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1/ Today my piece on the Never Trump movement posts. This thread nerds out on European history in connection. If analogies are to be made with early twentieth century tumult, let’s not forget the descent into facism followed “the containment of the left.” https://newrepublic.com/article/158703/never-trumpers-already-won-review-saldin-teles-book
2/ The authors of the book under review cite, as the premise of their study of honorable conservatives, a wildfire meme since 2016: American democracy depends on whether the right evolves in a democratic or undemocratic way.
3/ The basis for the meme is @dziblatt’s excellent study of the early 20th century, on the “conservative dilemma,” in which old and wealthy interests in England and Germany chose between playing the democratic game and scuttling it (respectively). https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Democracy-Cambridge-Comparative-Politics/dp/0521172993/
4/ It wisely got dropped from my review, but it is crucial that the authors of the Never Trump study draw directly on Ziblatt to suggest that their heroes today are honorable conservatives who are choosing the former (English) path rather than the latter (German into Nazi) path.
5/ This meme is becoming orthodox among political scientists studying America and looking for a model; @Jacob_S_Hacker and Paul Pierson also rely heavily on it in their new book. But the analogy is very flawed for two reasons, of which I will focus on the second.
6/ The first is that the background and constituency of the American right today-especially with post-1945 developments in mind-is radically different from Ziblatt’s historical cases, both the English one and (especially) the German one. This is worth pursuing elsewhere sometime.
7/ And note that the “conservative dilemma” in the American case is also a “liberal dilemma” since the Democratic Party in this country has been only somewhat less plutocratic, and less oriented towards elite interests, than its rival, especially in recent decades.
8/ In this connection, my second reason for skepticism is that there’s a better European history analogy from Charles Maier’s classic book, focusing not narrowly on the right wing and regime form (democracy v. tyranny) but on centrism and class. https://www.amazon.com/Recasting-Bourgeois-Europe-Stabilization-Germany/dp/0691169799
9/ One point of greatness of Maier’s study is that it sets up a whole ecology of ideology across the political spectrum, not treating right victory as solely about the right. Another is embedding what parties do in stories of class interest (though Maier is not a Marxist).
10/ In allusion to Maier’s book, the phrase I use in the review for what Never Trumpers have helped centrists achieve is “the containment of the left.” It is perhaps their principal achievement to date.
11/ Maier’s point was that putting aside differences in the center to keep the left in check was an essential precondition to the victory of the right in European history (and, he argued, a deeper “stability” that took hold in Western Europe after World War II).
12/ Even more interestingly, this centrist alliance was *not* for the sake of the maintenance of a liberal democratic regime form. It was out of class interest. Indeed, some places the “corporatist” pact took fascist form (while its liberal forms marginalized parliaments).
13/ As noted in other contexts, I am very suspicious of European history analogies for what is happening in America now, even leaving aside the 1933 analogy as way off. However, if we *are* going to traffic in such comparisons, Maier’s is probably the most helpful framework.
14/ From this perspective, Never Trumpers are not honorable stewards of democracy. They are helping fellow centrists, with whom they used to alternate power comfortably before 2016, contain the left, rising now as it was after World War I.
15/ More disturbingly, my analogy starts from the premise that it wasn’t just the far right, and certainly not the far left, behind the rise of fascism the first time around. Rather, fascism was a direction in which centrist forces in an era of crisis could head. @jasonintrator
16/ Never Trumpers are not heroes of the conservative dilemma. They are better seen as folks helping “recast bourgeois America” in our time-with a highly uncertain outcome.
