The Problem with Punishment Parties

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

 

Can conservatives who do not want to be led by Donald Trump use a third party to threaten or cajole the Republicans into nominating someone else? Or use it to punish the GOP whenever it nominates someone who promotes or cooperates with the former president’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election?

 

The idea was floated in a notable column by friend and former National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg. Current colleagues Charles Cooke and Dan McLaughlin point out one obvious problem, which is that political action of this sort is never received as a humble rebuke — it’s seen as subterfuge and party-wrecking.

 

Goldberg — no fool — recognizes this danger is a real one. His plan is a response to that subset of anti-Trump Republicans whose strategy instead is to just vote for the Democrats and essentially make their home there. But the dangers inherent in the third-party approach go beyond the backlash that would come from handing power to Democrats.

 

I don’t want to risk a pile-on, exactly, but want to play with this idea. Goldberg’s vision for this party is intelligently limited. If I’m reading his column correctly, the idea would be to endorse Republicans where possible on the basis of “a simple, Reaganite conservative platform” but run candidates against those who downplay the events of January 6 or who play along with Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Simple and direct: defeat Trumpism by punishing election truthers.

 

There are two problems with this that Cooke and McLaughlin don’t mention. The first is conceptual. If you want to be the conservative pro-democracy party, you can’t run the party democratically. Why? Because the party’s commitments — which are firm and fundamentally ethical — can’t be like a party plank subject to haggling or redefinition by members and must be more like a constitutional feature. The party could be a dictatorship of Christine Todd Whitman, or it could be run as a kind of monastic order, with Goldberg as the abbot. This shouldn’t surprise Goldberg, who has argued frequently that the problem with modern political parties is that they are too democratic and there is too little institutional power in the parties, wielded by responsible trustees of the longer-term interest. But not only would this party have to be organized like a religious movement — it would have to be run by men and women who are irreproachable. Good luck finding people with not a hint of conflict of interest. It would also, I think, have to renounce any other ulterior motives.

 

If running the pro-democracy party anti-democratically turns out to be impracticable, then it’s extremely likely that such an effort would fall into the second problem. This is a trap other anti-Trump movements have fallen into since the beginning. They have trouble separating Trump’s problems as a conspiracist and unfit leader from political positions and decisions they simply find offensive and unwelcome, such as the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan or modifications to America’s trading policy.

 

It’s important to be clear here. The anti-Trumpers are correct that Trump certainly alienated swaths of the suburbs that are normally fertile ground for the GOP. But the party after 2018 and 2020 is in much better electoral standing than it was after 2006 and 2008. Attempting to smuggle in a restoration of Bush-era conservatism as part of the repudiation of Trump is doomed to failure.

 

It is bleedingly obvious that many leading Never Trumpers care primarily about a foreign-policy vision that became electoral poison 15 years ago. When newsmaking Never-Trump figures like Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol start renouncing and denouncing other core conservative ideas, you get the idea that they were insincerely held in the first place, or held for ulterior motives. These Never Trumpers end up sounding anti-democratic, demanding that voters serve the interests of elected officials and other insiders, rather than the other way around.

 

An anti-Trump party that went all in for anti-populism would also mistake Trump as the cause of GOP populism, rather than a result of it. For decades there has been a slow-building realignment at work, in which Rust Belt states became gettable for the GOP. This realignment is also making the South less solid for the GOP. This electoral opportunity was on the radar nearly 20 years ago and weakened George W. Bush’s commitment to free trade as he pursued Pennsylvania. Trump’s open repudiation of free trade helped net him 64 electoral votes that Mitt Romney could not win: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As the political class turns increasingly hostile to a native “deplorable” population, its recommendations, biases, and expertise will come into disrepute in the party that contains and represents the deplorables.

 

Neoconservative foreign policy and free-trading may have their day again. In fact, I suspect they will as populists come into office and do exactly what their enemies did before them: antagonize the American people and under-deliver on their promises. That is, I think the best way to beat the fanatics is to watch them fail on their own. The sad truth about American politics is that the major parties never produce cathartic moments of repudiation. Reagan never really attacked Nixon. Obama never really attacked Bill Clinton’s legacy. They just moved on to new things.

 

What the conservative Never Trumpers need is not a third party as a tool of punishment; what they need is a compelling candidate whose success changes the tenor and character of the party they lead.