Conservatives have long quarreled strenuously among themselves about fundamental ideas and matters of principle, as well as practical political decisions such as whether Eisenhower or Nixon deserved conservative support or opposition, or whether Barry Goldwater’s insurgency was a good idea. But none of those past struggles comes close to the intensity and magnitude of the divide over President Trump.
This divide is not going away any time soon, nor should it. Infighting has strengthened the conservative movement over the years. But there’s reason to worry that the deepening bitterness of the conservative Trump wars could shatter the coalition at a moment when the Democratic Party’s lurch to the far-left might create the greatest crisis our political order has ever faced. In its current state, it is possible we could have a leftist government in power that would make Barack Obama look like a Rockefeller Republican by comparison.
This is not a setup for arguing that the Never Trump community should shut up and fall in line. Rather, it is a plea to take some steps to avoid a self-inflicted disaster on all sides. Shortly before the 2016 election, I half-joked in the Weekly Standard that some of my friends are for Trump and some of my friends are against Trump, and I’m going to stick with my friends! After I had declared myself to be anti-Trump early on, I mostly retired from the fray, being neither an activist nor a member of the punditocracy involved at the center of things. Nowadays I’m primarily attempting the long game in academia, far from the Beltway fleshpots I used to inhabit. My current disposition toward Trump I borrow from Lincoln’s remark, “Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”
Trump’s personal defects, political inexperience, and conduct of the office remain what they are, and his critics are quite correct to worry that he may do long-term damage to the Republican Party and to conservative causes, despite the many short-term policy victories his administration has delivered. I’ll be relieved if he doesn’t seek a second term, but I might well be satisfied to see him defeat an irresponsible leftist Democratic nominee and resume my daily white-knuckle exercise of turning on the news or opening Twitter. And also happily defending him from the relentless bad faith attacks from the left. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likes to say, sometimes there are no good choices. Or use Donald Rumsfeld’s famous line about going into battle with the army you have. I’m happy to plead guilty to being on the bubble and accept the criticism that comes with it, and I’ve received plenty.
The increasing bitterness of the two sides of the Trump divide toward each other is a cause for grieving. Permanent divisions and lasting bitterness among us will not serve the country well. As perhaps the only person who has written for both the Bulwark and American Greatness, though not about Trump, I have, at various times over the past two years, attempted privately to mediate some of the name-calling and harsh things said about particular individuals I thought were not fair or accurate, with varying degrees of effect. This is getting progressively more difficult to do.
With the imminent release of the Mueller report, a possible impeachment, and a possible primary challenge to Trump in 2020, the sense of looming open war on the right is intensifying. I do not propose to prevent this war, nor repair behind a treacly “can’t we all just get along” pose. So last week I sent out by email what I called a “closed letter” to a large number of people I know, proposing “A Geneva Convention for the Trump Wars.” With this article, I hereby make it a traditional “open letter,” in part because of a remarkable coincidence.
I was hoping to conduct this exercise without naming anyone directly, but the day after I sent my note, there appeared McKay Coppins’ article in the Atlantic, “Naming and Shaming the Pro-Trump Elite.” It has some sensational and bracing copy, in particular characterizing Charlie Sykes as “want[ing] to shame and stigmatize the ‘bad actors’ in the conservative elite.” I fully agree with criticism of the figures Sykes mentions as “low-hanging fruit,” but it is another passage that raised eyebrows: “Asked for examples of prospective targets, Sykes doesn’t have to think long before rattling off a list of high-status commentators (Marc Thiessen, Hugh Hewitt), think tankers (Henry Olsen, Victor Davis Hanson), and politicos (Bill Bennett).” There are other passages that read more pungently, though it should be noted they are in Coppins’ words, and not direct quotes from Sykes or anyone else at the Bulwark, such as: “To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.”
A number of people wrote to say they assumed I had written my note in response to the Coppins article, but in fact I had not read it. And if I had seen it, I would have held off a while. Although I disagree with Sykes that the big five “high-status” people he names deserve his scorn, I wouldn’t dissuade Sykes from his spirited position, for I am well aware of the vile abuse he and other Trump critics received in 2016. But it does make more salient my proposed “Geneva Convention for the Trump Wars,” which goes as follows:
1. Let’s try to confine our arguments purely to the substance of the issue at hand, minimize personal rancor, and leave possible motivations or commitments out of it. I think the model of this kind of exchange was the recent back-and-forth between Roger Kimball and Jonah Goldberg about Trump’s character, or Conrad Black in dispute with George Will. Good, tough, thoughtful arguments — but no gratuitous, snide, or personal animadversions.
2. Can we retire some by-now worn-out terms and phrases, like “Never Trump,” “cuckservatives,” “Conservatism, Inc.,” “the MAGA-hat crowd/MAGA country,” “Trumpkins,” “Trump Kool-Aid drinkers,” perhaps “populist” (this one is admittedly a little trickier, so use with a warning label), perhaps “neocon” (also tricky), and worse? I confess to liking the term “big orange man,” but I’m going to try to refrain. We can still argue hard with each other without indulging epithets, fun and satisfying as they always are in the moment.
3. We should attempt to emulate the spirit of Lincoln’s reply to Horace Greeley’s famous attack on Lincoln’s leadership in 1862: “If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.”
4. Grace note 1: Individual style and viewpoint are not always clearly perceived or appreciated, especially when it employs subtlety and irony. For example, consider a hypothetical tweet-maven, perhaps with initials “BK,” who likes to attack Trump, but does so with a mix of serious criticisms and whimsical humor. My suggestion to people who dislike or disagree with such a hypothetical composite person — let it go.
5. Grace note 2: Similarly, the divide between “elites” and “populists” is real, and people who engage regularly in a direct, unsubtle way — perhaps a hypothetical person with the made-up initials “JK” — should be respected as a voice that is in fact not well-represented in the salons of Washington, D.C., and New York. Thus, when a remark or argument seems intemperate — let it go.
6. Grace note 3: A lot of hard things have been said in particular moments since the beginning of the Trump era. It might do to clear the air to offer some apologies — privately, not publicly — whether fully deserved or not.
7. See point 3 above.
I invited responses directly to me, including just “Steve, you ignorant slut!” if anyone so chose. All of the responses I’ve received have been polite and courteous to me — I credit this entirely to my round, happy face — but a lot of them have the character of the schoolkids who tell the teacher, “Yeah, I was bad, but he started it!” It is a fair question whether attacks on opposing camps are a useful tactic to wrest control of conservatism’s future, but at some point, personal attacks elide into the social media mob mentality from which no good comes. There’s a lesson from history we should heed. When the new left decided in the 1960s to “murder liberalism in its official robes” with personal attacks on leading liberals, it contributed to the collapse of liberalism.
To be sure, the liberalism of that era was exhausted and confused and deserved its eclipse by the rising conservative movement that culminated in Reagan’s election. Conservatism today arguably suffers from a similar exhaustion and confusion. There is one fact pro- and anti-Trump conservatives ought to converge around, and Bill Kristol stated it late in the Coppins article: “Everyone understands the post-Trump conservative agenda is a very big task.” Perhaps the most shocking thing about Trump is that in winning the GOP nomination and the election, he revealed the conservative movement to be a paper tiger. We thought we were an essential pillar in Republican politics, that no one could get the nomination or win a general election without us, and that our policy ideas were popular with at least a plurality if not a majority of voters. The dimensions and causes of this state of affairs require a separate article or two, but I persist in believing that whether you love him or hate him, Trump was the agent to blast us out of a complacent slumber with the old conservative agenda that was steadily losing ground.
Steven F. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and a visiting lecturer at Berkeley Law.
