The Business We Have Chosen

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 26, 2024

 

The longest argument I’ve ever had with a Dispatch colleague came on a Friday evening a few months ago. And no wonder.

 

Logically, Friday nights are prime time for squabbles among political junkies.

 

For most of the population, it’s the opposite. The last thing a normal human wants to do to unwind at the start of the weekend is talk politics. But nerds like me (and you, dear reader) are a breed apart. We spend all week in mounting annoyance at the news and opinion we’ve been mainlining and then, finally free of professional duties, the resentments we’ve been nursing come spilling out. With help, perhaps, from a beverage or two.

 

Our own Steve Hayes maintains he was not imbibing when he touched off a brawl among Never Trumpers last Friday night on Twitter. “Grim moment in our politics,” he wrote. “Some conservatives embracing a nutty conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr. and others fluffing a statist progressive [like] Kamala Harris. What a mess the modern conservative movement is.”

 

Amid the hundreds of frothy replies he received from MAGA types eager to defend the nutty conspiracy theorist’s honor came this one from Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell: “Honestly, what are you talking about Steve? The sad state of the conservative movement has nothing to do with some conservatives voting for a Democrat to keep Trump away from power. The widespread capitulation to and ultimate embrace of Trump destroyed the conservative movement.”

 

Thus began a long back-and-forth, with Longwell accusing Steve of being stuck in “tribal muck” and Steve countering that he, not she, is the one who’s been “anti-tribal.” Longwell was indignant. “I’ve read you and [Jonah Goldberg] since I was a young conservative,” she replied. “You were both so influential on me. Watching your tedious rationalizations about why you’ll stand on the sidelines instead of taking a stand against the worst threat to American ideals in our lifetimes has been so deeply disappointing.”

 

She went on to call Jonah’s recent G-File gently scolding David French for endorsing Kamala Harris “almost spirit-breaking.” To quote George Will: Well.

 

Jonah himself soon replied at length, siding with Steve. Atlantic contributor Tom Nichols, another prominent anti-Trumper, chimed in on Longwell’s side. David, ever the peacemaker, tried to find a middle way over at Threads. Andrew Egger, who’s worked for both Steve and Sarah, gave his view. Within hours, the Never Trump equivalent of the gang fight in Anchorman had broken out.

 

Now I, the Brick Tamland of The Dispatch, must step forward and throw my trident.

 

I don’t know whom to throw it at, though. My weaselly yet honest opinion is that both sides in the Hayes-Longwell divide have a point.

 

Ultimately, the argument between them isn’t over Kamala Harris or Donald Trump or Never Trump-ism. It’s over persuasion. As pundits and writers, persuasion is the business we have chosen. But in this case, there’s an important difference of opinion on two fundamental questions.

 

What, precisely, are we trying to persuade people to do? And what’s the most effective strategy for persuading them to do it? 

 

Conservatism versus anti-Trumpism.

 

You wouldn’t know it by listening to some of our critics, but the respective missions of The Dispatch and The Bulwark are distinct.

 

The mission of The Dispatch, I think, is to promote the sort of traditional conservatism that’s been forsaken by the Republican Party. The mission of The Bulwark is to defeat Trump and right-wing authoritarianism.

 

Those two missions overlap substantially in 2024, enough so for me to have published a newsletter not two weeks ago that ended with a Bulwark-ian plea to “Vote Harris.” Steve himself reminded his critics on Twitter at one point this weekend that in 2020 he voted for Joe Biden. 

 

The David French column that inspired Jonah’s allegedly “spirit-breaking” G-File was essentially an exercise in marrying Dispatch and Bulwark Never Trumpism. I’m voting for Harris this year, David wrote, because we must defeat Trump to promote traditional conservatism. In the short term, he argued, a Harris victory will mean having a president whose foreign policy is closer to Ronald Reagan’s than Trump’s is. In the longer term, it’ll mean discrediting Trump’s brand of boorish populist authoritarianism among the American right as electorally unviable.

 

The staffs of both publications would be happy to see David’s prediction come true, I’m sure. But given the difference in our respective missions, it’s inevitable that Dispatch-ers won’t feel the same enthusiasm for a Harris victory as Bulwark-ers do.

 

And enthusiasm is key here. The most important word in Steve’s tweet that set this brawl off was “fluffing.”

 

I didn’t take him to mean that conservatives shouldn’t vote for Harris. (If he did, it’s weird that he hasn’t fired me.) And I certainly didn’t take him to mean, as Longwell seems to, that Republican enthusiasm for Harris is a major cause of why the modern conservative movement is “a mess.” His point, I thought, was that the cult of Trump has polarized supporters and opponents on the right so intensely that each has twisted the things they once believed beyond recognition to accommodate their feelings about him.

 

Steve is reflecting the ethos of this publication: If you’re trying to persuade people that conservatism is the best governing model for America, how do you do that by evincing earnest excitement for a San Francisco progressive? Vote for her as the lesser of two evils if you must. But if you’re enthusiastically “fluffing” her, you’re sending a decidedly mixed message, shall we say, about the supposed importance of small government and traditional values.

 

And by doing so, you may end up getting more than you bargained for.

 

We can all name people formerly of the right who have moved towards the left so enthusiastically in their strident Never Trumpism that they’re now almost indistinguishable from Democratic partisans. Morning Joe. The Lincoln Project. George Conway. Ana Navarro, who parlayed her “Republican who hates Republicans” stature into a guest-hosting slot at the Democratic convention last week. If Trump were to be crushed in November and the right were to revert to traditional conservatism in 2028, some or all of them might conceivably come marching home to the GOP, but would anyone bet on it at this point? 

 

Maintaining an ideological allegiance to the right is psychologically difficult once you’ve enthusiastically aligned yourself with a party of the left, especially if that alliance has been reinforced with praise and (in some cases) financial opportunity. And it’s asking a lot of middle-aged adults who uprooted their careers by abandoning their party once before to uproot their careers again by returning to that party once it’s “seen the light.”

 

What Steve fears, I think, is that the conservative marriage of convenience with Democrats for the mutual goal of defeating right-wing populism will, in many cases, become a love fest. When Trump is gone and the smoke clears, all that’ll remain on the right is his proto-fascist base and “conservatives” clinging to the Republican label who’ve let their antipathy to Trump seduce them into becoming dependable cheerleaders for liberals.

 

That’s not a problem if your mission is simply to defeat Trump and authoritarianism. When Steve was interviewed on The Bulwark podcast some months ago, for instance, host Tim Miller admitted that he was willing to “gild the lily” a bit in spinning events favorably for Joe Biden. And why not? Good press for Biden serves the goal of beating Trump. Ditto for Longwell, who often excitedly praises the Democrats’ deep gubernatorial bench on Bulwark podcasts. I understand that: Unless there are some dramatic changes in the GOP within the next decade, odds are good I’ll be voting for Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore someday.

 

But if your mission is to advance traditional conservatism, you shouldn’t be gilding the lily for any Democrat. (If Never Trump is about truth-telling, Jonah pointed out, it can’t just be truths that hurt Trump.) And just in case Republicans do regain their moral bearings soon-ish, you shouldn’t be excited at the prospect of sustained Democratic rule.

 

Steve wants to persuade readers to support traditional conservatism, and the Bulwark-ers want to persuade them to defeat Trump. Both goals are noble, but one is obviously more conducive to enthusiasm for Democrats than the other.

 

And the other, I think, is more likely to actually convince conservative voters. If you hope Nikki Haley’s Republican primary supporters will flip to Harris in the general election, as I do, my guess is that you’ll do better to persuade them by acknowledging the reasons for their reluctance than by broadcasting a sense of excitement about Harris (“fluffing,” let’s call it) that will seem foreign and suspicious to them.

 

The Democrat’s campaign is vacuous to the point of being intellectually insulting. Social conservatives will get—and should expect—nothing from her presidency. There’s nothing to recommend her agenda on fiscal grounds either except, perhaps, that Trump’s pro-tariff psychosis might plausibly prove worse. But Harris is neither crazy nor a coup-plotter, and the right deserves a brutal beating for what it’s become. Hopefully, such a shellacking would knock some sense into the movement, which is why conservatives should cross party lines in spite of everything.

 

They might listen to that. If nothing else, they’ll (hopefully) respect you as an honest broker for being frank about Harris’ weaknesses. But if you sound enthusiastic about voting for her, that’s when they’ll start to suspect that you’re not so much trying to beat Trump as you are trying to convert them into Democrats. That’s why our friend David took so much flak for his recent column: Right-leaning voters are used to “lesser of two evils” arguments, but when you tell them that real conservatism means voting for a progressive, many will think you’re selling them something.

 

Permission, reluctant or not.

 

I don’t think Longwell much cares about conservative enthusiasm, though.

 

She and Steve ended up talking past each other because she mistook his original tweet as an attempt to “both sides” the moral decline of the right by blaming crazed populists and Harris-supporting conservatives for it equally, which he wasn’t doing. (The Dispatch exists for a reason!) As to his actual point, about some Never Trumpers losing their ideological bearings, I suspect Longwell is indifferent: If Republicans want to wear hair shirts and flog themselves while reciting Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech as they trundle to the polls to vote for Harris this fall, she’s fine with it.

 

What she wants is for Steve and Jonah to say that Republicans should vote for her. She’s trying to persuade people to vote against Trump, in keeping with the mission of her publication, and she believes their endorsements could help marginally—if only in clarifying for right-leaning voters that Trump is the greater of two evils.

 

“Genuine question [Steve]: Which scenario is more dangerous for our country and for our allies abroad?” she tweeted on Friday. “Trump winning or Harris winning? I don’t believe for one second you think Kamala Harris is more dangerous than Donald Trump.”

 

It’s all about so-called permission structures, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. The reason I feel obliged to endorse Harris and why, I assume, our friend David felt obliged at his much bigger perch at the New York Times is because parties inspire powerful tribal loyalty and it takes a lot of persuasion to get partisans to consider leaving, even for just one election. The more conservative commentary there is out there encouraging support for the Democrat this fall, the more comfortable conservative voters will feel about it (in theory).

 

There might be some Haley Republicans who are weighing their options right now and could be moved by a cumulative nudge from people they respect, including Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. Longwell is trying to build a permission structure for those voters and can’t understand why Steve and Jonah don’t want to participate, I think, especially when she’s willing to forgo the “fluffing” part. They don’t need to be enthusiastic about Harris, merely forthright about Trump being the greater evil.

 

Instead, they’ve been reluctant to explicitly take a position on that question. And in this case, not explicitly taking a position amounts to taking a position, no?

 

Steve and Jonah may intend it that way (the latter called the election “a hard choice” on Saturday, with which I respectfully disagree) but readers might understandably interpret their ambivalence as a comment on just how freakishly unfit for office they believe Harris to be. If the founders of a publication as righteously anti-Trump as The Dispatch can’t bring themselves to endorse Trump’s opponent post-January 6, however reluctantly, the alternative on the ballot must be really—like, really really—bad.

 

And if she’s that bad, those readers might conclude, maybe they shouldn’t turn out in November to try to beat Trump after all.

 

More than that, neutrality between Trump and Harris implies that conserving the constitutional order isn’t an important priority of conservatism. Or at least no more important than, say, fiscal responsibility or restricting abortion is.

 

We conservatives should feel a little excitement that Captain Coup is no longer on the glide path to reelection that he was five weeks ago, no? We don’t need to “fluff” Harris by ignoring her policy flaws to feel relieved that she’s made the race competitive and hopeful that we might avoid another Trump administration bent on “retribution” and full-spectrum abuse of executive power. I can muster a degree of enthusiasm as a conservative for the prospect of a presidency in which that’s not a concern and the government functions traditionally, without monthly constitutional crises.

 

I don’t think Steve or Jonah would disagree. But a cynic could read their refusal to endorse Harris in November as ambivalence about whether an administration with conservative policies that operates outside the law is preferable to an administration with liberal policies that operates within it. That’s what drove Longwell to the pathos about “spirit-breaking,” I assume: Treating a right-wing policy agenda as a higher (or equal) priority as respect for the American civic tradition is the hallmark of anti-anti-Trumpers, not The Dispatch. There are other publications where you can find that viewpoint but it’s not supposed to be here.

 

And it isn’t. This is why Jonah has been tearing his hair out lately over critics treating his vote as a mirror into his soul: People infer waaaay too much about one’s political preferences from the simple fact of preferring one candidate over another in a binary choice. But that’s the problem, Longwell would presumably say. If preferring one candidate over another doesn’t mean much, why the reluctance to clearly prefer Harris over Trump, grudgingly or not?

 

Lurking beneath all this agita is one more important difference between The Bulwark and The Dispatch. The former is an activist site in a way that the latter is not.

 

Longwell was a political operative before becoming a publisher, and she still is. The PAC she runs, Republican Voters Against Trump, has embarked on a $50 million effort this year to persuade right-leaning voters to cross the aisle for Harris by circulating dozens of video testimonials from average-joe Republicans who’ve already made a commitment to do so. (Now that’s a permission structure.) As Tom Nichols put it, she has a specific definition of what it means to be Never Trump: “It means not only criticizing him, but stopping him.”

 

The Dispatch is different, as Jonah made clear by framing his defense of Steve and opposition to “fluffing” in terms of journalistic ethics. “I have no problem with journalists writing favorably or unfavorably about candidates they’re voting for,” he wrote on Saturday. “But the idea that they are required to write, report, and argue in ways consistent with how they’ll vote is the purest horses—t. … Journalists aren’t supposed to be de facto party hacks.” In fact, as a matter of company policy, The Dispatch doesn’t endorse candidates as an institution.

 

Right, I know: No one is asking Jonah or Steve to spend the rest of the campaign propagandizing for Harris, just for a simple “she’s bad but still better than Trump” affirmation. But if Never Trump journalists are morally obliged to approach the race as activists, given the high stakes for the country, shouldn’t they propagandize for her? What sense does it make to endorse her as the only feasible alternative to a dangerous man and then to go on criticizing her unsparingly, knowing how that criticism will undermine the endorsement?

 

If your highest priority is to beat Trump, not to promote conservatism, your attempts at persuasion will inevitably reflect that.

 

This is what Steve was worried about with “fluffing.” Once you’re an activist more so than a journalist, you’re destined to pull your punches. “I admit I’m not harping on Harris’ faults because I think it’s important to beat Trump,” one Never Trump conservative said on Twitter this weekend, which is fine for the average voter but not fine for a commentator at a publication like this one that aims to hold politicians of both parties to honest account. Start down that road and soon you might find yourself, well, gilding the lily.

 

Then again, I endorsed Harris and don’t seem to have any trouble maintaining my objectivity toward her. (Although, as Anchorman fans know, Brick Tamland is … “special.”) Last week, when writer Jeryl Bier wondered why there are so few conservatives willing to endorse Harris while continuing to criticize her on conservative grounds, a Twitter pal retorted, “Why is it so hard for people to believe that Allahpundit Republicans exist?” Why indeed, my friend? Why indeed?