Last week, I found myself in the odd position of getting attacked for being a liberal. Was it because I suddenly endorsed socialized healthcare? No. Mused that Beto O’Rourke was maybe onto something with this whole gun confiscation thing? No. Embraced late-term abortion? A 90% marginal tax rate? Wore a Che Guevara T-shirt to a climate strike? No, no, and no.
What happened was that I read the transcript of President Trump’s phone call in which he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Joe Biden and concluded that it was bad news. That conclusion put me at odds with many conservatives who see the Ukraine story as entirely without merit, just the latest act in a long-running effort by the Left and their allies inside and outside government to take down Trump. To find fault with Trump in this case, from their perspective, is to side with the bad guys.
It would be easy to chalk this up to a debate among Trump’s conservative critics and his die-hard supporters, but it actually reveals a much deeper schism among conservatives, of which Trump is only the most prominent flashpoint.
Schisms among conservatives are nothing new. For as long as modern conservatism has been identified as a political movement in the U.S., conservatives have been at war among themselves. But typically, the divisions have involved ideology. We had Rockefeller Republicans vs. Goldwaterites and, eventually, Reaganites. There were libertarians vs. social conservatives. Limited government advocates vs. “compassionate” conservatives. Neoconservatives vs. noninterventionists. What’s happening now, during the Trump era, is something markedly different.
Sure, there are still plenty of battles about issues. Trump’s brand of populism has challenged other conservative factions when it comes to trade, immigration, foreign policy, and entitlement reform, among other topics. But this does not explain the deep divisions that have emerged among many self-identified conservatives in the Trump era that are completely separate from any actual policy disputes.
To many conservatives, we’re living in an era in which the Left controls the culture, the media, the universities, and the federal bureaucracy, and they are willing to use these levers of power (often in coordination) to crush conservatives and everything they value, even when they lose elections.
This isn’t to say that these conservatives do not care about any policies or that other conservatives don’t care about bias in the media or academia. The division comes because one segment of conservatives sees these cultural and institutional fights as ancillary to the more important ideological war over the underlying policies. But to the other segment of conservatives such cultural battles aren’t ancillary to the fight but the central fight. One side believes that highlighting and pushing back against these cultural and institutional biases is worthwhile, but not at the cost of higher principles. But the other side believes that this battle is primary and must be fought by any means necessary.
One of the most public battles among conservative commentators this year came between the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari and National Review’s David French. It emerged after Ahmari was incensed at drag queen story hours at public libraries and pointed the finger at French as a symbol of conservatives who complacently tout values of civil debate and persuasion in the face of an existential threat to the culture. As the war of words waged on, even seasoned conservatives had a difficult time figuring out what everybody was actually arguing about. Both men are social conservatives and share many values in common. But ultimately the differences stemmed from Ahmari’s generalized sense that, “Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values.”
Another good example has been the ongoing fight about bans of some conservative personalities from social media. Conservatives may generally agree that forums should allow for open speech, but there’s a significant disagreement over the importance of this issue, as well as the proper response. One set of conservatives may think, “This person shouldn’t have been banned, but he/she was saying offensive things, and a private company has every right to ban whoever they want.” But to other conservatives, deplatforming is an issue of extreme importance, another effort by the Left to silence conservatives and control political discourse in the predominant modern forums for communication. In the face of this assault, libertarian nostrums about free enterprise are of little relief, and government action against social media companies to police bias is justified.
It’s no surprise that the single most unifying moment of the Trump presidency for conservatives was the confirmation fight of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In that case, there was a coordinated effort by liberal activists, Democrats, and the media to take down a highly qualified Trump nominee on the basis of uncorroborated accusations. At the same time, Kavanaugh was a pick who was favored by establishment Republicans, and he represented a chance to tilt the balance of the Supreme Court to the Right for years. It was, in other words, an ideologically and politically significant fight that also involved the broader battle against liberal institutions.
But overall, the Trump era has exposed a deep fracture among conservatives who for many years may have thought of each other as allies. Trump has been unrelenting in his verbal assault on the Left — Democrats, tech companies, the media, and the “deep state.” During the campaign, his past deviations from conservatism — on healthcare, abortion, guns, property rights, and other issues — became less important due to the cultural battle he was waging, a phenomenon often summarized as “but he fights.”
As he’s kept it up as president, for many conservatives, defending Trump has become a way of fighting back against these corrupt liberal institutions, whereas to criticize Trump (for his words or deeds) is seen as a betrayal. In the face of an all out assault on Trump by the Left, it’s suddenly treated as quaint to lament the return to $1 trillion deficits let alone raise alarms about the longer-term debt crisis that he has only made worse.
The way his defenders see it, from the outset of his presidency, there was a coordinated effort to delegitimize Trump by portraying him as an asset of Vladimir Putin who had conspired with Russia to hack the 2016 election, something that Robert Mueller’s investigation was unable to establish. Now, they see another coordinated effort to remove (or at least badly damage) Trump based on a manufactured scandal. To say that Trump did anything bad with regard to Ukraine, to publicly bristle at his talk about “treason” charges against House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, is to do the Left’s bidding and fail to acknowledge their misdeeds.
As the Democrats’ impeachment drags on and policy battles get deprioritized, this civil war among conservatives over the rules of engagement is only likely to get more heated, as ideological fights take a back seat.
