It's a joy to watch conservative groups that vehemently oppose Donald Trump spring up throughout the land. They, and the publications taking that position as their editorial stance, are solid proof that Trumpism has not marginalized the insistence on consistent principles, clarity, and decorum and character. We have not gone anywhere and our voice is strong.
Many of these groups take the laudable position that the "Never Trump" tent (and I dislike that term as much as I ever have) should be big, that a considerable range of ideas is healthy as long as there is a shared commitment to some kind of agreed-upon definition of conservatism.
Some, though, stretch the fabric of this tent to the tearing point by adopting the mirror opposite of the binary-choice argument that the Trumpists make - that is, by an insistence on the necessity of supporting Joe Biden.
Some take it that far and no farther, arguing that maintaining a Republican Senate majority assures the country a foil against the implementation of the kinds of identity-politics-and-redistribution-on-steroids policy moves that modern-day Democrats advocate. This seems to me to have a herding-cats implausibility to it. Who is clever enough to devise a strategy for exhorting voters to split the ticket in various far-flung states across this big country?
Some go all the way, arguing for a burn-it-all-down strategy that seems largely emotion-fueled. Proponents of this approach let their disgust with most, if not all, Senators and House members for not explicitly repudiating Trump override their considerations of hard politics realities, as well as those legislators' track records of support for real conservatism.
The Exhibit-A organization representing this position is The Lincoln Project.
Wariness about its passing muster as an actually conservative group starts with a look at its four founders. Steve Schmidt and John Weaver boast a number of political-consultant bona fides between them, but they seem to be generally in the service of Republicans who are decidedly not conservatives, such as John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Between Weaver's stints on the 2000 and 2000 McCain campaigns, he worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. George Conway's vocal aversion to Trump is laudable and seems sincere, given that it's been a strain on his marriage. Rick Wilson seems to fit the description of a conservative on the level of abstract principles, but his demeanor, particularly his foul mouth, does nothing to help lift our national discourse out of the gutter.
Then there's the matter of The Lincoln Project's funding:
By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave the Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. Employees at his company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, have given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, employees at Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats and $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.
I’m confused somewhat by one of the other top names: Arturas Kerelis, who news reports say is actually an Internet grifter named Arturas Rosenbacher. Maybe the donor is a different person. Then again, it would fit. (It looks like his donation was refunded.) Amos Hostetter, who droppedover a million dollars on the Obama Foundation, and David Geffen have been giving money to Democrats decades before Donald Trump ever ran for president or “Trumpism” existed. As has another top Lincoln Project donor, Joshua Bekenstein, director of Bain Capital, who gaveDemocrats $3.5 million in 2018.
David Geffen!
But I think we can also refer to Lincoln-Project-ism as a mindset. You will notice that those mentioned above who now take the gotta-vote-Biden position reserve their remaining modicum of respect for Republicans based on what we might call their RINO identities, also known as squishiness, or, to use a term coined here at Late in the Day long ago, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.
Another such Reasonable Gentleman is Mitt Romney. I'm sorry, but I don't have much use for this new-found admiration for Mitt as some kind of statesman the likes of which we need more of in this country. It was clear in 2012 that he didn't speak conservative as his first language, and, like McCain, went out of his way to avoid speaking plainly about Barack Obama's radical background.
And now comes a book by Stuart Stevens, who was Romney's chief strategist in 2012, which, as far as I'm concerned, sheds a lot of light on the pretty-much-leftist turn he takes in It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
In the short version, Republican deceits began in 1964, when, writes Stevens, “Barry Goldwater ran on a carefully crafted platform of coded racism.” This was the era of “Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, which became to conservatives what Mao’s Little Red Book was to the Red Guard.” William F. Buckley Jr. wasn’t any help in those days, on this account, advocating as he did limits on federal power along with the principle of a color-blind society that, says Stevens, we now know to be “perversely racist but reassuring to white people.” From which it follows that National Review’s founder was just “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.” He comes back to NR later on, pointing out that despite their own misgivings about Trump’s candidacy in 2016, some editors and writers have since been Trump’s well-wishers whenever he pursues conservative policies: “fanciful rationalizations.” The “racism” is gone but now NR’s problem is “moral collapse.”
After Goldwater came Richard Nixon, with appeals to “forgotten Americans” — “code words” for “white.” And then our 40th president with his stories of the “welfare queen,” an unkind term often attributed to him but which he never used, although for Stevens enough to prove “a direct line from the more genteel prejudice of Ronald Reagan to the white nationalism of Donald Trump.” And then George Bush with the Willie Horton ad . . . and so on all the way up to the nightmarish present, in a chronology every freshman in poli sci has heard chillingly recited to explain why, in national contests, Democrats don’t always win but always deserve to.
Apparently the assigned reading these days is Dog Whistle Politics by a University of California at Berkeley expert in “critical race theory” and “white and Latinx racial identity.” With special attention to the chapter “The White Man’s Party,” this book rates citation by Stevens as some authoritative treatment of Republican politics, along with some obscure study explaining “the Republican decision to exploit the race issue” in 1964. But to see what Goldwater’s “carefully crafted platform of coded racism” actually looked like, you have to go fetch it yourself. Republicans in 1964 pledged “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes; . . . such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; . . . continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”
Across the South, we’re to believe, ears went up at the dog whistle in this language, so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up. Even if Stevens’s point is that 1964 marked a sharp decline in African-American votes for Republicans, that proves only that the sum of Goldwater’s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson’s activist government and Great Society agenda. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained, African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal. Everything isn’t about race; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country’s interests. And this despite the fact that many prominent Democrats themselves in that era, including LBJ, had disgraceful records on civil rights.
On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men, whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “Goldwater Girl” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools, in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard, and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Easy to fault the senator now for overthinking constitutional objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that, and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party. But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact.
As a rule of thumb, moreover, anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as “ugliness and bigotry” the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs. And then there’s the “genteel prejudice” of Ronald Reagan: Here Stevens is referring to a man who one morning in 1982 read a Washington Post item about a persecuted black family in a white neighborhood in Maryland — their home had been vandalized, a burning cross left on their lawn — and then ordered Marine One fired up and that very afternoon paid the family a presidential visit, just to show what he thought about racists: an act entirely consistent with everything else in his character and life.
This is all undeniably tricky. As I say, narrowly constructed litmus tests are probably just a recipe for further fracturing of our political landscape.
Still I would caution Principles First, a group with a truly admirable mission, to reconsider the hand of solidarity it has extended to the Lincoln Project and LP types. It appears that it's still firming up its list of speakers for its upcoming Convention on Founding Principles. I'd be encouraged to see more of the likes of Mona Charen and Amanda Carpenter, and less of the likes of Jennifer Horn.
How about booking Justin Stapley?
This must all be handled deftly. First and foremost, we must remember that we embrace something that needs and deserves defending - against Trumpists and against Democrats.
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