Trump enthusiasts always forget this kind of conservative who finds Trump objectionable

John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, writing at American Greatness, has a piece that is worth your while.

He revisits the role of National Review in the birth of modern conservatism. He reminds us that its mission was nothing less than the confronting the American Left with a war footing:

the founding fathers of modern American conservatism in the mid-1950s at National Review also envisioned, not the give-and-take of bread and butter politics, but an existential conflict over the regime, i.e., over the “American way of life.” 

In the premier issue of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote that liberals “run just about everything….Radical conservatives in this country [among whose numbers he  included himself and the NR editors]…when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those on the well-fed Right.” 

This sounds familiar.

In response to the “profound crisis of our era” the new magazine would “defend the organic moral order” and stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” These are not exactly examples of political rhetoric as usual, certainly not in 1955. 

One year later, National Review senior editor Frank Meyer charged that “contemporary Liberalism” regarded “all inherited value—theological, philosophical, political—as without intrinsic virtue or authority” and, therefore declared, “Liberals are unfit for the leadership of a free society.” 

In those early days at National Review, the adversary was modern Liberalism itself, often spelled with a capital L. At the same time, of course, classical liberalism was part of what was labeled conservative “fusionism” alongside cultural traditionalism and militant anti-Communism. 

Willmoore Kendall, another National Review senior editor and Buckley’s mentor at Yale, declared: “the question ‘Is Liberalism a revolution?’ can have only one answer. Since it seeks a change of regime, the replacement of one regime by another, of a different type altogether, it is, quite simply, revolutionary.” Kendall further asked, “Is the destiny of America the Liberal Revolution or is it the destiny envisaged for it by the Founders of the Republic? Just that.” 

James Burnham, National Review’s foreign policy guru and Buckley’s closest advisor, posited that liberal ideology thoroughly undermined not only the American regime, but the entirety of Western civilization itself. He wrote in Suicide of the West, “Liberalism permits Western Civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” The “principal function of modern liberalism,” Burnham tell us, is to facilitate the suicide of Western civilization. Moreover, this suicide would be rationalized “by the light of the principles of liberalism not as a final defeat, but as a transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins a universal civilization, that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.”

The fact that the Left is still not only around but is still shaping both the way the formal levers of power are used and every last cultural institution (he dubs these, respectively, as the administrative state and  the cultural leviathan) makes it clear that conservatism hasn't yet achieved a decisive victory:

In the second decade of the 21st century, the twin pillars of the ongoing progressive-liberal revolution to fundamentally transform the American “regime” are the administrative state and the cultural leviathan. In recent years the foremost observers of “regime conflict” are associated with the “West Coast Straussians,” students of Harry V. Jaffa, and centered in or around the Claremont Review of Books. 

How in the pocket of the cultural leviathan is our society?

Today the facts on the ground tell us that the progressive Left dominates major institutions of American life: the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, the entertainment industry, and the human resources departments of the Fortune 500. Thus, Harvard, Yale, CNN, the Episcopal Church, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley (all private sector institutions of the often vaunted civil society) are part of a nexus that I will call the “cultural leviathan,” which is allied to the administrative state.

What is the purpose of this death grip? To prune perspectives and expressions thereof until all that is left is what gets the Left's seal of approval:

The rarely stated, but clear function of the cultural leviathan is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window, or what the Swedes call the “opinion corridor.” In other words: what is acceptable public discourse, and what isn’t; what is tolerable and intolerable, within the context of political correctness, with the goal of promoting the overarching “diversity” project. 

Year after year, the opinion corridor narrows. Larry Summers was forced out as president of Harvard University for angering the forces of the diversity project on campus. Brendan Eich, a major high-tech pioneer and innovator, resigned under pressure as CEO of Mozilla, after it was disclosed that he contributed $1,000 to the pro-traditional marriage campaign in California. James Damore, an engineer at Google, was fired by the Silicon Valley giant after he wrote a reasoned, well documented memo challenging some of the major assumptions of gender and ethnic group preferences. The vestry of Christ Church(Episcopal) in Alexandria, Virginia announced that after 147 years they would remove memorial plaques of their most famous parishioners George Washington and Robert E. Lee. The church vestry told the congregants that a plaque that simply states, “in memory of George Washington”—“make[s] some in our presence feel unsafe.” 

I gave three examples (but could have presented 300) of efforts to enforce and/or manipulate the opinion corridor or the Overton window. Every day our history and our culture are under assault. 

The California NAACP denounces the National Anthem as “racist,” and another speaker is shouted down on our nation’s campuses. Clearly, George Washington and the national anthem are de-legitimized and denigrated by the cultural leviathan, because America’s past and America’s common culture must be repainted in negative colors, if the progressive future is to be achieved. Decades ago, George Orwell famously reminded us in Nineteen Eighty-Four that “he who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” 

Another thread running through the piece is the establishing of a dichotomy between the way Yuval Levin sees the current state of the confrontation of Left and Right, and the way Victor Davis Hanson sees it. Based on the quotes he has chosen from each, any conservative still roused to the urgency felt by Buckley, Burnham et al is going to go with the Hanson take. Hanson employed the "war-for-the-soul-of-America" language I used above.

Fonte draws an interesting parallel between those in the 1950s claiming to be solidly right of center, but who were actually go-along-get-along center-straddlers, and those figures writing today who are the token righties at cultural-leviathan outposts:

We should remember that it was not only the leadership of the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand who were “expelled” from the mainstream conservative movement in those early days, but also some faux New York Times style “new conservatives” including Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck who condemned the National Review circle for “thought-control nationalism” and described the magazine’s writers as “rootless, counterrevolutionary doctrinaires.” 

Clinton Rossiter declared that America was “a progressive country with a Liberal tradition” and “a liberal [political] mind.” The goal of his conservatism was “to sober and strengthen the American liberal tradition, not destroy it.” Peter Viereck proclaimed conservatism as a “centrist philosophy” that was not intrinsically hostile to liberalism. He touted the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson and progressive Republican Senator Clifford Case as exemplars of a genuine American conservatism.

Needless to say, NR editors hit back. Frank Meyer mocked the “new conservatives” as unprincipled, focused mostly on “tone” and “mood,” and anxious to be received into “polite society.” He continued, “This is not a problem of tone nor attitude, not a difference between the conservative and the radical temperament; it is a difference of principle.” (italics in the original) In a similar vein, Willmoore Kendall wrote that Viereck and Rossiter explained “how you can be a Conservative and yet agree with Liberals on all not demonstrably unimportant.” In an interview Buckley told historian George Nash that the phrase “new conservative” was “a way in which liberals designated people they thought respectable.” It was a means, Buckley contended, by which liberals separated “approved” conservatives (Viereck, Rossiter) from National Review writers. 

Today, history repeats itself, as neither tragedy nor farce (pace Marx), but in an eerily familiar manner. A gaggle of liberal “approved conservatives” essentially play the role that Rossiter and Viereck played sixty years ago. They parrot what National Review called the “Liberal propaganda Line,” whose “fons et origio,” Professor Kendall noted, was the New York Times.

These “approved conservatives” are permitted (actually, enthusiastically welcomed) to use the columns of the New York Times and the Washington Post for two purposes. First, in general, to support a type of conservatism centered on tone and temperament that does nothing to challenge and, on the contrary, everything to reinforce, progressive ideological-cultural hegemony among the chattering classes. However, like the original “approved conservatives,” the contemporary breed, pretends a conservative temperament while hyperventilating in the Times and Post about other conservatives (and, of course, the president.) Second, and most importantly, these writers help promote the foremost immediate goal of American Liberalism—the removal of Donald J. Trump from the Presidency of the United States. 

On the contemporary conservative continuum Yuval Levin stands between the Never Trump “approved conservatives” and Trump-friendly right of center intellectuals at the Claremont Institute; among social conservatives; immigration hawks; defense specialists; and the editors and writers of American Greatness. Levin emphasizes Burkean gradualism with a genuine restrained style. Unlike, the hysterical, gratuitous, and sanctimonious language of Never Trump New York Times-Washington Post “approved conservatives” (Max Boot, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, and Bret Stephens come to mind), Levin’s critiques actually are sober, reasoned, and worth answering. 

He then cites once again Hanson to drive home his point that "approved conservatism" is utterly ineffectual against the determined onslaught from the Left.

LITD completely agrees with the Fonte / Hanson diagnosis, but they miss one element of the forces arrayed on the battlefield: Those who object to Trump but also understand that the Levin - Rubin -  Gerson - Pete Wehner (not someone Fonte mentions, but definitely in that group; David From could have been included as well) camp is starkly different from a right-of-center segment that most definitely understands the stakes but still finds Trump objectionable. That would be the camp represented by Red State, The Weekly Standard, The Resurgent, Brittany Pounders, Charlie Sykes and Ben Shapiro - and, if it's not too presumptuous, LITD.

And one organ the absence of which in this portion of Fonte's piece is most surprising: the current iteration of National Review, which in spring 2016 devoted an entire issue to the case against Trump. The contributors to that issue were not Beltway squishes. They were red-meat, three-pillar, scrappy figures who understood the magnitude of the war.

This camp's point is borne out daily by events on the ground, the most notable recent example being the Roy Moore defeat.

We can and should applaud the great developments of the year about to end: judicial appointments, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord (and the removal of "climate change" from the list of national security threats), the steering of the tax-policy discussion to consensus on lower corporate rates, the education focus on charter schools and homeschooling, and a renewed foreign-polcy coherence. But the fact remains that Trump himself is not popular beyond his slavishly devoted base. With midterm elections coming up, an energized Left is going to remind the public of every wince-inducing utterance from Trump, and is going to take every opportunity to associate him with such clown-car leaders of the post-American yee-haw tendency, such as Moore, Bannon, Hannity and Coulter.

There will be continued conflation of yee-haw-ism with the actual conservatism that Fonte ostensibly wants to preserve and see thrive. The task of correcting the record on that is not make any easier by the fact that some major figures associated with the Judeo-Christian-morality pillar of three-pillared conservatism have bought into the delusion that Trump is a worthwhile standard-bearer. Let's name some names: Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffers, Jerry Falwell, Jr.

I can't say whether there is any disingenuousness among Fonte's motives in the conspicuous leaving-out of the Trump-objectors who do indeed understand that this is a war. He may just dismiss them as inconsequential.

But hear this, Drs. Fonte and Hanson, this war we all agree on as being real and high-stakes cannot be  won with Trumpism.

Donald Trump is, while not completely useless, an ineffectual weapon against the foe.

Quite simply, he turns too many people off. Trampling on the edifices the Left has erected is one part of the equation, and quite important. The other part is winning converts, achieving a true majority. That can't be done with a figurehead so widely deemed unlikeable.