Back when Donald Trump was merely a small dark cloud on the horizon of American politics, many of us were already worried about the state of American conservatism. Five years ago, I suggested in these pages that Eric Hoffer’s famous observation of decades ago applied to the conservative movement. To paraphrase, every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
But that problem can be addressed by rejuvenation, reformation, and renewal. And it seemed it was being addressed during President Obama’s second term, and that it might come to fruition in a reformist Republican presidential candidate in 2016.
It was not to be. And now, one year into the Trump presidency, we face a crisis of conservatism more serious than a normal cyclical downturn from which movements can and do recover. To update Hoffer’s formulation: Every great cause begins with ideas, hardens into an ideology, and eventually degenerates into conspiracy theories.
In 1980, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator, noted, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.” It’s not mere nostalgia to recall the Reagan years as a reasonably idea-rich environment on the right, and it’s not unfair to see some decline into rigidity in the two sets of Bush years. That was unfortunate but not really alarming.
But the current state of discourse on the right and among elected Republicans on Capitol Hill sounds as if they’ve been taking instruction from the queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. After Alice insists that “one can’t believe impossible things,” the queen tells her, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. . . . Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
If only we were living in a wonderland where elected officials’ fantasies were simply another form of entertainment! But a well-functioning constitutional republic requires keeping a firm grip on reality. Today’s willingness to believe in “secret societies” and conspiracies—not mistakes or biases or incompetence—at the FBI is reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Today’s rhetoric about the “deep state” would warm the heart of Robert Welch and his John Birch Society.
Confronting the demagogues and demonizers of his own day, Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855, “I am not a Know Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?” But too many others found themselves able to be. “Our progress in degeneracy,” Lincoln lamented, “appears to me to be pretty rapid.”
Our own progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. And if you believe that America has benefited from a healthy conservatism and a strong Republican party, and would benefit still—you have to worry that their degeneracy makes far more likely America’s degeneracy.
