I've been sitting here deliberating whether to provide a link to the essay I'm about to discuss. I generally don't do so in these cases. If the piece is so poisonous to the national discourse that the question of responsibility for aggravating a dark trend arises, I decline.
But I'm going to in this case. Human Events editor-in-chief Raheem Kassam's piece entitled "National Review is Obsessed With Itself" fairly drips with determination to assume the role of arbiter for what constitutes legitimate conservatism in the present moment - and to stamp out that which falls outside its parameters.
I've had to do some maturing myself over the years in regard to what permissibly qualifies as a conservative position. While I still hold to the notion of three pillars that became the accepted model some thirty-plus years ago, I see that there is a big-tent quality to our worldview, that there is something to the notion that it is a sensibility at least as much as a hard and fast platform, and that its essence has resulted from a distillation process that, one could argue, goes back to our common ancestor, Edmund Burke.
There have been purgings before. William F. Buckley had to serve notice to both the John Birch crowd and the Randians that they fell outside the bounds of what qualified. When neoconservatism first became a thing in the mid-to-late 1970s, some of the former liberals fared better at making a full transition than others. For instance, it took a while for the great Jean Kirkpatrick to start to see the efficacy of right-of-center domestic-policy orientation.
The Trump phenomenon has proven thornier than previous points in the synthesis. Trump's status as a party-affiliation flip-flopper was the first glaringly obvious problem. Once his candidacy became the sensation of the primary season, the photo from his (third) wedding reception of him and Melania yukking it up with Bill and Hillary Clinton made the rounds fairly instantly. Then came signals of his collectivist views on health care ("We have to take care of everybody") and his vow not to make any changes to the structure of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Time passed and he became president, and he engaged in rank appeasement of North Korea within weeks of its testing of its most fearsome missiles. That, as we know, led to two summits, the second of which ended in collapse, which in turn has led to Kim's return to full-bore belligerence. It's this kind of stuff; other examples abound.
An unprecedented aspect of the Trump phenomenon is the degree to which it's built around one figure . There was some of that in the case of the Objectivists, but they revered Ayn Rand because of her ideas. And it's also true that three of our four most recent presidents have been pathological narcissists with slavish cult followings, Bush 43 being the exception. However, other than Trump, these were Democrats.
Which gets us to Kassam's piece. The tone is a little different from, say, that of Kurt Schlichter, but not the spirit. His unmistakable point is to use Trumpian tactics to try to delegitimize what has been the flagship magazine of conservatism since the month after I was born. There is no other reason for his citing of NR's circulation statistics and his use of Schlichteresque terminology ("muh free market," "Conservative, Inc."). He doesn't hesitate to go for the point of NR's most recent maximum vulnerability, citing - and linking to - the Nicholas Frankovich piece NR published in the first few hours of the Covington-kids situation, barely noting the fact that the magazine took the piece down and apologized for such a hasty and mistaken first take.
And that as much as anything points up the bully aspect of Trumpism's essence. The image one gets is that of an alpha-male grade-schooler on the playground, finding some kid minding his own business and bending the kid's knuckles backward just to watch him drop to his knees. There is no room in the Trumpists' mind for waiting for anyone to take a second look at his position. In other words, no grace.
And I need to say a word about Kassam's formulation "Where the conservative movement is headed." Conservatism, properly understood, is about immutable principles. It doesn't "head" anywhere. Speaking of the month after I was born, National Review's mission statement includes the legendary phrase "stand athwart history yelling stop."
Kassam's essay is nothing but another splash of gasoline on the fire. It reinforces the notion of an irrevocable split in conservatism.
It's also clearly devoid of any humanity and for that reason is on the wrong side of such a split if there is really going to be one.
It also makes excuses for someone who is not and never has been a conservative and doesn't understand what the term even means.
He's casting his lot with something extremely perishable.
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