A profound sadness arises when seeing participants at the Conservative Political Action Conference consistently live down to the worst caricatures the media lays on conservatives in general. An even more profound sadness comes from knowing that, for now at least, CPAC is almost precisely representative of conservative popular culture.
Eric Hoffer’s seminal 1951 book The True Believer, once a touchstone for conservative thinkers, warned against the sort of angry fanaticism evident in CPAC attendees’ lusty booing of every mention of recent Republican standard-bearers John McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Bush family. Hoffer and conservative intellectual Russell Kirk both warned against the dual dangers of rigid ideology and of leader-hero worship.
Conservative academics Willmoore Kendall and George Carey, together, as well as Walter Berns all warned against executive aggrandizement of power at the expense of the legislature and in favor of seeing the American process of government itself — not any leader, not any “right” supposedly guaranteed by the courts, not any immediately desired policy outcomes — as the main guarantor of liberty and self-government.
Alas, what we see in CPAC and in Trumpism-masquerading-as-conservatism is the opposite: fevered impatience with representative government; furious resentment of all who disagree; the constant hunt for scapegoats, foreigners, and apostates; and the elevation of faith in dear leader, as in, “I alone can fix it,” above all prior fealty to standards, virtues, and principles.
Along with this comes the mindless slinging of cliched slogans: RINO, cuck, swamp, neocon, fake news, and the Stalinist “enemy of the people.” Never mind that many of those so labeled were original Reaganites, and supporters of Kemp and DuPont over Bush, and of several others over Dole, and of almost anyone over McCain in 2008, and of Santorum or the late drafting of Jindal or others over Romney in 2012. Never mind that even the now-hated former GOP presidential nominees delivered numerous victories for conservatism over liberalism and for the United States over our enemies.
To be clear, the problem isn’t just with the crassness and mindlessness, for several years now, of CPAC. It lies with Republican congressmen who act as if their job in oversight hearings is to be snarling defense attorneys for the president rather than stewards of good government and the justice system. (Of course, most congressional Democrats are equally bad in the other direction, as prosecutors eager to deliver a sentence before identifying a crime, but that’s a subject for another day.) It lies with conservative TV hosts who turn legitimate concerns of blue-collar America into rambling us-against-them screeds pushing the nonsense that the “rich” and the “system” are deliberately trying to keep middle America drug-addled and impoverished.
And it lies with anyone who said Bill Clinton’s bad character made him unfit for office, Barack Obama’s “pen and phone” made him an abuser of executive authority, and Hillary Clinton’s past business dealings were fit subjects for congressional oversight, but that Trump need not answer for any of the same problems.
The academics Kendall and Carey, deeply and unambiguously conservative, wrote that the essential feature of the American system is that it encourages people to “try through the processes of persuasion to build a consensus around their strongly held beliefs, but one virtue they must cultivate is that of not being in too much of a hurry, and another is that of not expecting other people, their neighbors, to give up overnight their own strongly held beliefs.”
A putative conservatism that rejects this humility and grace is not conservatism at all, but an attitudinally radical ideology. It is one we should not embrace.
