There’s a cottage industry of liberal analysts who write about the alleged descent of conservatism and/or the Republican Party. Typically, these commentators yearn for the days when “responsible” conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower, or Mitt Romney, or (in some cases) even Ronald Reagan were the face of the Republican Party. We are expected to overlook the fact that these figures were viciously attacked by liberals in their time.
I’m not aware of any corresponding tendency among conservative scholars or pundits. Many of us regret the Democratic Party’s rejection of the liberalism of John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. However, we don’t obsess over, or try to analyze, it.
We take the Democrats as we find them and, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we go to war (figuratively in this case) against the opposition we have.
The latest example of a liberal critique of Republicans appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post. The author is Geoffrey Kabaservice of the Niskanen Center. He has written a book called “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of the Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”
As you can tell from that title, and as Kabaservice says at the beginning of the article, he wrote much of the book before the rise of Donald Trump. But Trump fits his thesis of “downfall and destruction” as, undoubtedly, will the next wave of Republican leaders. Perhaps Kabaservice should have produced his book in loose leaf notebook form.
The title of Kabaservice’s article in the Post is “The forever grievance.” The theme is that, with the Tea Party and Trump, conservatism “has reached the point that it is. . .an endless, all-encompassing. . .struggle against established authority. . .” He argues that “the tea party-Trump tribe. . .has no fixed principles other than smashing a nebulous ‘deep state,’ forcing all institutions of society to bend to its will, and waging never-ending war against the Democrats.”
Kabaservice ignores obvious “fixed principles” of Trump’s brand of conservatism. They include the desire to eliminate government regulations that are considered unnecessary and oppressive; to cut, or at least control, non-defense spending; to lower taxes; to sharply curtail, if not eliminate, illegal immigration; to improve America’s trade deals; to appoint judges who are reasonably wedded to the Constitution as written and originally understood; and to disengage from foreign wars.
Kabaservice also ignores the extent to which conservatives are reacting to the downfall of moderation in the Democratic Party. This is a common failing of liberals who undertake to analyze conservatives. They assume that the liberal consensus is a fixed concept that roughly corresponds to the way things ought to be. In this telling, conservatives are restless revolutionaries, right-wing Trotskyites, bent on attacking and, if possible, destroying “established authority” (to use Kabaservice’s term).
In reality, conservatives to a considerable extent are reacting to a rapidly evolving opposition. At the heart of Trumpism is resentment over two malignant growths in liberalism — political correctness and identity politics. Conservatives (and not just Trumpists) believe that, with the ascent of these tendencies, left-liberals answer to Kabaservice’s description of the so-called Tea Party-Trump “tribe.”
Left-liberals are engaged in an endless, all-encompassing struggle — a “permanent revolution” — to remake existing institutions and bend them to their will. They have marched through America’s colleges and universities, bending them to the absurd demands of wokeness and America bashing. They are working their way through corporate American. They are “reimagining” policing and trying to curtail religious freedom.
Trumpism is also, in part, a reaction to what Kabaservice acknowledges are “the real problems of non-college-educated Americans in rural regions and postindustrial towns, communities that have been destroyed by job losses, family dysfunction, and epidemics of drug and alcohol addiction.” Kabaservice doesn’t explain why these problems shouldn’t give rise to major grievances against “the established order” and a political movement that articulates these grievances.
Instead, he complains that the Tea Party and the Trumpists were/are “rooted in fact-free conspiracy theories about the treachery of Democrats and elites who allegedly plotted to destroy the livelihoods and traditions of ‘real Americans’ for their own benefit.”
There are some in these movements who allege an outright conspiracy. But no conspiracy theory is required to press the movements’ essential grievance. Mass illegal immigration benefits one class of Americans (upscale consumers) and harms another class (workers who must compete with cheap labor). Certain trade deals help many consumers at the expense of many who work in manufacturing.
There’s nothing abnormal about one political faction siding with a class aggrieved economically by a set of public policies, while another faction sides with the beneficiaries of the same policies. In fact, that’s roughly the story (or at least one story) of American political history.
Kabaservice concludes that, as a matter of political realism, the Republican Party cannot carry on forever as advocates for “a permanent revolution.” But it can do so as long as its opponents are carrying out a revolution of their own, or are widely perceived as doing so.
As I said, one goes to war against the opposition one has.
