On Confessing That Your Publication’s Entire Ethos Is a Fraud

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

 

It is not every day that a writer pens a column admitting that, at least to him, his publication’s entire ethos is a fraud. But it is hard to read this Tim Miller column at the Bulwark as anything else.

 

To rehash some familiar ground: “Never Trump” arose during the 2016 primaries as a slogan rather than a political movement, and that slogan — meaning nothing more or less than an unwillingness of Republican voters to support Donald Trump in the November 2016 general election — was adopted by people from a variety of different factions and persuasions within the party. The Bulwark, from its inception, represented a very particular brand of “Never Trumpism.” It claimed to be “conserving conservatism” despite being alienated from conservative voters and indifferent to hostile to conservative policy. Instead, the founding ethos of the publication catered to a particular brand of “Never Trump” argument: that it was vital for Republican politicians and conservative commentators to denounce Trump and all his works at every turn not because of his policy stances — indeed, in spite of them — but because he was uniquely toxic to our political system by assaulting its institutions and discarding the norms of behavior that make up the unwritten constitution without which the actual Constitution is a dead letter. Advocacy of this point of view allowed the publication — founded and staffed by people formerly employed by Republican campaigns and conservative publications — to claim to be conservative despite its regular hostility to conservative voters, politicians, and policy aims. The centerpiece of its many attacks on the character of conservative politicians and commentators has been the argument that conservatives are deviating from their principles by discarding norms they once revered. The entire point is to be purer on these issues than Caesar’s wife.

 

From a conservative perspective, of course, rules, process, and institutions matter a lot — both formal rules and informal norms of behavior. For all of the many facets of conservative thinking, all of conservative thought about politics comes down to two categories: policy and process. On the one hand, in terms of policy, conservative values tell us that some things are good and some are bad, and we should fight to promote the good and oppose the bad. On the other hand, in terms of process, a properly ordered society has rules, rules of prudence and experience and modesty and balance, and how we decide things is often as important as what we decide. Conservatives, having a skeptical view of human wisdom and centralized expertise, are much more focused on proper process than are progressives.

 

We are not the only fans of norms; centrists also tend to like them, less for philosophical reasons than out of a general sense that norms and rules restrain ideologues of either side from getting their way too easily. Progressives, by contrast, tend to be relentless foes of norm-observance, arguing that rules, norms, and institutions are all just a racket to prevent the right people from doing the right thing.

 

Which brings us to Miller, a former Jeb Bush political operative, who is very unhappy that people are now asking him to denounce Joe Biden and the Democrats for acting — as progressives do — with regular hostility and contempt for norms, rules, and institutions. He complains about the argument that “we Never Trumpers are required to defend in perpetuity every silly procedure and archaic policy our government has cooked up over the centuries.” He whines that he, now, is being asked to adhere to “blind loyalty to precious norms” when it might get in the way of pursuing a binary choice between Trump and his opponents. As if this is something different from what the Bulwark exists to do to conservatives. But it’s so unfair for people who claim to elevate this one aspect of conservatism above all others to actually defend it or abide by it!

 

No, Miller says: Trump is so bad in adjective adverb ways, that norms should be less important than being against him. He digs deep in his thesaurus to hurl insults at a man his readers all detest anyway. Trump is a “raging cockwomble” and “an incompetent, racist, dangerous, perfidious, megalomaniacal, degenerate corned beef face syrup wearing wankstain,” and therefore, “it is unclear why my opposition to that witless cocksplat means I have to give full-throated support to the current Senate cloture rules lest I run afoul of the pundit-consistency mandate.” In a feat of bad timing, he focused on Trump’s “personal attacks” and bullying of debate moderators, just days before Joe Biden publicly called a member of the White House press corps a “stupid son of a bitch.”

 

But, of course, if Miller was content to simply argue that Trump is a man of unusually bad character, he would find plenty of company at National Review, myself included. That is not what Miller or the Bulwark are about; the whole point of the publication is to take the argument beyond Trump and go after other conservatives, and to do so not mainly on policy grounds but on the basis of neutral process principles. Instead, Miller takes up the progressive posture: norms are often just a racket: “the Trump presidency should have awakened us to how our norms can be abused by people who don’t give a rip. Many political norms actually contributed to Trump’s rise and allowed him to abuse the system at the expense of competitors who were coloring inside the lines.” He also argues, conveniently, that we should have fewer norms against the party in power doing what it wants. I confess I do not recall Miller complaining much in 2017–18 about this.

 

Then we get this:

 

Some talk of norms is just dodgy—a way of pretending that power politics has some basis in principle or precedent. Following the deaths of Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, we heard a lot about the so-called norms regarding whether a president in the last year of a term can fill a vacancy. If I rightly remember Mitch McConnell’s contortuplicated explanations, a president in the final year of their term cannot appoint someone to the Supreme Court unless that president’s own party controls the Senate, in which case the president must be allowed to do so, if and only if Jupiter is in the house of Mercury, or else a longstanding norm invented by a blogger with an angry baseball avatar is at risk of being violated.

 

I’m not bothered by Miller coating his monitor with spittle at me — political commentary is a grownup’s business that deals in serious stakes, so it comes with the territory — but it is noteworthy that he refers to my Twitter avatar without mentioning me by name or publication. I suppose I can take it as a compliment that he simply assumes that all his readers know who I am, but it strikes me as a symptom of being Very Online to an excessive degree to do that. But recall my argument (see here, here, and here) about the Senate filling Supreme Court vacancies. My case at the time was twofold. One, the party controlling the Senate always has the power to confirm nominees when their party controls the White House, and historical precedent shows that no norm constrains that power. Two, the party controlling the Senate always has the power to refuse to confirm nominees when the other party controls the White House, but norms against leaving yearslong vacancies have constrained that power except when the nomination is made in election years, such that the dispute between the White House and the Senate can be timely put to the voters to resolve. My research into the historical precedents was extensive and detailed. Having no answer to that, Miller falls back on a temper tantrum against the very notion of historical precedent as a basis for norms of behavior.

 

There is a place in politics for arguing that norms matter, and a place for arguing that results are more important than norms. But if you are going to argue the latter in the pages of a publication whose entire raison d’etre is the former, you are confessing that you really never believed in the sorts of criticisms you and your publication have embraced as your stock in trade. It was all, always, just any weapon to hand.