Conservatives Can Either Hang Together, Or Hang Separately

You don’t go into battle with your forces divided, not if you expect to win. That’s something those still constructing the intellectual underpinnings of the upcoming midterms would do well to remember.

Successful movements thrive on division, like iron sharpens iron, as long as everything comes together at the end. When it doesn’t, you get an election like 1992 in which George H. W. Bush, having violated his singular promise to oppose the Democrats in their efforts to raise taxes, split the movement that put him in office and allowed a transmogrified liberal to win the White House.

They’d do best not to make that mistake again. Avoiding it will require a level of mature thinking that many contemporary conservative leaders and their followers have yet to demonstrate they can engage in. There’s still time to implement the changes necessary, but it’s running out.

Conservatives have known from the beginning that, like Richard Nixon, Donald J. Trump’s presidency would be transactional rather than ideological.  Decisions would be made according to what was best at the time rather than according to what people in the Reagan years would call “first principles.”

That’s proven a challenge as Trump has moved away from, and some would go so far as to say upended, traditional conservative positions on trade, traditional values, and other issues at which the Reaganites and the Bushies used to go at it, hammer and tongs.

That drift, if one can call it that, has spread to the organizational level to the point that groups once considered stalwart supporters of policies producing economic growth, a strong national defense, and cultural norms grounded in the historic American experience are now seen as apostates.