How Conservatives Lost the GOP

[bostonangler]

The Big Idea

How Conservatives Lost the GOP

By Yuval Levin

The semi-harmonious weaving together of these different kinds of thinkers was done in large part by Buckley’s associate Frank Meyer. A former Communist turned NR senior editor, Meyer leaned toward libertarianism himself. At a deep level, though, he understood that these different strains of conservatism could peacefully coexist—especially in common cause. He laid this out in a 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom. Conservatives, he argued, should emphasize the importance of individual freedom. Those concerned about freedom could agree about the threat of communism, and have qualms about the growth of the federal government. With the so-called “liberal consensus” committed to expanding government, and with Soviet influence and power on the rise, that was enough to form some bonds of commonality. Such commonality was sufficient for putting out a weekly and then later a biweekly magazine of ideas, which allowed for disagreement within that conservative umbrella.

Buckley's vision succeeded; as the journalist John Chamberlain put it, Buckley, “more than any single figure … made conservatism a respectable force in American life.” The result was not just a set of ideas but an agreed upon way of debating them. Absent the crude, rude and simplistic (not to mention wrong) arguments of the anti-Semites and the Birchers, conservatism became a dynamic movement in which ideas (even liberal ones) were put forward in their strongest form. This laid the groundwork for future political successes, which came to fruition decades later with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, whose administration brought conservative intellectuals and conservative ideas into government in large numbers.

In the 1980s, it wasn't hard for the different factions of conservatism to find common ground under the Reagan umbrella. A strong stance against the Soviet Union, high taxes and out-of-control crime unified libertarians, traditionalists and anti-Communists alike. It was really in the development of the Reagan coalition that the political marriage of the Republican Party and conservative intellectuals was sealed.

By 2016, Reagan, however, has been dead for over a decade. While most everyone in the conservative world still invokes Reagan as an ideal, there are plenty of disagreements over where Reagan would stand today on immigration, on foreign policy in a world with no Soviet Union, and on taxes in an era when many lower-income Americans pay no income taxes. On all of these issues there can be healthy disagreement, which is why over a dozen GOP candidates can get on a debate stage and profess their love of Reagan, and yet disagree on a panoply of issues. Similarly, conservative intellectuals continue to admire Reagan, yet argue over what is the modern manifestation of Reaganism.

It is in this post-Reagan era that the Trump candidacy has come and divided the world of conservative intellectuals. Foreign policy intellectuals are, for the most part, against Trump. Many signed a letter stating that they will unequivocally oppose a candidate whom they view as both unstable and wrongheaded. Another group heavily represented in the NeverTrump world is the neoconservatives, who overlap to a degree with the foreign policy group. Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz, editors of the Weekly Standard and Commentary, are two of the most prominent names on the NeverTrump team; their fathers, Irving and Norman, respectively, were probably the two most prominent or the original neoconservatives. (Irving passed away in 2009, but Norman did say in an interview that he would back Trump, although he did not sign the pro-Trump letter.) Yuval Levin, who edits National Affairs, which is explicitly modeled after Irving Kristol’s late Public Interest, is also a NeverTrumper.

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We all know who opposes Trump in the conservative world. But who is in favor of him? A close examination of the Scholars and Writers petition suggests that Trump has highlighted a cleavage little understood outside the most academic conservative circles—a feud between East Coast and the West Coast Straussians, one with origins decades ago, in a split between followers of the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss.

Strauss was devoted to studying and seeing the wisdom of the ancients—as opposed to moderns like Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although Strauss himself remained largely outside the fray, he had many important students who have become involved in political battles both on campus and in Washington. These students have sought ways to model a society on some of the deeper principles that emerged from his work, such as promoting natural right and criticizing relativism. Many of his students, including Walter Berns, Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, became important distillers of much modern conservative thought. They all had long careers in academia and accrued many followers. Berns and Bloom and their disciples became the East Coast school; prominent East Coasters include Bill Kristol and Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield.

Jaffa moved out to Claremont and developed his own disciples, largely around the Claremont Institute, and they became known as the West Coast Straussians. The most prominent West Coasters are probably Claremont’s Charles Kesler, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, and Amherst’s Hadley Arkes, showing that the “West Coast” designation is not strictly a geographic delimitation.

[bostonangler]

 

Why Some Intellectuals Are Breaking for Trump

The little-known East Coast-West Coast feud that could reshape American conservatism.

By Tevi Troy

November 06, 2016

Most Popular

It may not get the attention of the daily outrage cycle in the news, but one of the most striking fractures in the 2016 campaign has been the peeling away of conservative intellectuals from their own party's candidate—and, in some cases, from the party itself. As Donald Trump's ascendancy began in the summer of 2015, the thought leaders of the right were among the first Republicans to open up a direct line of attack on the celebrity real estate developer. (“He’s dead to me,” said Bill Kristol, after Trump attacked John McCain's war service early in his campaign.) And as the race evolved, many of the most resolute statements from the intellectual right have been leveled against a candidate, not for one, as writers like Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Yuval Levin and Pete Wehner became leading figures in the NeverTrump movement.

In more recent months, however, a schism has developed. The adamant NeverTrumpers have remained so, but a number of conservative intellectuals have started to support the New York billionaire. Some do so grudgingly, some full-throatedly, but it is clear that over time the proudly anti-intellectual Trump has attracted a base of thinkers willing to lend him their support. In May, Fred Barnes documented a handful of early examples in the Weekly Standard, including the historian Victor Davis Hanson, who was willing to give Trump a chance to prove himself; since then, the universe has expanded considerably, most notably in the recent pledge signed by more than 125 conservative scholars and writers backing Trump.

The language of the pledge—“Given our choices in the presidential election, we believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America, and we urge you to support him as we do”—was not exactly a rousing endorsement of Trump himself, and the two dozen or so submissions by some of the endorsers made clear that the decision was in large part a rejection of Hillarious Clinton. But a close examination of the names on the list also suggests that the Trump phenomenon has widened a fissure within the conservative movement that has been growing for years. The epicenter is Trump, to be sure, but the tectonic plates now separating were once covered by overarching principles that may be receding from view and exposing the cracks.

You could call it an East Coast–West Coast feud, an argument about American greatness whose roots lie decades in the past and have threaded themselves through the conservative movement's long and sometimes-rocky relationship with the Republican Party. Whatever happens on Tuesday, it's clear that the conservative movement is headed for a period of self-examination and a reckoning with whose ideas are going to drive the party forward. It remains to be seen whether conservatism will once again constitute the unified force it has been for the past three decades of American politics, but a look at this growing group of pro-Trump intellectuals could be helpful in figuring out where both the Republican Party and the conservative movement may be headed—and perhaps to detect a strain of the thinking that could animate a new version of the party.

Edited November 7, 2016 by bostonangler