In 2016, a group of Republicans broke ranks with their party to try to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency. Now they’re rallying once more to keep him from destroying the country. Sam Tanenhaus reports on the Never Trumpers.
By
Book parties in Manhattan tend to be overspillings of the workday.
People stop by in office clothes on their way home—uptown, downtown, to
Brooklyn, or out to the suburbs. But in D. C., book parties are social
occasions, even when they involve business, which is to say politics,
the only business that matters. One Saturday evening in late October,
some of the brightest figures in Washington’s media elite streamed into a
splendid Colonial Revival house on Foxhall Road in Wesley Heights.
“Outer Georgetown,” someone clarified: The phrase implied more than it
said, like so much else in this surreal time in American politics. Some
of the guests were liberal journalists whose faces were as familiar as
their bylines: Jane Mayer and Elizabeth Drew, Andrew Sullivan and David
Corn. But among them, too, was a cadre of the uprooted and displaced,
writers, intellectuals, and pundits who, had they gathered in Paris or
London—well, Ottawa, anyway—might have worn the haunted glamour of
émigrés and exiles, though in this case they are strangers in the same
precincts where they once felt very much at home. Call them Republicans
with a conscience, conservatives without a party, or simply, as most do,
the Never Trumpers.
Liberals and conservatives have always commingled
easily in Washington, but a year into the presidency of Donald J. Trump,
old lines are blurring and new alliances are forming in remarkable
ways. Exhibit A is the owner of the grand house on Foxhall Road: David
Frum, a former hardcore conservative and speechwriter for George W.
Bush. It was Frum who, with another Never Trumper, Michael Gerson (now a
Washington Post columnist), coined the phrase “axis of evil”
in 2002 and promptly entered the annals of liberal infamy. These days,
however, Frum is better known as a heretic and outcast, primus inter
pares of the Never Trumpers.
As the party got
under way, Frum and his wife, the author Danielle Crittenden—he in a
dark-blue suit and white shirt; she in black pants and a sleeveless
blouse—greeted their guests. With his broad forehead and Tory accent (“agaynst”),
Frum still has the manner of the Toronto gentry in which he was reared.
Standing near a pair of museum-quality African sculptures, he gently
urged his guests down a small flight of stairs to the backyard, which
was getting crowded and buzzy in the fading light.
The week that had just ended was no more or less
lurid than many others in the first year of Trump’s America, that
bottomless tasting menu of national debasement. The day before, a video
had surfaced proving that the administration’s Mr. Clean, John Kelly,
the chief of staff universally praised for bringing soldierly order to
an anarchic White House, had defamed an African-American congresswoman.
Meanwhile, the week-old #MeToo movement had begun to fell big media
names. (A no-show at the Frums’, though he’d been on the guest list, was
Leon Wieseltier, the former New Republic eminence and literary monarch of Washington; his story would break a few days later.)
Given
all this, it didn’t seem odd to be celebrating, near a lighted pool
with fountain spouts on a warm Indian-summer night, the publication of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (sample chapter:
“Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933”), which had just that week gotten a rave in The New York Times.
As the Champagne fizzed and the “Eastern Europe–themed” hors d’oeuvres
circulated on silver trays—smoked sturgeon, osetra caviar, borscht shots
with vodka that went down like raspberry sherbet—the book’s author, Post
columnist Anne Applebaum, gave brief remarks. She thanked her “beloved
friends the Frums,” who “care about the things I care about,” and also
reminded the guests of another book, From a Polish Country House Kitchen: 90 Recipes for the Ultimate Comfort Food,
which she and Crittenden wrote in 2012. “We had a little discussion
beforehand about whether we should talk about the cookbook in honoring a
book about the famine,” Applebaum said.
“After a famine,” Crittenden called out, “you want a cookbook.”
Everyone
laughed, but Applebaum, in a black cocktail dress, had serious things
to say. For one, the lessons of the Ukraine famine, in which almost four
million died, were more immediate than we might suppose. Consider: The
mass starvation was not an accident but a plan—part of a policy designed
by Stalin to stamp out rebellion in a region five hundred miles from
Moscow. Stalin’s paranoia went back to the beginning of the Russian
Revolution, which had inspired anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Ukraine and
caused his predecessor, Lenin, to say, “We must teach these people a
lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of resistance
in the coming decades.”
Well, the decades kept coming, but so did
resistance, in ever-changing forms. Today, it is the Never Trumpers who
are holding out against “forced collectivization”—imposed by the leaders
of their own party—and feel locked in an epochal struggle, with a great
deal riding on the outcome. To them Trumpism is more than a freakish
blight on the republic. It is a moral test. “We’ve seen a moment before
when holders of property gambled that their best hope of retaining their
property was to disenfranchise fellow citizens,” Frum told me. “We’ve
seen before when important parts of society put their faith in
authoritarianism. Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end
of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything—‘It’ll
just happen automatically.’ ”
This is not the
sort of thing Frum said in his former life, as a wunderkind of the
American Right. But for him, as for many of the guests at his party, the
rise of Trump changed the old refrain “It can happen here” into
something more dire and pressing: “It’s happening now and must be
stopped.” One guest, the affable conservative New York Times
columnist David Brooks, has called Trump a “European-style
blood-and-soil nationalist.” Another, the historian Ronald Radosh, has
written that when he met Steve Bannon in 2013, at the so-called
Breitbart Embassy in D. C., Trump’s future Rasputin told him, “I’m a
Leninist. . . . I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all
of today’s establishment.” That establishment includes the Never
Trumpers, and it’s a sign of how far things have come that these
insiders have now become outlaws.
Long before Trump was even nominated,
when hopeful moderates were pointing to his encouragingly sane positions
on abortion and health care and party elders like Bob Dole and Trent
Lott were saying that Ted Cruz was the greater evil, a small but
influential band of Republicans, not yet called Never Trumpers, were
warning that he was an authentic global menace. One august figure on the
Right, the Post columnist George Will, renounced the
Republican party in June 2016, declaring himself unable to witness its
submission to Trump. Others, such as longtime GOP operatives Mike Murphy
and Rick Wilson, began appearing on MSNBC, where they swung hard at
nominee and party alike. At the time, Trump seemed headed for a historic
rout in the general election, and the spectacle of these chagrined
oppositionists was a cheap-thrills sideshow to liberals, who chortled,
if only to themselves, “So now you get it.”
What
was missed was the message the Never Trumpers were trying to send, and
how genuinely alarmed they were. “There wasn’t a single conservative I
talked with at the beginning of 2016 who thought Donald Trump was a
remotely acceptable candidate for president,” says Max Boot, a
neoconservative foreign-policy writer who served as an advisor to John
McCain in 2008 and Marco Rubio eight years later. In March 2016, as
Trump closed in on the nomination, another neocon, William Kristol, a
founding editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to engineer a
third-party escape hatch. It went nowhere. Two years on, Boot has quit
the Republican party and says of his Never Trump confederates, whose
numbers seem to shrink by the day, “Right now we could all fit in my
living room.” Boot’s tone, plaintive but defiant, is common among the
Never Trumpers. It echoes the cadences of another period in our history,
when a generation of would-be communist revolutionaries were similarly
blindsided—the Ukraine famine was only the first of several shocks—and
subsequently abandoned the faith. Some of these apostates swore off
politics altogether.
Others went into retreat. Still others rejoined the
fight but switched sides. They became counterrevolutionaries, spoiling
for one last showdown. One of them, the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone,
predicted at midcentury that “the final struggle will be between the
communists and the ex-communists.”
A parallel
conflict is unfolding today, as one sharp blow after another—from
Trump’s humbling of Fox News to the reductio ad absurdum of Roy
Moore—has deepened the enmity between the pro-Trump faction and its
adversaries on the Right. This latter group sometimes sounds like
liberals, but its members are in fact counter-Republicans who mean to
take their party back, or blow it up. Others are seeking a third way. A
group that includes Boot and Applebaum is creating a centrist sanctuary
and talk shop, the Renew Democracy Initiative. They’re polishing up a
manifesto and plan to bring out a book, “a kind of Federalist 2.0,” says one contributor, the columnist Bret Stephens, a Never Trumper exile from The Wall Street Journal.
In April of last year, Stephens went to the Times and hasn’t looked
back, except to toss grenades at Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, and the
rest of what he calls “the bigoted, dipshit wing of the Republican
party.” Stephens today sounds less disillusioned than emancipated—as
though, in his words, he’s “walking away from a love affair gone bad.”
The
same is even truer of Frum, who outdoes all others in his born-again
zeal, perhaps because he got there first and has the scars to show for
it. His bill of particulars against the movement and the party he once
championed long predates Trump and Trumpism. In the essays and columns
he writes for The Atlantic, in his fluent commentary on MSNBC,
in his smart Twitter observations (he has close to six hundred thousand
followers), and in his new book, Trumpocracy, Frum’s sharpest
jabs are aimed not at the “kleptocrat” Trump but at House and Senate
Republicans whose “ideas for replacing Obamacare bubbled with toxicity”
and were a “radical attack on American norms of governance.”
His pages
on the “Rigged System,” the Republican campaign to disenfranchise
African-American voters in no fewer than twenty states, burn with the
white-hot anger we would expect to read in The Nation, not in a book by a former Bush staffer who once teamed up with Richard Perle, the neocon “prince of darkness,” to write An End to Evil,
a jeremiad heady with high-Cheneyist fumes.
(“Mullahs preach jihad from
the pulpits of mosques from Bengal to Brooklyn,” Frum and Perle wrote.
“Our enemies plot, our allies dither and carp, and much of our own
government remains ominously unready for the fight.”)
The Never Trumpers have their own history to live
down. Many were lusty cheerleaders for the second Iraq War, the event
above all others that cleared the path for Trumpism. Jacob Heilbrunn,
who wrote a skeptical history of neoconservatives and their swaggering
approach to foreign policy, says Frum and the others are “back on old
and comfortable terrain as intellectual renegades, issuing apocalyptic
warnings about a totalitarian threat to democracy. They want to make
neoconservatism great again by championing regime change—this time in
Washington itself.”
On the Right,
“neoconservative” carries a second, explicitly cultural depth charge, as
Boot acknowledges when he says that “Jewish conservative intellectuals,
with a few exceptions, have been pretty stalwart.” That’s not
surprising, given the anti-Semitic odor that clings to the alt-right
pockets of Trumpism. It also stirs troubling memories of the long
history of white ethnocentrism on the American Right, from the
Depression-era demagoguery of Father Coughlin through the “Christian
Front”–style offensives against the civil-rights movement in the
fifties, up through Pat Buchanan’s attacks on the pro-Israel “Jewish
lobby.”
This may explain the Never Trumpers’
defensiveness. “I’m a registered Republican,” Frum told me recently, as
if trying to convince himself that the party he once belonged to still
exists . . . somewhere. Across the continent, possibly? “If I lived in
California,” he speculated, “I’m sure I’d be voting for Republican
members of the state legislature or a Republican candidate for
governor”—but not, he allows, if he lived in Alabama.
Of
course, Frum knows very well that Republicans have no power in
California and frighteningly much in Alabama. And one can scour the
conservative press—which tends toward either robust Trumpism or evasive
anti-anti-Trumpism—and not feel the urgency that one finds in Frum’s Trumpocracy,
with its despairing plea to an audience he worries is deaf to the
approaching thunder of the Cossacks. “Maybe you don’t care about the
future of the Republican party,” he writes, addressing an imaginary
liberal reader. “You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If
conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they
will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
Frum dates his apostasy to the 2008 election, which he wrote about as a conservative journalist (for National Review)
and policy expert (for the American Enterprise Institute, the Beltway’s
premier conservative think tank). Everyone knew it was going to be a
tough year for the Republicans. Bush’s second term—Iraq, Hurricane
Katrina, the subprime-mortgage crisis—was catastrophic. The Democrats
had a charismatic presidential candidate in Barack Obama. John McCain,
the Republican nominee, was overmatched and showing his age. In
desperation, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. “When McCain
picked her, you could understand how they arrived at that decision,”
Frum says today. “She’s a woman. She raised taxes on the oil industry. I
was briefly sold on that idea.”
Not for long, though. McCain’s team hadn’t vetted
Palin with any rigor, but Frum did, informally. “YouTube was still a
very new thing,” he recalls, “and I remember watching all the video I
could find. There wasn’t much, maybe three hours.” It was enough to see
the obvious. “She was just out of her depth, even when she talked about
Alaska.”
Palin’s ignorance alone was
disqualifying. Even worse, Frum remembers, she had a brilliant but
disturbing campaign style. “She had a genius for finding the stress
points in American society and turning people against people,” he says,
meaning her insinuating praise of small-town “real America” and her
accusation that Obama, the nation’s first black presidential nominee,
had been “palling around with terrorists.” Palin didn’t invent this
style of demagoguery. But she was, in Frum’s telling, the purest
practitioner.
After the election, he began to
rethink. The trouble wasn’t McCain’s drubbing. It was the conservative
embrace of Palin, which seemed tied to “the collapse of support for the
Republican party by the young and the educated,” as he later told The New York Times. He left National Review with an idea to revive a more moderate Republicanism. His vehicle was a now-defunct website called the FrumForum.
During the first months of the Obama presidency,
Frum says, he noticed that an odd silence had settled over his
colleagues at AEI. The country was locked in debate over the Affordable
Care Act, the most ambitious legislative initiative in a generation. Why
wasn’t AEI more vocal about it? Frum thought he knew: Many of the
policy experts at AEI supported the bill but were afraid to say so, lest
they anger their allies—and donors.
In fact,
there was every reason for conservatives to like the policy, in
principle at least. Its cornerstone, the so-called individual mandate,
was the stepchild of an idea dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation, the
number-two conservative think tank in D. C. Today, Republicans from
Trump on down vehemently denounce the mandate—it was a casualty of the
tax bill the Senate passed late last year—but it was designed as a
market-based approach to health care, a near carbon copy of the plan
Mitt Romney had enacted as governor of Massachusetts. These resemblances
were no secret. On the contrary, they were supposed to be a selling
point for Obamacare. “It was a compromise measure, crafted with the
buy-in of the pharma and insurance companies, with a lineage stretching
back to Richard Nixon’s proposal, and based on the Heritage-Romney
plan,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin, a
chronicle of the modern Republican party. “It was an alternative to the
Medicare-for-all that the Democrats surely would have preferred.”
Conservative opponents of the ACA were well aware
of the bill’s provenance. But since attacking Obamacare worked at
election time, they pretended otherwise, inventing the fiction of
“repeal and replace.” The same dishonesty explains why they couldn’t
come up with a workable substitute: Obamacare was the GOP plan. “The
Republicans never had a health-care alternative,” says Ross Douthat, the
New York Times op-ed columnist who counts himself among the Never Trumpers.
All
of this is obvious today, but Frum saw it happening in real time.
Though he is by temperament and talent an intellectual pamphleteer, he’s
also a first-rate wonk. His book Dead Right, published in
1994, stripped bare the myth of Ronald Reagan as the vanquisher of big
government. And he knew that the Democrats had been serious about
health-care policy, dating back at least to Hillary Clinton’s attempt in
1993. “Hillarycare” has entered history as a dismal flop, but it was a
political defeat, not a policy failure. We forget that Hillary dazzled
legislators of both parties in early hearings, and that the task force
she set up brought the full spectrum of experts into “the process.” The
program crashed only after Republicans launched a media campaign to
destroy it.
Frum understood this because he’d been on the other
side, fending off the evils of big government, but by 2010 he was
looking at things less ideologically. To begin with, the country was
still digging out of the Great Recession. The economy had been shedding
five hundred thousand jobs a month—and when people lost jobs, they lost
medical coverage. They needed help. But Republicans couldn’t, or
wouldn’t, see it. Congressional hotshots like Paul Ryan were calling the
economic crisis a boondoggle for tax-and-spend Democrats.
Republicans
vowed that health care would be Obama’s Waterloo. They all but ignored
the excitement he inspired, and the discipline of his congressional
majorities, who had learned from the mistakes of Hillarycare. All this
indicated that the ACA was going to pass, which meant Republicans should
bargain hard for the pieces they wanted—especially since Obama
preferred a bipartisan bill. Instead, the GOP stonewalled. “No
negotiations, no compromise, nothing,” Frum wrote on his website in
March 2010. “We went for all the marbles, we ended with none.”
The Obama White House delightedly tweeted Frum’s post, and then came the angry barrage. First, Frum was eviscerated in a Wall Street Journal
editorial. No matter that he had been an editor there during the first
Bush presidency, and had edited columns by Paul Gigot, who had since
become the Journal’s top opinion-page editor. “Mr. Frum now makes his
living as the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a
stock Beltway role,” the Journal said. “He’s peddling bad revisionist
history that would have been even worse politics.”
Next
came a call from AEI. “Time for me to come in and have a chat with the
powers that be,” Frum recalls. He had a meeting with AEI’s president,
Arthur Brooks, the next day. According to Frum, Brooks “told me I was
welcome to keep my title but I should give up my salary and my office
and not come to work anymore. I was mad about it at the time. In
retrospect, I don’t know that he had any choice.” Frum means he’d asked
for it. “There’s a part of me that knows I should write in a blander
way,” he says. “It would be healthier. I know that and then I just won’t
do it.”
It helps that he doesn’t have to. With children not
yet of college age, Frum would have preferred to keep his $100,000 AEI
salary. But he didn’t need the money. His father, Murray Frum, was a
Toronto real-estate tycoon and one of North America’s major art
collectors (hence the exquisite African sculptures), and he led a
consortium that came close to buying the Blue Jays in 1997. Barbara
Frum, David’s mother, was a revered CBC journalist.
But
while Frum didn’t have money worries, others did. “The economy of the
conservative world in 2009 and 2010 was very difficult,” he told me. “A
lot of think tanks were shrinking. And a lot of people were scared. They
didn’t want to be seen with me. It felt dangerous.” As he was pushed
further out of the circle, something inside him was freed up. He began
to reinvent himself as a conscientious objector to the Republican party,
criticizing it from within. In 2011, he wrote a blistering cover story
for New York magazine in which he said the GOP had “lost touch
with reality.”
All its policy ideas, he said, boiled down to a single
fetish: “more tax cuts for the very highest earners.” (Six years later,
Trump’s GOP made a prophet of him with its tax “reform” bill.) Frum
also wrote a takedown of Rush Limbaugh in Newsweek. “That was
really out of bounds,” he told me with a laugh. “I’d committed various
infractions against orthodoxy and people were genuinely mad,” Frum says.
“It was lonely and disorienting. I lost a lot of friendships. Suddenly
people I spent a lot of time with weren’t around.”
All
political movements contain the seeds of their own ruin. Either the
leaders of the movement sue for peace with the establishment, or they
keep pushing the envelope ever further, until the fringe displaces the
center. Both those fates combined to undo “movement conservatism.” Its
first theorists and publicists, a small nucleus well aware that they
were outnumbered in their efforts to roll back history, ran interference
for dubious causes and rabble-rousing politicians. In the fifties,
William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, both Yalies,
wrote a book defending the below-the-belt slugger Joseph McCarthy and
arguing that the true hysterics were the “enemies” who were out to get
him. Barry Goldwater, the GOP presidential nominee in 1964, defended the
crackpots of the John Birch Society as doughty patriots while insisting
that the actual extremists were liberal intellectuals like Arthur
Schlesinger Jr.
Still later, when talk radio became big, Republican
elites championed Limbaugh. “Dear Rush,” Ronald Reagan wrote in 1992,
“thanks for all you’re doing to promote Republican and conservative
principles. Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind
that you’ve become the number-one voice for conservatism in our
country.” Soon enough, Limbaugh was on the cover of National Review,
with the headline “The Leader of the Opposition.” From there it was a
small step to Palin love. After her debate with Joe Biden in 2008, Rich
Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote, “I’m sure I’m not
the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a
little straighter on the couch and said, ‘Hey, I think she just winked
at me’. . . . And her smile . . . sent little starbursts through the
screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”
The high-low fusion was risky—a kind of unsafe
political sex. With each compromise, movement elites gave up more
ground. “You can tell this story as one of a changing media
environment,” says Ross Douthat. “From Buckley to Roger Ailes”—the
longtime head of Fox News—“you go from a time when the leading media
impresario was intellectual and high-minded to someone who was primarily
interested in making money.” Buckley and company had an old-fashioned
belief in institutions, and were confident the movement would remain a
top-down operation. The ideas began with them. Why wouldn’t power accrue
to them, too? “What you have in Buckley and Reagan is a desire to have
what the liberals have had,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice. “Buckley doesn’t
want a second-rate New York Times. He wants an actual conservative Times that has the same standing, same quality and reputation as the liberal Times.
Reagan does not want a conservative president in office who’s going to
have a less capable government than the liberals have had before.”
That illusion crumbled in 2016. “The election proved elite conservative media doesn’t matter,” says Douthat. “Every major non–Wall Street Journal columnist was against Trump. The Weekly Standard was against Trump. National Review was against Trump. None of it mattered.”
And if those publications don’t matter, why fund them? Even as Trump taunts the “failing” New York Times, it’s the boutique right-wing media that’s truly in peril, now that its lack of influence has been exposed. When National Review—the
country’s most venerable conservative journal—published its celebrated
“Against Trump” issue just ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2016, the
blowback was considerable. On a fundraising cruise last August, donors
and subscribers objected fiercely to the issue. (NR editors and
writers pointed out that it had been a one-off.) Today, Rich Lowry says
that reports of financial pressure have been exaggerated. But at the
time there was serious concern. “There were complaints and
cancellations,” says Jack Fowler, National Review’s vice-president, though he adds that the magazine has since rebounded.
It has done so by splitting the difference on Trump. NR
writers Kevin Williamson and Jay Nordlinger oppose the president, while
their colleague Ramesh Ponnuru looks for places where Trumpism
intersects Reaganism or George W. Bushism. Meanwhile, Lowry, who has
sometimes pushed an anti-anti-Trump line in his own columns, tries to
keep NR’s pages in balance. “I watch the tone and the volume,” he says
of attacks on Trump. “But, more or less, people can say what they think.
We’ve probably had more internal debates than we’ve had in a while, but
that’s a symptom of the times.”
The other option is to capitulate, which is what happened at The Wall Street Journal. Much has been written about friction between the Journal’s
down-the-middle, just-the-facts news reporters and its highly
ideological editorial department. But the more significant story—an
obsession for the Never Trumpers—is the rupture within the Journal’s editorial pages and the exodus that resulted.
Bret Stephens, who won a Pulitzer in 2013, was the
defector with the highest profile. He was deputy editor when he jumped
over to the Times, where he was soon joined by his editor at the Journal, Bari Weiss. The Journal’s books editor, Robert Messenger, is now at The Weekly Standard. Sohrab Ahmari, a foreign-policy writer, went to Commentary. Mark Lasswell, an editor, was told not to return from a book leave.
Those
were heavy losses in pages whose content is managed by fewer than
thirty people in total. And the reason, according to several defectors,
was the Journal’s skidding reversal once Rupert Murdoch realized Trump
could win. Several sources pointed to the editorials by one writer,
James Freeman. “All-in for Ted Cruz” during the primaries, Freeman wrote
a strong attack on Trump’s Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go.
But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept
delaying publication, saying “it needed work.” Once Trump became the
likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. “The
facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than
Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “America managed to survive Mr. Clinton’s two
terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump.”
Since then, the Journal has gone further.
Even jaded readers were startled to see the editorial-page call for
Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation, to resign. And
when an op-ed urged Trump to issue blanket preemptive pardons for the
accused, John Yoo, the theorist of the expansive “unitary executive” and
author of the Iraq War “Torture Memos,” warned in the Times that the Journal’s advice would place Trump on the road to impeachment. (Neither Gigot nor Freeman replied to interview requests.)
“Conservatives have decided they are a tribe,” says Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post
writer who has declared war on both Trump and his GOP. “They’re not
Americans first. They’re Trump defenders first.” It is ideological
groupthink, the Right’s own political correctness. And it gives credence
to the old argument, rooted in the culture wars of the nineties, that a
great many conservative writers and policy experts are intellectuals
manqué, tightly leashed by wealthy donors, just like the Republican
politicians they promote.
But in truth, “Conservatism, Inc.” was never the luxury gravy train its critics depicted. It was closer to a Soviet-style nomenklatura,
with a good deal of ideological policing. “I had the president of a
small conservative think tank tell me he admires my anti-Trump position
but he just can’t be identified that way because his donors would cut
him off,” says Boot. Even now, the Never Trumpers I talked to, though
freed from the grip of the old dogma, were constantly going off the
record or pleading, “Protect me.” Who can blame them? For all their
resources, they are indeed outnumbered—unwanted and unloved.
So
it was in an earlier time, too. “We ex-communists are the only people
on your side who know what it’s all about,” Arthur Koestler, another of
the great apostates, said long ago to liberals disinclined to take him
and his ilk seriously. The good news is that the Never Trumpers are
getting a close hearing. Whatever mistakes they made in their time of
devotion, they have emerged as the best exegetes of the conservative god
that failed. No one else understands it so well—its means, its ends,
its methods, its costs. “The problem with the devil’s bargain is that
the devil never delivers,” Frum says. “That’s the point of the story.”
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