Early in the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, the higher ups at the Republican National Committee handed down a research request: Make Bob Novak look bad.
Novak had irked the White House with one of his columns. Maybe it was the one reporting on the “incompetence and neglect by the White House” in Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Perhaps it was one of his columns undermining the justification for the Iraq War.
Whatever the cause, the effect was that RNC researchers went to work trying to call up past Novak columns that could in retrospect make him look bad.
I worked for Novak through most of Bush’s presidency. Novak had been cut off from access to the White House by then because he had written repeatedly against the Iraq War and spoken against it on television. For a guy who made his trade “intercepting the lines of communication,” being so cut off was no small thing, but the Bush White House was big on demanding loyalty.
The funny thing is, Novak was not necessarily more critical of W. than he had been of the elder George Bush. And Reagan, Ford, and Nixon all ended up on the receiving end of plenty of Novak’s barbed columns.
What had changed was the expectations. In Bushworld, the assumption was that his friends and ideological allies would support him, and only his enemies would ever knock him. “You’re either with us or against us,” to put it in Bushian terms.
This rule applied to Republican officials, conservative activists, and right-leaning journalists. This demand resulted in Novak’s exile. But from countless others, loyalty was obtained.
Tom DeLay’s office would tell me in those days that DeLay saw his job not as advancing a conservative agenda, but simply as “passing the president’s agenda.” (Hence No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, overspending, and so on.) The blogosphere produced a small army of pundits who saw their roles the same way: At a GOP briefing at the 2008 Democratic convention, when an RNC staffer took questions, the first question was, “How can we help?”
Opposition to Bush made one a “RINO.” Critique of his Iraq War made one “unpatriotic.”
Novak, who frequently implored young people to “always love your country, and never trust your government,” didn’t fit in. He was always independent — he implored me to be independent not only of the GOP, but also of the conservative movement. Constantly reporting and digging up what some people wanted buried, he was also constantly skeptical.
It’s too bad more people didn’t follow Novak’s path. It’s too bad loyalty to the president was made the lodestar.
And it turns out that many of the maladies of today’s Right and today’s GOP are traceable to the same Bush-era tendencies that Novak found so noxious.
Today it is said more explicitly that Trump is conservatism, Trump is the Republican Party, and even Trump is America. If you oppose Trump, you are opposing conservatism, the GOP, and America. If you don’t stand with Trump, you stand against your country. Rightly seen as a mania today, the attitude was present under Bush, too. The deification of Trump is just one step beyond the “with us or against us” zeitgeist under Bush.
But some of those so ready to toss the “unpatriotic” label at Bush critics such as Novak ended up on the other side this time around. The most pro-war elements of the Bush-era Right are overrepresented among the crowd we could call the Still Never Trumpers.
The writers who enforced ideological uniformity with lines like “if it’s good enough for the president, it’s good enough for me,” have now totally abandoned conservatism, or at least decided that opposing Trump is the only worthy task of a true conservative.
Even now, when Trump isn’t on the ballot, they are still Never Trump. They oppose everything he does, even the good things. They see it as moral error to call “balls and strikes.”
The irony is that these folks, just like the Trump loyalists, are letting Trump make up their mind for them. The loyalists are always with Trump, and the Still Never Trumpers are always against him. Perhaps some of those Iraq hawks’ excess of loyalty 16 years ago reflected a shallow rudder to their conservatism, thus leaving them to be tossed by the winds when the tempest that is Trump arrived.
Novak’s beliefs were, in contrast, grounded in constant reporting, constant checking, fierce independence, and — unusual for a daily journalist — wide reading of classics, history, and even poetry.
Novak died 10 Augusts ago. I miss him. As we look at a conservative movement that is mostly beholden to a president who doesn’t deserve our loyalty, except for a dissident rump whose only principle is opposing that same president, it’s obvious that the loss of Novak was not just to those of us who knew and loved him, but to all of journalism, to the conservative movement, and to the country he loved.
