Final Four
First, I’d like to thank the sports gods for providing a pretty good weekend of basketball for me to watch while nursing my head cold. The Loyola Chicago story really is terrific, and it’s also good to reminded of their run in 1963, which I very vaguely remember following as a ten-year old, particularly because of the civil rights subtext (or maybe text). (There are several good accounts of the Loyola-Mississippi State regional final, which couldn’t be played in Mississippi, and then the final game against Cincinnati, easily findable online; here are a couple). And the Duke-Villanova regional final yesterday was a classic nail-biter, marked (if I may say as the father of a Duke grad) by a terrible call against Duke in the last minute of regulation (I suppose the college basketball gods were balancing things out for the usual pro-Duke predilections of the refs), as well as by Grayson Allen’s game-winner going in and out in the last second of regulation.
In any case, here we are. All of America, except for Wolverine grads, will be rooting for Loyola Chicago next weekend. The odds of course suggest they’ll fall to Michigan in the semis, and that the Villanova-Kansas winner (that should be a good game!) will take the whole thing. But let’s not be fatalistic. I’m keeping hope alive. Loyola Chicago in 2018! And a better Republican nominee in 2020!
As for our contest, a couple of you had Loyola Chicago going to the final four—I’ll have Jim Swift find an appropriate reward for you (though since you then lost your nerve and had Loyola losing in the semifinals, I’m not sure you really deserve one). About 20% of you picked a Villanova-Kansas matchup in the semis, evenly split as to the winner, and a few of you had Michigan going to the final and even winning—so plenty of you are still in play. In fact, if we get a Villanova-Michigan finals, the four of you who picked that will surely deserve a huge TWS prize package! What you’ll get, on the other hand, depends on the whims of Jim Swift…
In any case, I’ll report next week on how things stand on the eve of the final.
Meanwhile, Ride On, O Ramblers!
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Conversation with Jim Warren
Someone else who’ll be watching the Final Four is my high school classmate and friend, and fellow sports fan, Jim Warren. Jim has had a notable career as a reporter and an editor, and has focused in recent years in thinking and writing about the media. There are lots of changes and developments in the media landscape worth discussing, and Jim and I do discuss them on the latest release from the Foundation for Constitutional Government, a Conversation with James C. Warren.We analyze the major changes in American media during the last few decades—from the decline of print and emergence of online news outlets to the dramatic impact of social media. We note the benefits of the current media landscape– notably the availability of diverse news sources of high quality, data-driven reporting, and audiovisual content–but we also consider the drawbacks, including the proliferation of disreputable sources online, and how budget constraints and other factors have led to the lowering of editorial standards in traditional media. Jim also addresses the future of the media business and the challenge readers and viewers face in distinguishing between serious reporting and fake news.
It’s an interesting discussion, I think, if a somewhat sobering one.
And of course I should remind you that this Conversation and all previous releases are also available as audio podcasts on iTunes and Stitcher, and that of you’d like to view the other Conversations that have been previously posted, click here.
* * * Still a Republican
A young friend who’s a Republican and who can’t abide Trump wrote me about various matters this week, and in the course of his email described himself as a Republican in the wilderness, or a wilderness Republican. I kind of like the phrase, perhaps because I’d just written a short piece for the magazine on why I too remained a Republican, if one committed to replacing the current tendency and leadership of the party.
To his credit, my young friend isn’t sitting around in despair–he’s running for local office in the Midwest, even though he occupies an uncomfortable middle ground in the current party alignment. I’m not running for anything (though I am speaking at Cornell College in Iowa, this week!), but I did write this week’s piece both as a piece of analysis but also as an attempt to encourage others neither to give up nor to give in.
In case you haven’t seen the article yet, here it is:
The other day I signed an online petition sponsored by Republicans for the Rule of Law. It’s addressed to Donald Trump: “Mr. President: Firing Robert Mueller would gravely damage the Presidency, the GOP and the country. Please don’t do it.” Since this is an effort to rally Republicans behind allowing the Mueller investigation to go forward, I was asked by the website, after signing the petition, to check a box: “I am a Republican.”
I’ve got to acknowledge that I hesitated for a minute. Gordon Humphrey, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire and a staunch conservative, says that he no longer considers himself a Republican. George Will, surely the preeminent conservative columnist of his generation, is no longer a Republican. My friend Pete Wehner, a valued contributor to the conservative cause for three decades, a veteran of the Reagan and both Bush administrations, writes that he is now a man without a party. And I myself didn’t vote for the Republican presidential candidate in 2016.
Furthermore, in just this past week, the Republican Congress has thrown together a $1.3 trillion spending bill that’s vulnerable to all the complaints Republicans have made over the years about how Democrats in Congress govern. And individual Republican members have continued to make fools of themselves. Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, trying to defend HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s purchase of a $31,000 dining room set for his office, claimed that “somebody in the deep state” had ordered the table in order to set Carson up—even though Carson acknowledged it was his wife’s doing. More broadly, it’s a plausible argument that it would be better for the country if Democrats won control of the House in 2018.
Still, I checked the “I am a Republican” box on the Republicans for the Rule of Law website.
Am I just a backward-looking conservative, refusing to face new realities? Perhaps. But one thing conservatism teaches is not to embrace new realities too quickly. Some of those new realities turn out to be transient; others prove harmful. Isn’t conservatism in part about resisting so-called new realities when you sense they might be questionable, even as people lecture you that you’ve got to get with the times?
So for now at least I’m choosing not to get with the times or go with the times. I’m choosing not to leave the GOP. I’m choosing not to accept the Trumpification of the GOP as an irreversible fact.
It’s not as if the Democratic party presents a particularly attractive alternative. It seems to be moving toward the left, not to the center. If it does so, and if the GOP stays captive to the charms of Donald Trump, then I can certainly imagine supporting an independent presidential candidate in 2020 against, say, a Republican ticket led by Donald Trump and a Democratic ticket led by Elizabeth Warren. But it would surely be better first to take a shot at reclaiming the Republican party. It’s not just nostalgia for the good old days of Reagan and Bush and McCain and Romney that leads one to balk at giving up the Republican party to the forces of nativism, vulgar populism, and authoritarianism. It’s also the fact that it would be bad for the country if one of our two major parties went in this direction.
And the Republican tradition is well worth defending. To have been right about the Cold War, right about the need to revive constitutionalism, right about resistance to “progressivism” in all of its illiberal modes—for a party that at its best embraced much of what was admirable about both classical liberalism and classical conservatism—is no small thing. And most Republican members of Congress remain alive to that tradition, even as they (temporarily?) succumb to the pressure to accommodate Donald Trump.
So for now, I—along with many others—prefer to fight rather than to switch.
Of course things could change. I remember Jeane Kirkpatrick writing a piece in 1979 on why she remained a Democrat. In fact, she stayed a Democrat when she joined Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. She did not switch parties until 1984. By then the Reagan Republican party was one that was becoming increasingly hospitable to a Hubert Humphrey Democrat like Jeane Kirkpatrick. Are Reagan Republicans going to find an equally welcoming home in the Democratic party of the 2020s? I’m doubtful, though life is full of surprises.
In the meantime, the Republican party, it seems to me, is very much worth fighting for. Despite the current climate, the fight is not hopeless, and the stakes are high. So I still check the box: “I am a Republican.”
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Happy Holiday
And finally, let me wish all of you Happy Passover or Happy Easter, whichever’s applicable. And whether you observe either or neither, I hope this time of year proves to be an occasion for reflection, renewal and happiness for you and yours.
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Onward.
Bill Kristol
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