Is the Party Over?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 05, 2022

 

As the political philosopher Neil Sedaka observed, “Breaking up is hard to do.”

 

Something you will no doubt have observed in your own life and in the lives of others is that the discord in a relationship — or the bitterness of its ending — is directly proportional to the intensity and closeness of the relationship itself: A romance consisting of three dates in six weeks might end without either party’s even quite noticing, but the dissolution of a 30-year marriage with children is always agonizing and potentially explosive; it is much more wrenching to leave a job you find personal meaning in than a job that is just a paycheck; with rare exceptions, you will never get as angry at your cousins as you do at your brother. Etc.

 

The thing conservatives need to keep in mind: The Republican Party is not your ex. Neither is the conservative movement. As it happens, I wrote this newsletter — except for the sentence you are reading — before Charlie Sykes’s latest — “A Governor Breaks Up with Trump” — landed in my in-box; the headline could not be more apt.

 

There was a time when sensible conservatives could take a realistic, instrumental view of the GOP and find it reasonably useful for our ends. The job of the Republican Party was to serve conservative interests — not the other way around. That has become complicated in two equally significant ways: One, political tribalism has done its awful work on conservatives as much as it has on anybody else, and many on the right today see advancing the electoral prospects of the Republican Party as, in effect, the whole of the conservative agenda per se; second, the Republican Party is today a much less able and reliable vessel of conservative policy than it was ten or 20 years ago, because it has been deformed by vulgar populism and infantile nationalism, to such an extent that certain important factions within the GOP have discovered a strange new respect for everything from heavy-handed and politically tinged antitrust regulation to economic redistribution to Vladimir Putin — and a positive loathing of free trade, free speech, the military, and the libertarian sensibility that Ronald Reagan famously described as “the very heart and soul of conservatism.” Down with Reaganism, up with Orbánism; down with Margaret Thatcher, up with Marine Le Pen.

 

For a certain kind of contemporary rightist, the relationship between the Chicago Boys and Augusto Pinochet is something that reflects poorly not on the economists but on the generalissimo. You’ll rarely meet a leftist who detests the thinking of Milton Friedman as much as our rage-addled new rightists do.

 

How should an unsentimental conservative think about the Republican Party?

 

Before the question of what we should think about the Republican Party, we might start with how we should feel about the Republican Party, about which I would advise — not very strongly.

 

If I am not quite politically where you’ll find, e.g., my friends over at the Bulwark, I am not emotionally where they are, either, and that may be more to the point. By this, I do not mean to cast any aspersions on that school of thought and its adherents. I would be very surprised if William Kristol did not have much stronger personal feelings about the Republican Party than I do: He served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations (as chief of staff to the vice president in the latter case), advised (and even managed) Republican campaigns, led organizations with the word “Republican” in their name, etc. — and I didn’t. Joe Scarborough held office as a Republican. If you look at the résumés of conservatives most bitterly estranged from the Republican Party, you’ll see many former advisers, campaign operatives, Hill staffers, party officials, etc. These are people who didn’t casually date the Republican Party — they were married.

 

And when I talk with them or read their work, I often think: “I don’t especially disagree with any of that, but — holy crow! — are they ever angry!”

 

The ladies and gentlemen on talk radio and the cable-news shows talk admiringly about “passion,” while John Adams feared passion — and he was right to do so.

 

It is worth remembering that passion is another word for suffering.

 

My own view is that, looked at dispassionately, the Republican Party is an organization that has for a long time been only partly useful to conservatives and that is becoming less useful each day. And all of that angst and wailing from the likes of Sean Hannity and the rest of the Chicken Little crowd — the sky is falling, Joe Biden is the Antichrist, and we are only one election away from losing our country forever! — is verbal camouflage deployed by people who have political or financial interests in maintaining the myth that conservatism and the Republican Party as so closely identified as to be in effect a single instrument. You may have noticed that the two kinds of people who argue most intensely for the complete identification of the conservative movement with the Republican Party are professional progressives and entrepreneurs in the more commercial side of right-wing media — in this, and in much else, those interests are quite closely aligned.

 

What conservatives will have to do in the post-Trump era is what conservatives have always had to do — take our wins where we find them, be realistic about our prospects, and expect to be disappointed by politicians. I am always happy to see a Ben Sasse rising in the world and would be pleased to see such figures rise farther; on the other hand, Lindsey Graham and figures like him are a net loss for the republic irrespective of whether what we are talking about is a Brand R Sycophant or a Brand D Sycophant — and if your sense of loyalty necessitates pretending that this is not the case, then you are loyal to the wrong things.

 

The Republican Party as it currently is constituted is not the only instrument available to us, nor is it the only possible instrument that might be available to us. Those who speak despairingly about the prospects of third parties should remember that the GOP began as one. But this is not mainly a question of forming new parties or engaging in some kind of endless Tracy Flick–ism, in which the ambitious and the frustrated start new organizations to give themselves something to be in charge of. In the long term, ideas are and always have been the most powerful force in politics: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”; “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”; “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!”; “It is accordingly our wish and our command that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fullness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places forever.”

 

This should figure more prominently in our political thinking than does the question of the party registration of the next man to be elected chief dog-catcher of Penobscot.