Last September, I wrote a post at Precipice titled "My Personal Struggle With Contempt." It riffs off of
an essay at Law & Liberty by John O. McGinnis entitled “Is Civic Decline an Existential Threat?” It really doesn’t cover any ground that hasn’t been covered before. It notes the three main components of our present crisis: decline of education, decline of civic associations, and the transmutation of the religious impulse. McGinnis even shares my inclination toward pessimism about our prospects for any kind of civic restoration.
McGinnis is properly aware of how tough it is to surmount ill will given the array of obsessions the Left has imposed on society as a whole:
As McGinnis points out, climate alarmism, which demands a halt to human advancement regarding such modern blessings as safety, comfort and convenience, is something that we ought not to abide by. He also notes the normalization of the Howard Zinn’s and Nicole Hannah-Jones’s view of America’s essence, and this likewise falls outside the parameters of “just one of many viewpoints we ought to consider in our nation’s classrooms.”
I would add to his enumerations the mainstreaming of historically unprecedented notions of human sexuality, such as the expansion of the definition of marriage to include unions of two people of the same sex, and the legitimization of self-identification with the sex opposite one’s DNA and genitals. Carl Trueman is exactly right in asserting that, of all the bizarre novelties we’re living with, this one takes us into realms devoid of reference points. In combination with artificial intelligence, it has the capacity to completely untether us from assumptions we as members of the species Homo sapiens have held since our arrival among the planet’s life forms.
And then there is the septic infection on the Right:
Conversely, the fact that well over half of those who identify with one of the nation’s two major political parties intend to vote for the most unfit, vulgar and infantile person to ever enter US politics, even after two impeachments, four indictments, and the increasingly unhinged nature of his social-media blurtings cannot be permitted to be seen as a new normal.
Along those lines, New Right abandonment of the free-market component of conventional conservatism’s vision erodes the overall centrality of human freedom on which that vision rests. Some very smart people have gone in for this. It seems they have lost sight of what Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt had to say about how an individual’s freedom of choice about what to own, buy, sell, invent and market is a divinely granted gift. This one really does boil down to a binary choice. One is either free to come to an agreement with one’s fellow human being about the value of a good or service being considered for exchange, or we’re talking about central planning. Prattle about “settling for imperfect arrangements” that compromise this freedom of choice, this personal sovereignty, stinks of rudderlessness.
This is what I mean by inhabiting an ever-narrower sliver of terrain. There is no space in our public square for a healthy prescription for peaceable co-existence.
I then publicly forced myself to be real about my reaction to the lay of the land, and its spiritual implications:
That said, all the destructive devotions I’ve discussed here are embraced by my actual various fellow human beings, and I have to figure out how to hold them in some kind of basic regard. I pass them on the sidewalk. I host them for Thanksgiving dinner. They’re colleagues at the university where I teach. I have them as social-media friends.
If I hold them in contempt, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn,” I cage myself in a kind of isolation in which productive existence becomes impossible.
More fundamentally, in so doing, I sin. No matter what they have proclaimed or done, they were created by the same God who fashioned me, and have the same right to breathe and pursue happiness that I have.
The struggle hasn't abated. That has been brought home to me as I encounter the Trumpist response to the excellent victory for the international rules-based order achieved yesterday in the House of Representatives.
The Federalist, a perfect example of a once-actually-conservative site that has been wholly given over to MAGA-ism, has among the daily sewage it's inflicting on the world this morning Shawn Fleetwood's piece in which he trots out the by-now-disgustingly-familiar look-Ukraine-can't-possibly-decisively-defeat-Russia-so-instead-of-shoveling-more-money-at-the-Ukrainian-resistance-to-being-invaded-we-ought-to-be-moving-toward-a-'realistic'-end-game angle. Not a word about the fierce determination of the Ukrainian people and leadership to reassert the country's sovereignty. Oh, and also that disingenuous zero-sum horseshit about the US southern border.
At the similarly septic American Conservative, Bradley Devin, in a piece titled "What's Next After the Ukrainian Mistake?" the author makes the help Johnson got on the House floor yesterday his focus, with a strong implication that Johnson was driven by a cynical foremost motivation of keeping his Speaker job.
Utah Senator Mike Lee, who is a prime example of this sepsis consuming a once-honorable-Constitutional originalist with a mainstream Rightist set of principles, decided to post on Twitter (X, if you must), a hey-look-we-got-'em-now reaction to the package's passing that lists objections of varying degrees of speciousness, such as - well, he starts out with that always-handy red herring, the US southern border - and including funding for gender advisors to the Ukrainian army and humanitarian aid to Gaza.
From his choices of objections and the way he words his screed, it's obvious he's reaching, while the sane majority - well, maybe it's just a plurality - of Westerners are celebrating the assertion of national sovereignty for three important West-inclined nations.
The Washington Examiner has a roundup of explanations from House Republicans who voted against the aid package. They strike a similar tone to the foregoing:
“I stand with the Ukrainian people in their fight against Russia, but not at the continued expense of hardworking American taxpayer,” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) wrote on X. “The United States cannot continue to spend blindly when those funds could be better utilitzed right here at home. As Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, I made a commitment to safeguard taxpayer funds from waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.”
“For the Swamp, it’s Ukraine First and America Last,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) wrote. “Gleefully waving Ukrainian flags as the American people suffer under Biden’s border invasion.”
“We must be thoughtful and strategic with our dollars and put Americans first, which is why I voted to send funds to our borders, Israel, and Taiwan, and not send dollars to Ukraine until we have a strategic exit plan with quantifiable metrics,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) wrote in a statement.
Last month at Precipice, I wrote a post looking at a number of laudable, indeed noble, efforts of people who to some degree hang onto a self-identification as Republicans to plan for a time when the Trumpist infection passes out of the party. (In the process, I date myself as Boomer.)
Some are more effective than others. I’ve written before about how Heath Mayo, founder of Principles First, badly dented his movement’s raison d’être by chiding Republicans for not signing on to legislation codifying same-sex marriage, calling such legislation a “no-brainer” that would strengthen the family unit. Such a position is a de facto resignation to secularization. Acknowledgement of a transcendent order becomes a quaint notion our society has outgrown if we listen to such an argument.
Most self-identified conservatives can’t accept that.
Among publications that have sought to clearly repudiate the MAGA impulse, some have admirably continued to hew to a recognizable conservative vision (think The Dispatch) and some have bought into the binary-choice framing, which has made them Democrats for all intents and purposes (think The Bulwark; I was particularly dismayed to learn that Mona Charen had deemed the stay-home and consideration of a third party options as “the coward’s way out”).
The publication that has conferred Senior Freelance Contributor status on me, The Freemen Newsletter, has spawned an interesting undertaking. I’m not exactly clear on whether it’s going to be called the Reagan Caucus or the New Reagan Caucus, but a number of younger folks who appear on the masthead are having lively discussions on Twitter (X, if you must) and Slack regarding mission, tactics and standards for alliances.
The Freemen founding editor, Justin Stapley, laid out his druthers about the enterprise in a recent piece entitled “DeTrumpification of the GOP.” He sets the table by resolutely proclaiming what I assert above - namely, that despair is not an option, that our conservatism obliges us to see this as a universe of possibility. (He does so by taking issue with a 2021 Dispatch piece by Jonah Goldberg, someone high in Justin’s pantheon of good guys - and mine) in which Goldberg looks seriously at the third party option.)
Justin sees a Reagan Caucus thusly:
Taking Reagan as a symbol of an old-school approach to Republican politics and a commitment to conservative principles unstained by the reactionary nature of Trump’s brand of nationalist populism, this Reagan Caucus is declaring an intention to engage in the GOP's primaries and processes to push back against MAGA’s control of the party, and pledges to withhold their support of Republican candidates who embody or acquiesce to the toxic nature of the MAGA movement.
If non-Trump conservatives take this path, it can solve several of the problems with the third-party route:
We could still participate in the Republican Party and wouldn't further abandon the party to the very forces we wish to curtail.
We would be encouraging more participation in the party processes instead of further enabling control of the processes by those we oppose.
We wouldn't be seen as a rival or spoiler political party.
We wouldn't be operating from the get-go as a spoiler effort.
We would have clear organizing principles and, especially, could demonstrate a contrast to the party's current direction given that the actual “agenda” of Trump and MAGA changes at his whim (TikTok).
We could both endorse acceptable Republican primary candidates and actively work to get them through the process.
There would be nothing keeping us from endorsing acceptable Republican candidates who lost in the primaries as independent candidates should the eventual nominee prove to be wholly unacceptable, or throwing our support behind other independents or even third-party candidates.
The caucus's declared values would hopefully keep members from being less inclined to support Democrats unless the Democratic candidate moved to accommodate us as a more moderate alternative in the mold of Manchin or Sinema.
I think this approach has a good shot at accomplishing what Jonah proposed in 2021 while answering the concerns many had with his proposal, including myself. There have long been various caucuses within both political parties and many other organizations and lobbying entities that support or withhold their support of party nominees based on declared principles.
So, the Reagan Caucus is not going to be doing anything new or threatening, and it could engage in ways that would still accomplish the goals that Jonah put forward, arguably in more effective ways given that we'd still be engaging in the GOP itself without other Republicans easily dismissing us as a rival or spoiler party. We could force a genuine debate on principles and vision that could transcend Trump and Trumpism instead of becoming a reflexive opposition that loses its intellectual grounding in the struggle of the general election.
And besides, even most Trump voters still love Reagan, and this effort could be an effective way to provide a better contrast between an actual conservative vision and the angry, unprincipled direction that Trump has taken the party.
His optimism is enviable. Maybe he has an ear closer to the ground than I do, although I know a lot of local Republicans. Maybe that ground is more arable in Utah, where he lives, than it is here in Indiana.I think of my state’s gubernatorial race. There are four Republican candidates. The television ads of three of them try to outdo each other in boasting of the Trump connection. The fourth candidate has chosen a noteworthy departure, framing himself as being in the lineage of Reagan and Mitch Daniels, a universally admired Indiana native who served as everything from governor to president of Purdue University to president of the Hudson Institute to head of Eli Lily’s North America operations to Reagan’s OMB director. I don’t know much more about that candidate, but I’d still want an answer to the question of who he intends to vote for for president come November.
As I say, the folks who are fired up about this project are, from this Boomer’s perspective, young pups, and they are already setting about taking concrete actions - becoming Precinct Committeemen, running for office, deciding how to structure the project organizationally.
In their back-and-forths, they demonstrate a grounding in that which they ought to be grounded in. They know who Russell Kirk, Fredrich Hayek and Frank S. Meyer are.
Two things: I hope they understand the ferocity with which the Trumpists will attempt to stomp them into the dust, and the challenge they’ll face maintaining their standards for forming alliances. I’m already seeing arguments along the-tent-must-be-big-enough-to-bring-in the-less-ate-up-Trumpists lines. That could muddy the mission from the get-go.
Please note the phrase about ferocity in the last paragraph of the above excerpt. And note how quickly the Trumpists went to work upon the passage of yesterday's aid package.
I have real trouble forgiving them for what they've done to conservatism's prospects. They're proud of their incoherence and their vaunting of stubbornness as a primary admirable basis for political engagement.
I'm trying really hard not to let this post become a venomous rant, but I can say that actual conservatives remain mired in a two-pronged existential battle: against a Left working overtime to impose climate alarmism, militant identity politics, and wealth redistribution, and a Right wholly given over to worship of the least savory traits human beings are capable of exhibiting.
At this point, I still intend to stay home the first Tuesday in November.
