In a provocative excerpt of his new book, Arizona Republican Jeff Flake identifies hazards of the Trump aura that conservatives have abetted and must challenge today. They include: “the most egregious and sustained attacks on [President] Obama’s legitimacy” … “the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians” … and “our own White House … rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies.” This is behavior that transcends ideology; it is part of the “destructive politics” Flake mentions in the Politico excerpt of Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle.
The distinction in Flake’s subtitle is essential to understanding the wilderness inhabited by many conservatives who are conservative in their convictions—not only intellectuals, but everyday Americans who profess a right-of-center worldview. For example, distinguishing between birther theory and Obamacare repeal requires as much heavy lifting as it takes to raise a one-pound dumbbell. Birther theory is about race prejudice and self-delusion. Obamacare repeal is about configuring the government’s role in health insurance. This isn’t night and day—it’s night-vision goggles and daydreaming. Not only do the two ideas lack a common philosophy, they lack even a coherent string of thought. The only connective tissue joining them was grafted from political convenience in an election.
Flake wonders:
But critics of the book excerpt don’t see the difference. “Flake shoulda titled this ‘I loyally voted for Trumpcare and now expect you to believe I oppose Trump,’” wrote one. Another common response: “Note: Sen. Jeff Flake has voted in line with President Trump’s position 95.5% of the time.” This criticism seems prevalent among those in the blue checkmark set (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ). Together, they imply that the only legitimate challenge to President Trump is to oppose his behavior, apolitical maneuvers, and the beliefs on which he’s incidentally conservative. This, of course, is stupid.
A majority of Flake’s Senate votes to this point in 2017 have been on presidential appointments (23 of the 44 overall votes, based on the source of the 95.5 percent statistic at Five Thirty Eight). The others have been on a mix of standard GOP policy fare—the bulk of them comprise undoing Obamacare and certain agency rules from the previous administration. Considering Trump’s lack of involvement on the details of health insurance reform, most of this legislating has been driven by congressional, not presidential, leadership. Noting that the president and Flake both backed the repeal of the “stream protection rule”—an expensive regulation impacting the coal industry— does not provide insight into the particulars of their relationship. Any Republican president would have agreed with Flake on this issue. At that point, your quarrel is not with Trump, but with the mainstream conservative policy that predates his ascendancy. Wrapping the two together and chiding them produces imprecise, even sloppy observations.
Expecting Jeff Flake to abandon his ideology because the president shares some of his beliefs is not a fair way to evaluate his character. Trump is not a controversial figure for adopting and then walking the GOP plank of Obamacare repeal; in fact, that’s one of his normal traits. It’s for the occasions when Trump finds himself at odds with the foundation of American government that Flake has offered himself to be judged: “It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued.” The instability of which he speaks is not found in the Republican platform.
