Crisis of the Conservative House Divided

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The Weekly Standard:

A pre-mortem

Steven F. Hayward

Oct 31, 2016

 

For months it has been clear that in one vital respect Donald Trump's fate in the presidential election does not matter. Win or lose, he has divided and may yet shatter the conservative movement, a fact that was evident before the Access Hollywood tape gave us a TMI moment barely suitable for TMZ. Who could have foreseen that the Great Pumpkin candidate would turn out to be a Black Swan event for conservatism?

 

I have good friends who are enthusiastic pro-Trumpers and good friends who are adamant Never Trumpers, and I'm doing my best to stick with my friends. I've always been a fusionist conservative, finding merit and insight in every corner of the right-wing galaxy and often acting the diplomat in trying to reconcile the competing kingdoms in our ideological game of thrones. I have argued to the neocon followers of Leo Strauss, for example, that they should pay more attention to Roger Scruton's traditionalism and to economist Friedrich Hayek's congenial work. I tell libertarians and apolitical traditionalists to be less disdainful of politics if they ever hope to prosper in actual elections. And I'm always trying to explain everything about politics to economists, some of whom, I assume, are good people.

 

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The exacting demands of statesmanship have seldom been put better than by Hillsdale's Thomas G. West, one of the most fervent Claremont pro-Trumpers, in a 1986 essay: "A president who would successfully lead the nation back to constitutional government must have the right character, be able to present the right speeches, and undertake the right actions to guide the people to elect a new kind of Congress." Last week, I asked West whether and how Trump could measure up to this understanding of what is necessary today. West points to what he calls Trump's "civic courage," i.e., his intransigence in the face of relentless attacks, his willingness to call out radical Islamic extremism by name while noting the guilt-infused reluctance of Obama and Hillary Clinton to do so, his willingness to question the bipartisan failures of foreign policy over the last 25 years, and his direct rebuke to the collapse of the rule of law in cities with large black populations. West thinks Trump's breathtaking stubbornness and shocking candor are the ingredients for the kind of restorative statesmanship the times demand.

 

I'll leave to others to debate whether what West sees as Trump's courage is closer to the recklessness that is the defect of courage. Perhaps Trump's intransigence and self-regard would serve him well in office, but his likely failure at the polls next month ought to raise a serious question for those of us who hold aloft the banner of high statesmanship. We'll never know whether a candidate of Trump's disposition without his baggage and defects would succeed in winning in 2016 and governing effectively in 2017 and beyond. Did not James Madison warn that "enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm"? If the restoration of the republic depends more than ever on the contingency of a wise and forceful statesman winning election at the right moment, then it suggests the crisis of governance is so far advanced that we need more than just a great president to reverse our course.

 

Perhaps everyone has put too much emphasis on finding the supreme virtuous statesman—another Reagan—to lead us out of the wilderness. The failures and shortcomings of the Reagan presidency, whose experience and lessons are strangely unstudied by conservatives, ought to be a source of searching reflection. (I took a lot of criticism from some Reaganites for the conclusion of my book on his presidency, The Age of Reagan, for being less than fully triumphant about the greatness of the Gipper. I wrote that "Reagan was more successful in rolling back the Soviet empire than he was in rolling back the domestic government empire chiefly because the latter is a harder problem.") It ought to be added, though, that this Waiting for Godot outlook is less fanciful than that of our legal friends who keep hoping that appointing the right Supreme Court justices and generating the right cases will chip away at "Chevron deference" and other constitutionally dubious props of the administrative state.

 

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