The convulsions of last week leave us with a great deal to unpack. But one thing they must surely do is to illustrate, in the starkest of terms, the distinctions between conservatism and the populism which masquerades as it.
President Trump has always embodied the latter, borrowing enough of the former, usually in a reductionist rhetorical form, to make the pretense complete. And it was successful in many ways — bringing about tax and regulatory reforms that revived a lethargic economy, providing for a more restrained and constitutionally astute judiciary, and permitting the relocation of America’s Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
But where its rootlessness failed, it did so spectacularly.
Aside from some notable examples (Vice President Mike Pence, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sens. Ben Sasse and Pat Toomey, Reps. Liz Cheney and Ken Buck and a few others), there was very little about last week in Washington, D.C., that could be called conservative. The election challenges were puerile and baseless, and the proposed remedies even worse. What they boiled down to was essentially a call to federalize elections, one of the few remaining areas of responsibility that have remained, properly, in the domain of the states. Conservatives have spent a great deal of effort defending the Electoral College over the years, particularly from the Jacobinical impulse to impose a national popular vote. If the last two months have not revealed to the Left the need and genius of the decentralized Electoral College system, one despairs of anything that would.
We have perhaps become accustomed to dissent from the traditional conservative canon in the White House, and acceptance of this heterodoxy on the part of the Republican base, which, dismayingly at times, seems to regard the president’s statements as Papally infallible. I recall beholding, in some amazement, a roomful of Republican loyalists cheering Trump as he extolled the virtues of trade protectionism and price controls on Big Pharma while railing against President George W. Bush’s “warmongering” in the Middle East. Surreal.
Appeals to populist sentiment generally do not end well — Edmund Burke wrote his most illustrative work reflecting on a massive one in France at the end of the 18th century. Thus, last Wednesday ought not to have come as much of a surprise. The summer was full of populist upheavals, from a different direction, but using the same tinder. In each case, masses gathered, eager and willing to be fed ideological yarns woven by demagogues to support the myth of some oppressive superstructure, culminating inevitably in violence. That is a type of social architecture that is antithetical to conservatism, regardless of who embraces it.
So, where do we go from here? The question most immediately looks to Trump and what the repercussions should be. Any sober analysis suggests that the president’s actions and statements are impeachable. It gets more muddled after that. Invocation of the 25th Amendment, an option being bandied about liberally, is inappropriate — it is designed for a completely different situation, and recklessly expanding its scope would set a dangerous precedent. But is impeachment the best option? Probably not as a means to remove Trump from office, desirable or not. There is insufficient time to do it properly, and it would needlessly inflame already raw partisan nerves — the last thing the nation needs at this point. There is a case to be made for later impeachment, both as an ultimate rebuke and to prevent him from running again. There is time to ruminate on that option, one that ought only to be taken after national tempers have cooled.
There do have to be consequences for Trump’s actions. One of the more substantive problems lingering from the summer’s violence is the prevalence of inadequate, or inconsistent, application of consequence to the offenders, beginning with over-restraint of law enforcement in response. It would help our focus to reacquaint ourselves with a key conservative tenet, that the principal duty of government in a free society is the maintenance of order under the aegis of the rule of law.
The vast majority of the country is unified in outrage by the spectacle of last week, but probably for different reasons. Democrats appear to believe that this episode reveals the fatal flaw in conservative philosophy and that we are all coming around to the enlightenment of progressive ideologies. Conservatives, rather, recognize that all of these disruptions are the consequence of a steady, if gradual, rejection of conservative tenets.
America’s institutions have prevailed through all the various uprisings. How long they can continue to do so, while sustaining assault from populist ravages from both the Left and Right, is the question that America must make its business to answer in the very near future.
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant and columnist.
