True True Conservatism. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, May 4, 2016.
Douthat:
When Donald Trump knocked first Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio out of the Republican primary campaign, he defeated not only the candidates themselves but their common theory of what the G.O.P. should be — the idea that the party could essentially recreate George W. Bush’s political program with slightly different domestic policy ideas and recreate Bush’s political majority as well.
Now,
after knocking Ted Cruz out of the race with a sweeping win in Indiana, Trump
has beaten a second theory of where the G.O.P. needs to go from here: a theory
you might call True Conservatism.
True
Conservatism likes to portray itself as part of an unbroken tradition running
back through Ronald Reagan to Barry Goldwater and the Founding Fathers. It has
roots in that past, but it’s also a much more recent phenomenon, conceived in
the same spirit as Bushism 2.0 but with the opposite intent.
If
Bushism 2.0 looked at George W. Bush’s peaks — his post-Sept. 11 popularity,
his 2004 majority — and saw a model worth recovering, True Conservatism looked
at his administration’s collapse and argued that it proved that he had been far
too liberal, and that all his “compassionate conservative” heresies had led the
Republican Party into a ditch.
Thus
True Conservatism’s determination to avoid both anything that savored of big
government and anything that smacked of compromise. Where Bush had been
softhearted, True Conservatism would be sternly Ayn Randian; where Bush had
been free-spending, True Conservatism would be austere; where Bush had taken
working-class Americans off the tax rolls, True Conservatism would put them
back on — for their own good. And above all, where Bush had sometimes reached
for the center, True Conservatism would stand on principle, fight hard, and win.
This
philosophy found champions on talk radio, it shaped the Tea Party’s zeal, it
influenced Paul Ryan’s budgets, it infused Mitt Romney’s “You built that”
rhetoric. But it was only in the government shutdown of 2013 that it found its
real standard-bearer: Ted Cruz.
And
Cruz ended up running with it further than most people thought possible. His
2016 campaign strategy was simple: Wherever the party’s most ideological voters
were, there he would be. If Obama was for it, he would be against it. Where
conservatives were angry, he would channel their anger. Where they wanted a
fighter; he would be a fighter. Wherever the party’s activists were gathered,
on whatever issue — social or economic, immigration or the flat tax — he would
be standing by their side. He would win Iowa, the South, his native Texas, the
Mountain West. They wanted Reagan, or at least a fantasy version of Reagan? He
would give it to them.
It
didn’t work — but the truth is it almost did. In the days before and after the
Wisconsin primary, with delegate accumulation going his way and the polling
looking plausible once the Northeastern primaries were over, it seemed like
Cruz could reasonably hope for a nomination on the second or third ballot.
So give
the Texas senator some credit. He took evangelical votes from Mike Huckabee,
Ben Carson and Rick Santorum; he took libertarian votes from Rand Paul; he
outlasted and outplayed Marco Rubio; he earned support from Mitt Romney, Jeb
Bush and Lindsey Graham, who once joked about his murder. Nobody worked harder;
no campaign ran a tighter ship; no candidate was more disciplined.
But it
turned out that Republican voters didn’t want True Conservatism any more than
they wanted Bushism 2.0. Maybe they would have wanted it from a candidate with
more charisma and charm and less dogged unlikability. But the entire Trump
phenomenon suggests otherwise, and Trump as the presumptive nominee is
basically a long proof against the True Conservative theory of the Republican
Party.
Trump
proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any
purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other
G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed
his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past.
No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough
of them to make Cruz the nominee.
Trump
proved that many evangelical voters, supposedly the heart of a True Conservative
coalition, are actually not really values
voters or religious conservatives
after all, and that the less frequently evangelicals go to church, the more likely they are to vote for
a philandering sybarite instead of a pastor’s son. Cruz would probably be on
his way to the Republican nomination if he had simply carried the Deep South.
But unless voters were in church every Sunday, Trump’s identity politics had
more appeal than Cruz’s theological-political correctness.
Trump
proved that many of the party’s moderates and establishmentarians hate the
thought of a True Conservative nominee even more than they fear handing the
nomination to a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor
impulse control. That goes for the prominent politicians who refused to endorse
Cruz, the prominent donors who sat on their hands once the field narrowed and
all the moderate-Republican voters in blue states who turned out to be
#NeverCruz first and #NeverTrump less so or even not at all.
Finally,
Trump proved that many professional True Conservatives, many of the same people
who flayed RINOs and demanded purity throughout the Obama era, were actually
just playing a convenient part. From Fox News’ 10 p.m. hour to talk radio to
the ranks of lesser pundits, a long list of people who should have been all-in
for Cruz on ideological grounds either flirted with Trump, affected neutrality
or threw down their cloaks for the Donald to stomp over to the nomination. Cruz
thought he would have a movement behind him, but part of that movement was
actually a racket, and Trumpistas were simply better marks.
Cruz
will be back, no doubt. He’s young, he’s indefatigable, and he can claim — and
will claim, on the 2020 hustings — that True Conservatism has as yet been left
untried. But that will be a half-truth; it isn’t being tried this year because
the Republican Party’s voters have rejected him and it, as they rejected
another tour for Bushism when they declined to back Rubio and Jeb.
What
remains, then, is Trumpism. Which is also, in its lurching, sometimes
insightful, often wicked way, a theory of what kind of party the Republicans
should become, and one that a plurality of Republicans have now actually voted
to embrace.
Whatever
reckoning awaits the G.O.P. and conservatism after 2016 will have to begin with
that brute fact. Where the reckoning goes from there — well, now is a time for
pundit humility, so your guess is probably as good as mine.
