Anti-Trumpers After Trump

Peering into the hazy future of the ex-President's fiercest conservative enemies

Donald Trump, too, will pass away. The year will come when he will join General Boulanger and Lord Randolph Churchill and the Tea Party in the back pages of History. Given the sort of people who dominate the historical profession these days, he will doubtless incur damnatio memoriae on the level of Senator Joe McCarthy if not the Emperor Nero. Then, as happened to those one-time shakers of the Earth, public memory will stiffen him into a waxwork.

That will leave a great gap in the lives of a small but noisy band of intensely anti-Trump conservatives, many of them formerly influential on the Right but now glimpsed only behind the paywalls of select web sites or in appearances on MSNBC, CNN and NPR. They are not, it should be noted, the only conservatives who criticize Donald Trump. What distinguishes the true anti-Trumper is that the Evil of Trump has become the guiding star in his political firmament, for which he will accept no pleas in mitigation. He is certain that the former President idolizes Vladimir Putin and other tyrants, harbors particularly vile racist sentiments, plotted insurrection to maintain himself in office, and, if elected again, both can and will establish a punitive, authoritarian regime. He heartily endorses lawfare against the Orange Menace. Too prudent to endorse the bolder step of assassination, he casts the blame for would-be assassins’ acts on the intended victim.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, Kevin D. Williamson speculated on “Where Do Never Trumpers Go From Here?” What will become of the “anti-Trump Confederacy” after their occupation is gone? He notes at the outset that the “Confederacy” is far from a unified movement. He subdivides it into five “constituent tribes, the borders between which are necessarily fuzzy and porous”:

1. Neocons: The broken-hearted denizens of The Bulwark substack and likeminded allies keeping alive the flame of vintage Weekly Standard–style neoconservatism.

2. Frenchmen: Pro-lifers and other social conservatives (the New York Times columnist David French being the exemplary specimen) who could not abide a Mammon-worshiping amoral bigot such as Donald Trump even before the former game-show host attempted to stage a post-election coup d’état in 2020.

3. Libertarians: Cato Institute-type Republicans who still secretly thrill to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and more or less agree with Reason magazine’s positions on drug legalization.

4. Snoots: Affluent, Economist-reading (well, Economist-subscribing) members of the urban-to-suburban professional classes who much preferred a Republican Party that prioritized their values and who dislike the fact that Fox News is now on 24/7 at the clubhouse.

5. Lifers: The long-term committed Republican partisans who have been determined to wait out Trump and Trumpism rather than surrender to the GOP to grifters and ignoramuses, cognizant that dopey right-wing populism has had only very modest political success outside of Republican primaries.

If one confines one’s attention to political activists, intelligentsia and a narrow segment of the C-suite, that is a pretty good taxonomy. It does, however, ignore the Republican Party’s biggest erosion in the Trump Era, namely, the loss of well-to-do suburbanites who are repelled by the candidate’s personality and largely insulated from the negative trends in American life that underlie his appeal. They aren’t Snoots. They watch Fox, have never read an issue of The Economist and don’t belong to any organizations with clubhouses. Mr. Williamson doesn’t discuss them, presumably because he doesn’t think of them as belonging to the anti-Trump Confederacy; as, indeed, they don’t.

As for the Confederacy’s components, here is a quick summary of the Williamson forecasts:

• The Snoots have already become Democrats and won’t return to the GOP fold.

• The Lifers –

are either going to go into internal exile following a Trump victory in November or fight what’s left of the Trumpists following a Trump defeat. In the latter case, the Trumpists will still be led by Trump, who will simply insist that the election was illegitimate, and the Lifers will lose, again. Mitt Romney, Lifer-in-Chief, is an intelligent and patriotic man, but his argument for withholding his endorsement of Kamala Harris – that he wants to retain his influence in the GOP – is straight-up delusional. . . . The best-case Lifer scenario in the foreseeable future is political purgatory as a cranky and impotent minority faction.

• The best-case scenario for the Neocons, Mr. Williamson thinks, is “returning to their ancestral home: the Democratic Party”, as he believes they already have “to a significant degree”. He notes, with historical accuracy, that “the original neoconservatives were focused on a critique of the domestic welfare state, a line of criticism that had both a fiscal aspect (it’s expensive!) and a social one (it creates disincentives to work and marriage).”

There are Democrats who will listen to arguments for fiscal stability and regulatory reform, and for casting a more critical, evidence-based eye on social programs. And while the Democrats are not exactly Milton Friedman on free trade or Scoop Jackson on foreign policy, they are, at the moment, slightly more amenable to the libertarian view of trade and the assertive, internationalist sensibility on foreign policy (especially vis-à-vis Moscow) than is the GOP, the neurotic xenophobia of which is broad enough to encompass both international trade and multinational alliances. If the Democrats could get over their “Norma Rae” nostalgia and back-burner the union goons – who are a tiny share both of the workforce and of the electorate, and whose rank and file are, after all, pretty Trump-ish – then they might realize that there is something useful to them in that old neoconservative critique.

• Without saying so, Mr. Williamson implies that the Libertarians – by which he means not “the kooks associated with the so-called Libertarian Party, but the business-aligned offshoot of midcentury conservatism who did their MBAs at the University of Chicago with copies of Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose’ in their briefcases, imbibing a ‘Mad Men’-era political cocktail that was 97% Chamber of Commerce small-government stuff and 3% LSD” – have no future home at all. He seems to think that the Democratic Party can woo them with a platform of “a U.S.-EU free-trade deal, entitlement reform and a more humane approach to drug problems” but concedes that “they’ll be a hard get”, for “the right-leaning Libertarians aren’t just anti-state – they are also anti-left, in many cases even more than they are anti-state. And, for many of them, working with the Democrats just feels…dirty. To listen to them talk, you’d think Liz Cheney and everybody to the left of her is a Marxist.” Umm, do you imagine that free trade with the European Union and entitlement reform are preferred policies of even one contemporary Democrat in ten? One in fifty? If so, you should consult a competent psychiatrist about your hallucinations or at least cut back your weed consumption.

• The outlook for the “Frenchmen” is likewise bleak. Mr. Williamson notes that the eponymous David French, who has endorsed Kamala Harris for President, “is very much in the minority among his coreligionists, with most politically engaged evangelicals having been all too happy to go along with Donald Trump’s pageant of idolatry and cruelty. A few recently have broken with Trump over his inconstancy on abortion and his newly accommodating view of the subject, but most are still loving the Kool-Aid.” In other words, the Frenchmen tribe is tiny and uninfluential even among Evangelical Christians. Williamson’s conclusion sounds like the wishcasting of someone who doesn’t much like Evangelicals of any kind:

What that probably means is that anti-Trump evangelicals and pro-Trump evangelicals will end up together in a faction that no longer enjoys the influence it did only a few years ago, amounting to little more than a series of prayer breakfasts. Like the NRA, which spent many, many millions of dollars securing its own irrelevancy as a political organization, evangelicals forgot what it is that pride goeth before.¹

As the reader may have divined, I find Mr. Williamson’s analysis less than convincing. The flaw is his inattention to the dynamic effects of the Trump phenomenon. Hatred of Trump has changed the members of the anti-Trump Confederacy. Some, it is true, espouse the same positions today as they did before the Ride Down the Golden Escalator. Jonah Goldberg is a conspicuous example. Kevin Williamson himself is another, albeit tarnished by his habit of incendiary name calling.² Many more have abandoned virtually every conservative position that they ever espoused. Vide Bill Kristol, Jen Rubin, Max Boot, David Frum. . . . Is it likely that they will ever revert to the status quo ante DJT?

One must also consider what footprints Trump will leave in the sands of American politics after he is no longer treading them. Woodrow Wilson and FDR permanently and dramatically altered the ideology of the Democratic Party, to the point where the transition between Grover Cleveland and Wilson, the next Democrat to win the White House, induces vertigo. The leap from Eisenhower-Nixon-Ford to Ronald Reagan is not quite so spectacular but was even more abrupt. At first glance, Donald Trump represents a return to an earlier era, when key GOP policies included restrictive immigration laws, protective tariffs and indifference to Old World turmoil. Certainly those views have gained strength among Republicans since 2015, but except for the first (and there only when the subject is illegal immigration without controls of any kind) they remain minority opinions. The Donald has devised no refutations of the case for international commerce and a robust foreign policy. He just shouts fallacious old clichés that lost their persuasive force a couple of generations ago. Hence, the likelihood that he will leave an imprint like that of President Reagan, who understood the positions that he espoused, is small. Events may alter the GOP fundamentally; Trumpian tirades won’t.

Looking through a dynamic lens at the prospects for the anti-Trump Confederacy leads me to these conclusions about the future trajectories of its “constituent tribes”:

The “Snoots” have indeed swarmed into the Democratic fold. But why? They comprise America’s busiest, hardest working cohort, the men (and increasingly women) for whom 16-hour days are routine and whose attention focuses on what is essential to their labors. Their turn to the Left is best understood as a preference cascade set into motion by revulsion at Donald Trump’s pose as a celebrity billionaire, coupled with the DEI prodding of management consultants and HR departments. The former will evanesce with The Donald; the latter is already losing its hold. After the election, particularly if Trump is defeated, preferences may well cascade the opposite way. Bill Ackman looks more and more like a pioneer on a path that is destined to become an autobahn.

The “Lifers” are the only Republicans who are truly not “Republican in name only”. The Mitt Romneys and George Bushes are attached to the Grand Old Party as an institution, seeing in it the best vehicle for rational public policy. They don’t expect to win every platform fight or to be delighted with every Republican candidate’s opinions or character. They take the rough with the smooth and will adapt to changing fashions within their party until and unless a superior alternative presents itself. No foreseeable Democratic Party is that alternative. Furthermore, and contra Williamson, they have very good odds of outlasting the MAGA partisans after Trump and his charisma have exited the stage, just as work horses keep going after show horses have retired to the stables.

Among the “Neocons”, the most conspicuous defectors to Kamp Kamala have defected from neoconservatism as well. Their lurch to the Left has no roots in their former philosophy. For the rest of the neoconservatives, those who have not trailed after Bill Kristol et al., today’s Democratic Party holds no more attractions than did the party of Jimmy Carter. The domestic policy of the Biden-Harris Administration is rife with the un-thought-through wishful thinking that the original neoconservatives detected in the Great Society. Its foreign policy has a single neoconservative element, support for Ukrainian independence. On the other side of the ledger are coddling of Iran, hostility toward Israel, insouciance about Communist China and indifference to America’s deteriorating defense capabilities. The Republican Party has its isolationist elements, too, but they are a fringe; for the Democrats, they are the core.

Anyone who pays attention to the substacks and blogs of non-exotic “Libertarians” can only wonder whether Mr. Williamson, who used to have an affinity for that tendency, has given up reading them. They are severely critical of Donald Trump’s fiscal indiscipline, tariff proposals and empathy for Big Government but are far more troubled by the Democratic Party’s industrial policy, lawfare and budding social media censorship regime. The last two concerns have boosted their standing among Republicans in general, including even the MAGA hard core. Libertarians will never be at the center of the Republican Party, but they are moving in from the outskirts.

Finally there are the “Frenchmen”. I can’t fathom what they will have to say when they don’t have Donald Trump to kick around any more. As Dan McLaughlin observes, David French’s New York Times endorsement of Harris is a Hamlet-without-the-Prince production. His case for Kamala is that conservatives should not allow themselves to be tarred by association with Donald Trump. The headline summarizes the thesis: “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris.” To save “conservatism”, not “America”. “Harris” is just a name to fill a blank. “[A]side from the title and declaration of intent to vote, French mentions Kamala Harris only twice”, and those mentions say nothing about “Harris’s views on domestic or foreign policy, her approach to law and the rule of law, how she uses power, or what sort of people she might appoint to the executive and judicial branches (Tim Walz is not mentioned).”

Mr. French’s evident objective is to preserve the purity of a particular brand of conservatism, perhaps in the hope that someday, somehow virtue will be rewarded, certainly in the fear that acquiescence in vice will be punished. There is something admirable in that refusal to compromise his ideals, but in politics being admirable is not the same as being influential. And influence diminishes swiftly when the ideals are regarded as fanciful. This would indeed be a better world if political factions repudiated self-proclaimed messiahs of dubious moral character. It’s conceivable that Mr. French has in some minuscule way made that world more likely to come to pass at some time on or about the Greek Kalends. What he has not made more likely is a world in which his opinions will have practical impact.

Mr. Williamson foresees a reunion of “French” and “anti-French” Evangelicals. That will require an heroic degree of mutual forgiveness. The former see the latter as complicit in sin; the latter decry the former as abettors of sin’s triumph. The exchange of venomous polemics will not soon be forgotten.

Such are the destinies of the anti-Trumpers after Trump, so far as I can descry them through my glass darkly. I offer my predictions without malice and with only the appropriate degree of confidence. All swans hatched this year are black, which makes life hard for prophets.

1. The purported parallel to the National Rifle Association is bizarre. The NRA has indeed lost much of its political salience, partly on account of internal corruption but mostly because it has largely won its argument. Witness Kamala Harris’s claim that she owns a Glock and would (joyously!) shoot dead an intruder or Tim Walz’s clumsy effort to present himself to the electorate as a hunter.

2. When J.D. Vance talked up reports of cat-devouring Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Mr. Williamson could have legitimately chided him for neglecting to double check before repeating improbable tales. Instead, he roared, “You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus [sic] the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”