional, and utterly incapable of resisting Communism.
These three legs of the conservative triad, although in some ways independent and even occasionally at odds with each other, formed the foundation of what became the conservative movement. The legs of the triad have not always seen eye to eye on individual issues (e.g. the libertarians would see the war on drugs very differently than the traditionalists). But conservatism has always been less of a dogmatic platform, and more fundamentally a coalition, with its members working together towards a common goal despite differences on some individual policies and issues. Modern conservatives have banded together, working as a coalition who agree on basic philosophical principles.
There are many variations of what those principles are, but essentially they would include such things as limited government, free trade and free markets, globalism, small government, individual freedom and self-determination, security through a strong military, (governmental) fiscal responsibility, Judeo-Christian social values, the right to own private property, and the right to contract. However, conservatism is more than just those buzzwords – it is a complex ideology that includes theory and policy.
Trump has skirted, and in many instances outright eschewed, many of these principles. His conduct as president was antithetical to conservatism’s core, in direct tension with most everything for which it has historically stood. Take free trade, and globalism, for instance. Conservative presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush each supported regional trade agreements with Mexico and Canada and Bush 41 started the NAFTA negotiations. Heck, even Democrat Bill Clinton embraced the capitalist assumptions of international agreements like NAFTA. But not Trump. He advocated for tariffs, claimed that NAFTA was harmful to the United States, and withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement similar to NAFTA). Trumpism is deliberately breaking with the conservative internationalism of the Cold War era and with the pro-free-trade, supply-side-economics orthodoxy that has dominated Republican policymaking since 1980. These conservative economic principles formed the basis of the global economy since the 1990s. He rejected free market capitalism in favor of nationalism, isolationism, and protectionism. He was even willing to engage in trade wars, particularly with China, to defend American production, by imposing tariffs. Trump unilaterally levied billions in tariffs in contravention of free trade and free market principles, raising prices for consumers and damaging domestic businesses that rely on foreign sources of supply. On the domestic side, Trump brokered preferential tax deals for companies like Carrier, picking winners and losers in the exact same way Obama used taxpayer money on pet projects like Solyndra, rather than letting the free market determine which businesses should succeed and which ones should fail.
Even beyond his economic policies, Trump is not an internationalist, but a nativist and nationalist. While traditional conservatives were concerned with the wellbeing of the western world, Trump was concerned only with the United States, irrespective of how U.S. interests affected — and were affected by — international events. Witness his threat to withdraw from NATO. Putting isolationism above our national security interests, Trump blindsided his top military advisers and key allies when he abruptly announced that he would withdraw some 2,000 troops from Syria, all in the name of ending “endless wars.” We should remember, too, that although the withdrawal from Afghanistan under President Biden was an unmitigated disaster, it was Trump who initially committed us to withdrawal in the first place, again in the name of ending endless wars.
And rather than oppose dictatorships and communism, he is friendly with and even routinely praised dictators and communist strongmen such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jung-un and Xi Jinping. He even adopted this “strong man” mentality during his presidency. He tried to unilaterally end the statutory asylum process for refugees and, threatened to unilaterally declare a “disaster” at our border to appropriate funds that Congress wouldn’t give him. He utilized the antitrust laws to threaten and attack certain companies, like “Amazon’s Washington Post,” in order to execute a personal vendetta or just because he was rubbed the wrong way, like a petulant teenager. He used imminent domain to cause local governments to condemn private property to support his private real estate ventures.
As for traditional Judeo-Christian values and ethics, Trump’s words and actions speak for themselves. Family values, moral responsibility, compassion, and a belief in the equality and dignity of every human being is something quite foreign to the president who cheated on his third wife while she was pregnant with his child, paid off a porn star to keep her from revealing their affair, and took great pleasure in vilifying, in uncouth if not vile terms, anyone who opposed him in the slightest. He has attacked women (both physically and verbally, by his own admission), minorities, the disabled, and military veterans. He routinely made judgments about the quality and ability of Americans based on their race. He once claimed that a Hispanic federal judge (who was a native-born US citizen) could not fairly adjudicate a dispute because of his heritage.
As for fiscal restraint and responsibility, Trump increased the national debt to historic levels on the back of his $1.3 trillion omnibus spending binge. He complained that a $3 trillion Democratic pandemic social spending plan was not enough — he wanted more.
On that note, although conservatism has always been an ideology of cooperative coalition, Trump has never been the slightest bit interested in working with those who disagree with him. Indeed, his combativeness was one of the primary traits that inspired his followers to vote for him. Importantly, as Jonathan Montano observed:
“[Trump] claimed that nobody has a better understanding of the American system, and that “I alone can fix it”. Trump’s claim of individual power is important to note because he establishes himself as a singular unit of change rather than a leader of a larger philosophical coalition. Conservatism has long been understood as an alliance of individuals who share a common interest. But Donald Trump wants to be an individual, and seen as the [ed. note: sole] individual source of knowledge and change.”
There is an apocryphal story about a liberal and a conservative walking down a road, trying to get to the same place, when they come across a fence which crosses the road and stops them from going any further. The liberal looks around, and says, “I don’t see the purpose of this fence, and it’s keeping us from continuing our journey to our destination. I say we tear it down.” The conservative thinks for a minute, and then says, “First, tell me the purpose of the fence. Then we’ll see if we should tear it down, or do something else. Maybe we’re on the wrong road.” I believe even Trump fans will have to admit that he is more like the liberal: it if gets in his way, destroy it. For example, in 2018 he encouraged the GOP senators to get rid of the legislative filibuster, stating that if they didn’t do it, the Democrats would. (To date, despite being in the majority and being stymied on a great number of Democratic priorities, they haven’t done so.)
But, the foregoing screed notwithstanding, my point isn’t really about Trump at all; it’s about conservatism, and what it means now. Honorable, distinguished intellectuals from Russell Kirk to William F. Buckley to Ronald Regan worked tirelessly, and against great headwinds, to define and advance the cause of conservatism in the American political consciousness. It was the work of generations, which culminated in Ronald Regan and George W. Bush. Unfortunately, Trump has managed to almost single-handedly destroy that legacy, and turn the word “conservative” into a stand-in for “supports Trump.”
Now, many stalwart conservatives, myself included, are no longer considered a conservative by today’s Republican standards because we opposed Trump in 2016 and 2020. Indeed, some of my closest friends believe I am liberal or, at best, moderate. Some even believe I voted for a Democratic presidential candidate (I have never done so). So instead of calling myself a conservative, I have to qualify it. “I am a conservative as that word has traditionally been understood.” Not that anyone understands what that means.
I’m coining a new label (I think): I’m a “classical conservative.” A classicon.
