Why
I, a Lifelong Conservative, Now Call Republicans Enemies of Democracy
I was a Cold Warrior.
I worked in the Reagan White House. But thanks to Trump and his GOP creatures,
I have severed my association with the Republican Party, and I won’t even call
myself conservative any more
Feb. 8, 2021 4:27 AM
I have been a conservative my whole
life. As a teenager, I idolized William F. Buckley, Jr. (and, upon graduating
from college, started my career at his magazine). Later, I worked in the Reagan
White House. My right-leaning syndicated column was featured in hundreds of
newspapers and I was a regulator on TV chat shows.
Though raised in a Jewish,
quasi-liberal home in a liberal state and surrounded by people who thought
registering as a Republican was evidence of a mental defect, I was confident in
my choices.
Being on the right in the 1970s and
1980s was an intellectual feast. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, noted
in 1981, "Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas."
Irving Kristol brought his
analytical skill to the pages of the Wall Street Journal and The
Public Interest. James Q. Wilson was enlightening about crime. William F.
Buckley hosted a high-brow interview show. George Will’s erudition shone
through in his widely syndicated column. Free market guru Milton Friedman won
the Nobel Prize. Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court opinions transformed the legal
world. Supply-side economics, championed by Robert Bartley and my old boss,
Rep. Jack Kemp, seemed to promise a better approach than top-down government
efforts to improve lives. Month after month, Commentary magazine,
under Norman Podhoretz’s guidance, offered trenchant rebuttals to dominant
liberal assumptions.
But what drew me to the right more
than anything else was the left’s passivity about the Cold War. Many mainstream
liberals took a pas d’ennemis a gauche stand toward the USSR and
other communists.
Echoes of this are still evident in
the career of Bernie Sanders, who has credulously repeated Fidel Castro’s propaganda about literacy rates and
even excused bread lines in communist Nicaragua. My first book, Useful Idiots,
took liberals to task for what I perceived to be their inexcusable naivete, or
worse, regarding left-wing authoritarians.
Why was I such a committed Cold
Warrior? Being Jewish played a role.
As a teenager, I went through a
phase during which I marinated in Holocaust studies. It shaped my worldview,
alerting me to the depravity and savagery human beings are capable of and
underscoring the importance of maintaining bulwarks against authoritarianism –
the rule of law, the free press, individual rights, and an independent
judiciary among other things.
The fate of Raoul Wallenberg was the
perfect encapsulation of the twin horrors of the 20th century: he fought the
Nazis and saved thousands of Jews, and he was arrested and murdered by
the communists.
But the last five years though have
caused me to sever my association with the Republican Party, and even to reject
the label conservative.
The conservatism I embraced and
helped to propagate was small-l liberal in all essential respects. It was
distinct from European, throne and altar conservatism. American conservatism
was based upon reverence for the American constitutional order. As recently as
the Obama years, I was sounding an alarm at the then-president’s reliance on
executive orders because they violate the spirit of the Constitution, which
requires that Congress make the laws.
Like progressives, conservatives
believe in reform, but are more likely to stress gradualism, small-scale
experimentation, and prudence.
From the very outset of his run for
the presidency, Donald Trump smashed those understandings of what conservatism
was. His lies alone were enough to signal his unfitness. Flagrant lying is a
key feature of authoritarianism.
His eagerness to sweep aside
institutions, to violate the law (even on war crimes), to make common cause
with dictators, and to demonize minorities signaled a frightening retreat from
pretty much everything conservatives were supposed to revere.
That the Republican party could
nominate him was enough to make me withdraw - and that the party would rapidly
become his complete creature continues to disgust and mystify me to this day.
Without saying that Trump was Hitler (which would be absurd), I will say that
my Holocaust reading never seemed so relevant as in the past five years,
particularly the lesson about how fragile democratic norms are.
I still believe in all the things I
believed when I called myself a conservative. My perceptions about race have
changed, though. In the past, I genuinely thought racism in America was a
fringe phenomenon, soon to be relegated, as Reagan put it in another context,
to the "ash heap of history." What I’ve witnessed in the past five
years, including the death of George Floyd, has altered that perception. So
that’s one area where I acknowledge that liberals had a better bead on what was
happening in the country than I did.
But there are many areas where I
continue to think conservatives have the better case. I think liberals put too
much faith in the power of government to do good, and pay too little attention
to the tendency of government to make things worse. I think capitalism is the
greatest engine of human flourishing the world has ever devised, and that the
two-parent family is key to a society’s well-being.
Why then do I reject the title
conservative? Because we don’t exist in a vacuum. In America today the word is
associated with white/Christian identity movements, hostility to immigrants, a
personality cult, and openness to conspiracies. Since the attempted coup of
January 6, many conservatives, along with high percentages of Republicans, have
shown themselves to be enemies of the American constitutional order.
In opposing Trump and working for a
Biden victory, many of us in the Never Trump camp have been happy to make
alliances with progressives and others who are committed to decency and the
rule of law.
Where we go from here is less clear.
Some will become Democrats. Others will work to reform the Republican party.
Still others will consider forming a new party.
America desperately needs a sane
center right party. The matter is urgent because as things now stand, every
general election between Democrats and the current Republican party will be a
contest between democracy and its enemies.
Mona Charen is a syndicated
columnist, Policy Editor at The Bulwark,
and host of the Beg to Differ podcast. Twitter: @monacharen