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1. I would love to read a sympathetic (yet critical) essay that assessed a central claim made by Never Trumpers like @davidfrum--that conservatism today is an embarrassing bastardization of what conservatism once was. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/dinesh-dsouza-is-making-a-comeback/567233/
2. Let me start by saying that I take Frum and other Never Trumpers to be acting in good faith. I appreciate and respect the principled stand they have taken against Trumpist conservatism. But I have questions.
3. First, the declensionist narrative. "Once conservatism was an intellectually robust political phenomenon, but now it is anti-intellectual pap." I'm willing to be convinced of this...but it's going to take some work.
4. For example, let's rewind to the early 1990s, a time when today's Never Trumpers were unapologetic conservatives, and a time when a brash young Congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich (PhD in History), carried the mantle of "the conservative politician with the big ideas."
5. In 1995 Newt taught a course called "Renewing American Civilization," a mix of history, sociology, and politics designed to chart a course forward for the @gop and the nation. It was a shambolic mess, to put it politely. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/11/28/steer-clear-of-newts-courses/
6. In 1995 I was a graduate student in American history and was curious what one of our major political leaders thought about the subject, so I opened up Netscape and downloaded the full text of Newt's lectures via 56K modem. They're still accessible at http://terrenceberres.com/ginren00.html
7. They read like the transcript of a Trump campaign rally, only with a 12th grade vocabulary instead of a 5th grade vocab. It's stream of consciousness gobbledygook. Like this gem. No one w/ a rudimentary knowledge of American History or social science could take Newt seriously.
8. Looking back at Newt's 1995 lectures from the vantage point of 2018, it's easy to see many of the building blocks of Trumpism--the disdain for elites, the faux populism, the culture war BS, etc. "2018 Trumpist Newt" doesn't seem like a departure from "1995 galaxy brain Newt."
9. In the 1990s I was no "raving leftist." I had two Republican voting grandparents and was educated in public schools in a conservative small town where my parents were small business owners.
10. Sure, I went to Brown for college, but my primary US history prof was Gordon Wood, a man known to dine with Antonin Scalia. Despite that background, in 1995, at the age of 27, it only took me about 20 minutes to figure out Newt was full of sh*t. Because I had read some books.
11. Newt is full of the same anti-intellectual sh*t today as he was in 1995, when he was the conservative "man of the hour." So I ask (& I really do mean this as an open question despite my snarky tone)...what did Frum et. al. see in Newt ca. 1995 that is unlike Trump ca. 2018?
12. The other great conservative "intellectual" of the early 1990s was Dinesh D'Souza. The Never Trumper declensionist narrative rests upon the distinction between the once respectable Dinesh and the now clownish Dinesh.
13. I will grant that D'Souza's 1991 book "Illiberal Education" is a less ludicrously clownish book than his most recent productions. But that would be akin to saying that the comedy stylings of Chevy Chase were more intellectually robust than those of Adam Sandler. True, but...
14. Illiberal Education benefited from a few generous reviews written by credentialed but curmodgeonly white male academics like C. Vann Woodward. Woodward's peers took him to task at the time. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/09/26/illiberal-education-an-exchange/
15. The scholarly work that D'Souza (and Woodward) pilloried in the early 90's has stood the test of time. The 1990s work of D'Souza's reactionary defenders like Eugene Genovese and Woodward, however, has fared less well.
16. Like Gingrich's lectures, D'Souza's Illiberal Education was a laughing stock amongst those who actually knew the universities and scholarly fields he claimed to expose. His stock and trade then was reactionary oversimplification. Same goes for today.
17. Can we also just recall some of the greatest hits of Reaganite conservatism? Like the Laffer curve? Or EPA director James Watt, who thought we needn't protect the environment because the rapture was imminent? Or super-patriot Ollie North?
18. Voodoo economics is alive and well in Trumpist conservatism, Scott Pruitt was like James Watt redux, climate change denial is the 2018 version of the @gop's anti-science foot dragging on tobacco regulation, and Ollie North is back as the head of the GOP's favorite gun club.
19. We might also remember that Dick Cheney and other "serious conservatives" defended our support of apartheid South Africa, and Reagan was pretty tolerant of dictators like Pinochet. More than a few echoes of Trumpian foreign policy here. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/augusto-pinochet-asylum-united-states-ronald-reagan
20. When Never Trumpers express shock and dismay at what Trump has made of the Republican Party, it's hard for me not to wonder "how can this come as a surprise to you?"
21. As this excellent thread shows, the progressives of the mid-90s called much of this. They saw the embryo of Trumpism lurking within 90s conservatism. Yet at the time, conservative "intellectuals" supercilliously dismissed such critiques as hysterical. https://twitter.com/chick_in_kiev/status/1026201562174111745
22. Apologies if this has come off as "I told you so-ism." That's not how I mean it. I guess I just want to read a few articles that are less "I'm shocked, shocked that the @gop has become authoritarian & racist" and more "here's how I regretfully helped build this."
23. The Never Trumpers are important voices in our national conversation. They can grant us an insiders' perspective on how Trump was so easily able to co-opt the conservative movement. If there is truly daylight between Trumpism and conservatism, they can help us see it.
24. Progressives will just say "see, Trumpism is what conservatism was all along. It's just now shown its true face." I suspect most Never Trumpers would disagree with that. So please, show us the receipts!
25. Speaking as someone who teaches a course on the history of conservatism that tries to treat that history on its own terms and with respect, I'd love to see a Never Trumper memoir or essay that started from the presumption that Trump is not a black swan, not an alien invasion.
26. Wow, this thread has blown up far more than I expected it would. Upon reading some of the responses, I have just a few more take aways.
27. First, if people wonder why there are so few conservatives in the academy, just read Gingrich's lectures and then compare them with some of Robert Reich's writings. Reich was arguably the Democrats' intellectual answer to Gingrich in the 90s.
28. It's not that Reich was correct on everything. But he was a genuine intellectual, someone who cared about evidence & argumentation. It was pretty inconceivable in the 90s that a rigorous intellectual could stomach Gingrich. That's Gingrich's fault, not the academy's.
29. So why are there so few conservative professors and intellectuals? In part because conservatism became so associated with jingoistic anti-intellectualism that it became nearly impossible for an educated person to defend it.
30. This points to another thread in the history of conservatism that dates all the way back to Bill Buckley...conservatism has often defined itself largely AGAINST a phantom "left" that doesn't really exist as they think it does.
31. Not only do conservatives tend to see that "left" as monolithic, they also see it as posing an existential threat to "western civilization" or "our way of life."
32. Without the slippery slope argument, conservatism loses much of its rhetorical punch. Want Medicare? You're secretly a commie. Support gay right? You hate the nuclear family! Support the rights of transgender people? There's no biological truth anymore!
33. This is not just a rhetorical device conservative politicians deployed to gin up votes. It's also been an essential piece of conservative intellectual thought as well. "Standing athwart history yelling stop," and such.
34. We see both of these tendencies in Trumpism--from Michael Anton's "Flight 93 election" essay to TPUSA's dire warnings about the communist brainwashing that happens on college campuses. Without a scary, phantom "left" to bash, conservatives wouldn't have much to talk about.
35. For a fuller explication of this argument about how the right, from the beginning, has defined itself against a phantom, monstrous "left," read this article. h/t @DavidAstinWalsh https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/how-the-right-wing-convinces-itself-that-liberals-are-evil/
