There once was a time when conservatives insisted that bills must be paid, and that public debt should be avoided or severely limited.
There once was a time when conservatives believed the state’s power within our own borders should be carefully circumscribed. We believed that government should not be allowed to seize private property without due process of law. We believed in free markets and free trade.
We said we believed in telling the truth. We said we supported investigations of public corruption and opposed the smearing of honest law enforcement personnel. We opposed smearing anybody, period. Honest debate and criticism were okay, but personal calumny wasn’t.
We opposed executive overreach. But we expected the president at least to try to unite us, rather than to inflame tribalist instincts. We expected a real effort for respect and civility in the public square. And we expected a degree of dignity in office.
We said character counts. We said that while private matters should remain private, it was also true that bad private behavior and good public character rarely co-exist for long. We used to think that public officials should be, if not perfect, than at least far better role models than not. We said flagrant personal misbehavior was a disqualifier from high office.
We insisted that thuggish dictators, especially communist ones, shouldn’t be coddled and praised. We believed we should trust only what we could verify, not trust before we verify – and that we needed some basis to even begin trusting (glasnost, perestroika), not mere promises from a mass torturer and proven liar.
We said moral clarity was an important tool in diplomacy. We insisted that America is pre-eminent among nations not merely because we are materially strong, but because we are uniquely admirable. We really believed that our might springs from our rightness. We are exceptional not just in our arms, but in our ideals, and in how we try so hard to keep our practices consonant with them.
We said we should treat our allies better than our adversaries – and we believed, with Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, that we should particularly treasure and preserve the alliance of English-speaking peoples. (This includes India; this isn’t racial, it’s about a shared political and commercial rule-of-law heritage.)
Real conservatives abhorred racism and all forms of bigotry. We believed in conserving not just any social custom that happens to exist, but instead conserving specifically those habits and institutions that guard and promote liberty and elevate the best things civilization offers. Conservatism, in the modern American sense, meant the conservation of classically liberal, democratic-republican values, and of mediating institutions in the private sector.
Conservatism also accepted compromises on details (but not on bedrock principles) within a Madisonian system designed to mitigate the flaws in human nature, acknowledge the fallibility of each of us, and channel us towards practical if rather rough consensus.
Today, every single one of those traits of the modern conservative worldview is at risk, disdained by those in power, or utterly abandoned.
We have an entire government, all three branches, dominated by self-professed conservatives, but which nonetheless is the most profligate, the most debt-ridden, the most protectionist, and the least interested in public virtue of any peacetime American government in well more than a century. We accept a president who lies more often and more radically even, by far, than Bill Clinton; who repeatedly praises the most vile dictators on Earth; who rejects the very idea that the U.S. is morally exceptional; and who attacks and insults our closest allies in fits of pique.
We have a putatively conservative president who rushes to endorse rank bigots and attack the ethnicity of respected American judges, claims against all evidence that plenty of “very fine people” were marching with violent white supremacists, and needed to be browbeaten for days before denouncing neo-Nazi David Duke.
The president repeatedly insults women in the vilest terms, makes viciously dishonest accusations against momentary adversaries, encourages violence at his rallies, and refuses to apologize for any of it.
Yet most leading conservatives, in office and in the permanently astroturfed swamp of activist organizations, march in lockstep with this obviously least admirable of presidents.
The crowning indignity was Trump’s endorsement of neo-Confederate Corey Stewart for U.S. Senate in Virginia. Another column in this publication rightly called him a “clown.” If the Republican National Committee and every major national GOP leader don’t denounce the clown and his bigotry, their shame will be everlasting – and the conservative movement will be officially dead.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic, a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
