Activists gathered Thursday for day one of the Conservative Political Action Conference to cheer conservative entertainers, firebrands, and the vice president.
For all the conservative progress President Trump has made during his first 13 months in office, Vice President Mike Pence was correct in giving credit to CPAC’s attendees. “Because of all of you, because of the conservative majorities in Congress that you helped elect, and because of the strong leadership of the president you put in the White House, 2017 was the most consequential year in the history of the conservative movement,” Pence said. From tax reform to deregulation to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, there is indeed much to celebrate.
But, like every president before him, Trump is imperfect. One need only peruse his Twitter feed or consider Trump’s support for import tariffs to see a few examples. The types of conservatives who are CPAC attendees also deserve blame for defending and even reinforcing or exacerbating Trump’s imperfections. This isn’t what CPAC attendees are supposed to do.
Trump is a phenomenon of his own kind. Conservatives at events like CPAC cannot be thinking about how to emulate him — they need to be thinking about how to influence him in the right direction, and also about the future of conservatism after he leaves the White House either three or seven years from now.
Republican politicians obviously feel they have to embrace Trumpism or face severe consequences. They have made a political calculation. But conservative activists and thinkers don’t have to face the voters. They have the liberty to celebrate when Trump gets something right but also point out or harshly criticize when he is in the wrong. And they have the duty to persuade him when he strays.
Often, they rise to the fulfillment of that duty. For example, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro garnered applause from the CPAC crowd when he criticized Trump’s comments about Charlottesville, saying: “It is nonsense. It is immoral.”
But CPAC cannot afford to embrace Trumpism uncritically. For example, the lie of protectionist dogma, if implemented, would impoverish the nation. No matter how much you want to appeal to the working-class voter, your appeal will ultimately fall short if it stultifies the nation’s economy and puts him out of the job. Even when Republican politicians feel the need to accommodate protectionist sentiment out of fear (former President George W. Bush once did this), the CPAC crowd need to be the ones to pull Republican leaders in the right direction.
The same is true of Trump’s evident public admiration for Russian dictator and war criminal Vladimir Putin. Here, there seems to be more hope — even Trump himself implicitly understands that being soft on Putin is bad, which is why he now tries to argue (not without merit) that former President Barack Obama was even weaker in handling him.
But conservatives at CPAC should not be satisfied with leaving the matter to an amoral embrace of “whataboutism.” Rather, they should be pushing Trump to make an example of Putin now by fully imposing all sanctions permitted by law, which he should have done last month.
Related to all of these populist deviations from traditional CPAC thinking is the gathering’s disturbing decision this year to play host to a shady fringe figure, Marion Marechal Le Pen. Le Pen represents the model that American conservatives have wisely rejected in the past, and they must not let enthusiasm for populism misguide them now.
The issue here is not just Le Pen’s political family, with its historical ties to antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The issue is her own apparent connection to racist alt-right groups in Europe and her inexplicable coziness with Putin.
To be sure, CPAC has always been a big-tent. But rather than being cheerleaders, its attendees need to think of themselves as the nagging conscience of future Republican officeholders and administrations. Instead of adapting their ideology to match whatever is trendy, they need to guide those vulnerable to fashion so that they don’t abandon what’s important.
