Longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly died as her final book was being published.
The Conservative Case for Trump, co-authored by Eagle Forum colleague Ed Martin and conservative journalist Brett Decker, comes over fifty years after her first book, A Choice, Not An Echo. The latter made the case for Barry Goldwater against the Eastern establishment wing of the Republican Party.
Schlafly’s advocacy for presidential candidates she thought would offer conservatives a choice stretched back even further than that, with her support of Robert Taft at the 1952 Republican National Convention.
Each phase of Schlafly’s activism from Taft to Trump represented a different set of conservative priorities. “Mr. Republican” Taft was a small-government champion of the Old Right, perhaps even more skeptical of warfare than of welfare. Goldwater was a near-libertarian constitutionalist at home but a Cold War hawk abroad.
From there, Schlalfly became a major proponent of the New Right social conservatism that by Ronald Reagan’s presidency became the Christian Right. She led one of its few winning battles, defeating the Equal Rights Amendment while it was just a few states away from ratification, while predicting many of the fights her compatriots would go on to lose.
If conservatives can claim victory in the Cold War, Vladimir Putin notwithstanding, the Right has mostly lost the culture wars. Schlafly lived to see the Supreme Court rule against traditionalists on school prayer, abortion and eventually marriage.
By the 1990s, Schlafly understood the culture war to mean something more than debates over contentious social issues, though she remained committed to them until her dying breath. She was an early critic of mass immigration and free trade deals, foreshadowing the nationalism and populism that would later grip so much of the Right.
Initially, that took the form of backing Pat Buchanan’s losing Republican presidential bids. It caused her to break with leadership of the GOP on some foreign policy disputes and to argue that immigration no less than the growth of the welfare state was expanding the size and power of Democratic constituencies. She opposed the Iraq war.
These were the issues that drew Schlafly to Trump even as many of her longtime comrades in arms manned the barricades for Ted Cruz or to a lesser extent Marco Rubio. “He betrayed us all,” she declared of Rubio who was with her on abortion and religious liberty but not immigration and those “rotten trade deals.”
To Schlafly, it was first a struggle against a party establishment that was to her left on limited government, then to her left on values and finally to her left on borders and national sovereignty. To her these were the conservative battles of our time.
Yet to many of her fellow conservatives, Schlafly’s Trump endorsement was dismaying. He still has no affinity for constitutionally limited government and his conversions on the right to life or the Second Amendment seemed unconvincing. He was a thrice-married, foul-mouthed, Howard Stern-loving New Yorker with little to no history of fighting for conservative causes.
Schlafly’s Trump endorsement divided her own conservative organization and even her own family. What she thought was a continuation of modern American conservatism many others regarded as a repudiation of it.
Conservatism’s priorities have shifted before, however. Taft would likely have opposed Cold War military interventions Goldwater supported. Goldwater voted against the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts Reagan praised while advocating his own. Reagan himself was better on deficits than taxes as governor of California, the opposite as president after his embrace of Kemp-Roth and supply-side economics.
Is it possible that Trump’s nationalism is the Republican future? Schlafly’s death in some ways makes that less likely, as it marks the passing of an influential figure who could help Trump leave a lasting mark on the Right. He has no institutions behind him save a few talk show hosts, commentators and websites even if he does speak for millions of Republican voters who found both the GOP establishment and its conservative equivalent wanting in this year’s primaries.
Trump imitator Paul Nehlen — endorsed by Schlafly — got crushed by Kemp-Reagan Republican Paul Ryan, albeit running as the sitting House speaker in a state Cruz won handily. Trump himself isn’t out of the running yet.
Did Schlafly as a nonagenarian once again identify a sea change on the Right or did she get her last pick for president wrong? Her last book could reveal her to have been ahead of her time or out of touch with the conservative movement for which she labored for so many decades.
