What does it mean to be a conservative in the Age of Trump?

When this question came up in a primary debate three years ago, candidate Trump responded that conservatism means conserving America. Some conservative pundits ridiculed this as displaying Trump’s ignorance of conservatism. Indeed, it is unlikely Trump reads conservative books and journals. But his response suggested that he, more acutely than many who do read them, understood that if we continued politically in the direction of the previous three decades, we would lose our country, in which case the question of American conservatism would be moot.

Among Trump’s most loyal supporters have been conservative Christians, who have cause to understand that their religious freedom is on the brink of destruction. Would our country still exist if that happened? Certainly, theirs wouldn’t. There was a sense among the people described by J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy that they had already lost their country. These people appear loyal to Trump, as do many in the middle class who look to move up but find their way blocked by the regulatory state. There might be a pattern here to learn from, for conservatives who are open-eyed and interested in the possibility of a governing majority.

Today, even the legitimacy of caring for one’s country, in any literal sense, is in dispute. At November’s Armistice Day ceremony, President Emmanuel Macron of France, setting his teeth against Trump’s support of nationhood, declared that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.” Macron distorted the meaning of nationalism, calling it the “egotism of a people who look after only their interests.” Only is a cheat word. To have a duty to look after one’s people is not to have a duty to look after only them. In his speech at the United Nations last October, Trump correctly pointed out that only in sovereign nation-states is it possible for free peoples to exercise political consent.

But Trump has bad manners and tweets too much! Certainly, a requirement of conservatism in the age of Trump is the ability to see past Trump’s manners and tweets to political reality and to the dangers and opportunities before us.

Larry Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College.

DAVID FRENCH

To be conservative in the age of Trump is to be constantly confronted with a question: Did you really believe what you said? That is, did you mean it when you argued for decades that character matters in politicians? When you stated clearly and unequivocally that lying under oath or causing others to lie under oath was grounds for impeachment? When you condemned unnecessary divisiveness and blatant identity politics? When you lamented the negative cultural effect of the Clinton presidency in spite of the economic prosperity?

At the same time, the instant you answer yes to those questions — and you start to ponder the natural implications of that yes — you’re immediately confronted with a different set of queries. Do you still believe in the policy aims of the conservative movement? In other words, do you still value originalist judges, lower taxes, and a strong national defense? Do you seek pro-life policies, the protection of religious liberty, and limitations on the regulatory state?

This is the life of the conservative in the age of Trump. All at once, long-sought policy victories become attainable. A positive judicial revolution unfolds. Our military has struck serious blows against jihadist terrorists overseas. These are developments we should cheer, but here’s the insidious thing — if you really, truly want to be or feel like a part of the Trump team, you must either abandon or remain silent about those other things, about those other values you hold dear. Yes, good conservatives can and do work in the administration, but they do so with the understanding that circumstances may demand their resignation, and their true loyalty remains to the Constitution — not the president.

We humans are uncomfortable with ambiguity. We like to know where — and with whom — we stand. We like to pick a team. Yet, the task of the conservative in the age of Trump is to reject that very human impulse and to embrace, for a time, wandering the uncomfortable wilderness without a tribe. That means there may well come a time when we have to urge the impeachment of a man who appoints the judges we love, who cuts our taxes, and who rebuilds our military. That means we have to remind our friends and neighbors that virtuous causes can be discredited by vile champions.

In short, the challenge for the conservative in the age of Trump is to continue to believe everything you used to believe. Because those things are good and true. Fail in either direction — abandon policy to defeat the man or embrace the man to exalt his policies — and conservatism will fail. It will have sacrificed its credibility on the altar of a single politician, and no man is worth that cost.

David French is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a senior writer at National Review.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

One of the ways that Vladimir Putin retains power in Russia is to permit a systemic, yet insincere opposition in the legislature. Technically, these individuals are in an opposing party, but they are generally fine with Putin’s government. Putin uses them to monitor his opposition and to create an illusion that there’s an outlet for contrary opinions.

For too long, the conservative movement in Washington, D.C., functioned as the systemic opposition to progressivism’s march through American institutions, public and private. Technically, they were opposed, and they’d make some sounds about opposing the growth of the administrative state and the cultural rot. But they were never terribly successful at returning the country to its first principles or constitutional order, despite the millions of supporters who put them in power and expected not just rhetoric but results.

Conservatism now is about rejecting this rigged system and taking the risk of working outside of it to advance its principles and policy objectives. The fact that conservatism had become a checklist of watered-down progressive policy prescriptions only served to hasten the demise of the old system.

What was conservatism’s last great accomplishment? The expansion of Medicare Part D? The failed efforts to spread democracy by force through the Middle East? Wasted years talking about the repeal and replacement of Obamacare? Sitting idly by while Silicon Valley tech oligarchs took control of our discourse and set the parameters for acceptable thoughts and speech?

There is a limit to how long people could ride the high of the Reagan years without successive accomplishments.

Conservatism today is properly understood as constitutionalism and a revisiting of first principles about securing the blessings of liberty. It’s a movement that demands meaningful free-trade agreements instead of just agreements based on the hope that someday China will play fair. It seeks hearty discussions about national sovereignty and meaningful borders. It acknowledges the limits, and costs, of military action. It recognizes that crouching cowardice in the face of cultural losses led the country to its current precipice, where people are terrified to speak freely and speak the truth.

And it doesn’t care one whit if it has to completely upset the existing political order.

Mollie Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist.

ERICK ERICKSON

I am a conservative because I am a Christian. I know that all of us are sinners, so I want as few in charge of me as possible. Today, conservatism seems to be about what our side can get out of the system. Instead, conservatism should be what it has always been about — elevating the individual over the state and restraining the petty vanities of the collective self whether in the form of the state or the mob.

The mob has masked thugs and social justice warriors attempting to silence or ruin any who disagree with them. The state has cops and revenue agents. Conservatism must restrain both. Instead of looking to strongmen in Washington as saviors, conservatism must favor building up strong men and women individually across the nation who can take care of themselves and their families. A family dependent on government is a family dependent on the enslaving generosity of progressivism from which rarely a person escapes.

Scripturally, conservatism must be an ideology that seeks the welfare of the cities from which we are in exile. We, as conservatives, must be reminded that a Washington able to do much can also cause great damage. Conservatism should incentivize localism, restraint at the federal level, and charity in one’s own community. What is right in one region of the country may not be right in another. We must resist the temptation to think we can fundamentally change human nature through collective enterprise at the national scale.

A conservative in the Age of Trump is now the most skilled diplomat in our society. He balances the friendships and jealousies of friends who embrace the president against those who disdain the president, while all supposedly working on common ground. Too many a conservative now has thrown their lot in with power for the sake of power. In a Tolkienesque manner, they have decided that they can wield the ring of power and abandon its destruction. The conservatism that will ultimately see us through the present age is the one that rejects the ring and the strongman and stays committed to those things that bound our souls out of Eden — men are sinners, God is real, and no city on earth can be trusted to preserve liberty if the sinners themselves cannot be empowered to preserve their own.

Erick Erickson is host of the Erick Erickson Show on WSB Radio, Atlanta, and the editor of The Resurgent.

ALEXANDRA DESANCTIS

My college graduation took place two weeks after Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary, all but securing the Republican nomination. Three weeks before Trump officially accepted the nomination, I began my first post-grad job as a writer.

To state the obvious, this was not the landscape I’d imagined growing up as someone wanting to be a conservative writer. I never expected to see an “era of Donald Trump” in American politics.

As a young conservative, the last three years have inured me to constant outrage cycles and already dulled my ability to expect anything other than disappointment from politics. The ideas that first drew me to conservatism — support for tradition, the free market, small government, and personal virtue — now seem in short supply on the Right.

But the fact that Trump has discarded many of these norms, or that his supporters have shamelessly sought to reshape them around his person, doesn’t mean that the conservative movement has been fundamentally transformed.

To be sure, the president has endeavored to remake the Republican party in his image, and the vast majority of the Right has willingly participated. His reality-television presidency has provoked politicians, pundits, and thinkers across the political spectrum into losing their heads. Right-wing figures who once moralized about leaders needing character and integrity are quick to excuse Trump’s worst misdeeds. Formerly conservative commentators now insist, pell-mell, that all “good” Americans must vote for Democrats to save the country.

This is an increasingly challenging climate for those desiring a politics of principle rather than of personality. While there is little cause for naive optimism, there remains room for hope. Donald Trump has scrambled our politics, changed the trajectory of the GOP, and fractured conservatism. But he hasn’t killed it. No one person can do that.

That reality offers a particularly salient reminder for the Right and anyone else willing to acknowledge it. This period of upheaval confirms the conservative wariness against making politicians the center of our lives or create a government so vast that each election becomes an existential struggle. Our political views and goals should never be defined solely by the woes and whims of one man — and, more important, politics can’t be everything.

The Trump era cautions conservatives and Americans of good faith not to put our faith in princes. That’s a deeply conservative value that will outlast our tumultuous moment.

Alexandra DeSanctis is a staff writer at National Review.

DAVID FRUM

To be a conservative in the age of Trump …

Is to know what you are against more clearly than what you are for. Aside from the familiar commitment to tax cuts for upper-income people and corporations — and state-level action to reduce ballot access for poorer people and minorities — policy changes in the age of Trump have been few and tentative. Where’s the promised Obamacare replacement? Where’s the action against the opioid crisis? The border wall? The one big new idea of the Trump era — global trade war — seems designed to ensure that the U.S. meets the challenge from China with the fewest possible allies and supporters.

Is to espouse an ideology fiercely rejected by its most loyal voters. Conservatism is supposedly an anti-statist philosophy. Yet, Trump-era conservatism depends on votes of the biggest winners from statist redistribution: retirees, rural people, military veterans, farmers. Measure the 50 states by their net claim/contribution to the national finances, and nine of the 10 biggest “takers” are solid red states.

Is to feel culturally powerless. As conservatism recedes from knowledge centers, conservatives come to seem less knowledgeable. Their opinions carry less intellectual and moral weight. Conservatives increasingly have internalized this weightlessness. Above all things, they feel judged — harshly and unfairly judged. They resent it.

Is to be enmired in the unsolvable moral dilemma of Donald Trump. Every day, President Trump does something astonishing and outrageous — from defaming military heroes to organizing payoffs to porn stars. He receives millions of dollars in payments from foreign entities, ignores ethics rules, courts dictators, insults allies, and blabs national secrets to the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office. He lies and lies.

To be a conservative in the age of Trump is to struggle every day whether to ignore, condone, or even outright justify the actions of Donald Trump. It’s a test, and the majority are failing in ways that will be remembered for a long time.

To be a conservative in the age of Trump is thus a heavy destiny — but not nearly as heavy or difficult as the destiny that awaits conservatives after Trump. This country will always need a politics for the non-left: a politics of continuity with the American past, of private enterprise and limited government, of prudent skepticism of grand schemes for human uplift. How can non-left politics redeem itself from the maelstrom of Trumpism? On a successful answer to that question, the future of the American experiment will turn.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic.

HENRY OLSEN

Anyone trying to understand what conservatism means post-Trump should look to the old English advice for brides on their wedding day: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Each phrase points toward an aspect of the new Trumpian conservatism.

Conservatives still believe in some of the old verities. We still support cutting taxes. We still back judges who judge rather than legislate from the bench. We are still are pro-life, pro-family, and friendly toward traditional Christian religion. We still support a strong, robust military that can protect America from conventional and unconventional foes.

New aspects of conservatism center on immigration and trade. Conservatives today largely back restricting the number and types of immigrants who come to our land. There are many arguments within this camp, but gone are the days when Bush-style immigration policies that winked at illegal immigration ruled the roost.

The same holds for trade. Conservative voters largely believe that free trade deals have cost America jobs, and even some conservative intellectuals and leaders are beginning to realize there is no Republican political majority for a trade policy that treats native-born Americans without a college degree as collateral damage in the war to eradicate global poverty.

This means that the new GOP has borrowed some of its old, pre-New Deal identity. Go back to the 1920s, the last time the Republican Party was the working person’s party, and you’ll find it was anti-immigration, pro-tariff, and suspicious of American involvement overseas.

The new conservatism is much more modern on all counts, but the giddy turn-of-the-millennium confidence is gone. If you find this shift distasteful or worse, chances are you have moved to the Democrats or are in that uneasy space occupied by the remaining Never Trump conservatives.

That doesn’t mean conservatives are wholly satisfied with their lot. Our president is crude, brash, often rash. His past leaves a lot to be desired, and all but the most starry-eyed “MAGA” man sometimes feels ashamed he’s our guy.

So, where does this leave conservatism? That depends on where you thought it was before he came on the scene. If you thought American conservatism was healthy pre-Trump, then you’re probably upset and unreconciled to the new age. But if, like me, you thought it was suffering from a terminal illness, one that unless treated quickly would bring about its demise, then you see the glass at least half-full. Trump is like a serious medication that causes painful side effects and which isn’t guaranteed to cure the patient. But given the options on hand when the GOP went to the metaphorical hospital in the 2016 primaries, he might have been the only hope it had.

Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and an adjunct professor at Villanova University.

BEN SASSE

Conservatism is gratitude and skepticism.

It is gratitude for the inherent dignity of every individual, and for all of the institutions and communities we inherit and create. But it is also skepticism of utopian visions that rely on coercion and force.

Conservatism is much more than simply anger at the increasingly cynical politics of Washington. Conservatives believe that the most important challenges and opportunities are almost always bigger than what governments can reach, even when government is working well. That is because government is about power, whereas the center of life is about love.

Conservatives want limited government because we believe in limitless human dignity. Our Constitution sets a framework for ordered liberty, based on our shared understanding that family and friendship, worship and community life are the things that give us meaning. When those start to crumble, politics fills the void and takes on too much meaning.

Our current screwed-up politics is, in part, a consequence of overreaching decisions made in Washington over the last few decades: the choice to turn judicial confirmations into hyperpartisan cage fights, the choice by Congress to surrender legislative power to unelected bureaucrats. But the deepest sources of our ache are not political.

As families and local communities have broken down, we have become lonelier. As traditional, stable work has disappeared, we have grown anxious. As local institutions — churches, Little Leagues, Rotary Clubs — have evaporated, we have lost a sense of common cause. To numb these losses, many Americans have turned to drugs.

Politics has become a type of drug. Americans feel more tied to TV talking-heads than to their next-door neighbors. And cable-news shouting matches and social-media smackdowns are ways of feeling like we’re part of something bigger, something important. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people who don’t have many face-to-face friends end up forming virtual mobs.

A conservatism suited not just to the next two years but to the next two decades must be re-oriented toward restoring, renewing, and protecting the institutions of private life.

We need strong, tight-knit families. Our neighborhoods need service organizations that bring isolated people together. We need educational institutions that understand the importance of the liberal arts to produce rooted and well-adjusted men and women during a time when our economy is moving in a more rootless and global direction. We need churches and religious organizations that are free to serve the least of these and to share the “good news” with people who haven’t heard much good news lately.

A conservatism worth its name must be focused on conserving the things that make life worth living: communities and ordered liberty above all. Progressivism is about government coercion pushing for what might work. Conservatism is primarily about what has worked for the neighbors we’re called to love.

Ben Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska.

W. JAMES ANTLE III

For a timely illustration of the tensions in modern American conservatism, look no further than Meghan McCain’s eulogy for her father. She praised the longtime Arizona senator, 2008 Republican presidential nominee, and war hero as a great man, listing his public deeds and enumerating his virtues. Yet, as she talked about her wedding and childhood skinned knees, it was clear she loved him not just for his greatness but first of all because he was hers.

At the time of his death, John McCain was perhaps the Right’s foremost exponent of America as an idea, a creedal nation with no roots in blood and soil. Under President Trump, who ran promising to “Make America Great Again,” conservatives have embraced nationalism and an enhanced sense of place. As the veteran conservative journalist John O’Sullivan has put it, “America is not just an idea; it is a nation.”

A healthy nationalism is similar to the love between parents and children. We don’t love our parents or children because they hold the correct philosophical views. We take pride in their accomplishments but already loved them before they accomplished anything. We don’t want our parents to beat up all the other parents on the block, and our love for our children is not manifest by enslaving other people’s children.

So it is with a country. As it happens, America is by many measures great. There is also much wisdom in the ideas that undergird the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But loving America is as much about the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Fenway Park (or, if you prefer, Yankee Stadium) as it about believing in natural rights that come from our Creator.

Nationalism isn’t always healthy. Just as the Cold War era fusionists sought to balance virtue and liberty, nationalism without the universalizing influences of religion and classical liberalism can quickly degenerate into something ugly and hateful. It can also devolve into worship of the state, the political expression of the nation which is nevertheless distinct from it.

Pre-Trump conservatism had grown too abstract and disconnected from the “mystic chords of memory” that bind a people together. But Trump himself is not up to the task of summoning Americans to a shared national identity bigger than party, race, or class because he is in many ways a small man.

Whether governed by Trump or McCain, America was already great, and it is ours. The task facing conservatives is to sustain that love of country while heeding Edmund Burke and trying to keep our country lovely.

W. James Antle III is editor of The American Conservative and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?