No Higher Principle Than Expedience

Republicans Should Just Stop With Their Highfalutin Pretense

What surprised me most during the early days of Covid was the almost complete silence regarding any principled commitment to freedom. Principles inform choices, especially in times of uncertainty. The behavior of the political class was uniformly a disappointment. Not as much where Democrats were concerned, because they have been telegraphing their totalitarian aspirations for at least two generations. If you don’t know by now that the Democrats view you as a kind of livestock, to be farmed and harvested, then you are willfully blind. Their rush to exploit the crisis for their totalitarian goals was understandable even if repugnant, as per usual. Democrats generally have the morals of Orcs, and it should surprise no one when they act according to their kind.

But Republicans are the party that prattles on about liberty and freedom. They’re the ones who are supposed to be manning the barricades against government overreach and depredation. (Please. If you’re going to laugh, at least try not to snort.) Republicans have been LARPing their nostalgic Americana bona fides since at least the first George H.W. Bush campaign. Reagan may have been the last principled Republican presidential nominee who was not role-playing his own conservatism. The Bush’s seem not to have really believed in anything except, as George Will once wrote, “that people like them should be president”. And we all know how Romney and McCain turned out.

By the time Trump came along in 2016, the U.S. electorate was rife with Republican voters who were sick and tired of winning debates while losing elections. This is something Conservatism, Inc., the predecessors to Never-Trumpism, seem never to have grasped. At some point, all of the principles expressed in clever and glib editorials need to be made real in the life of actual human beings. But the legacy conservative pundit class seemed to have insulated itself from the practical realities of the lives of their readers. The writers and thinkers of Conservatism Inc. increasingly came across like former high school debating champions who were making a living by re-hashing the same arguments that won the day at debate tournaments a generation ago. Notwithstanding their superior literary skill, in practical terms they started coming across to many voters more like a hapless Barney Fife than a competent Dirty Harry.

I met a man once who was a professional Elvis impersonator. Over time, he kind of lost himself in his own Elvis impersonation. He became unable to distinguish himself from the character he sometimes played. I ran across him in the parking lot of a church, all alone, dressed as Elvis, talking like Elvis, forlornly looking for someone he knew who went to that church.

This is the way Never Trumpers come across to me now. Like they are lost in personas from a nostalgic time and place. Re-typing the lines and phrases from back in the glory days, they perceive the world as if it is still 1989. They are mystified by why their old political debating tricks have lost their former appeal. They would have happily gone on forever losing one election after another, all while writing the best and most witty editorials about the superiority of conservative ideas.

This kind of cultural myopia seems to have been a longstanding problem with Republicans. All the way back in the 1950’s, Whittaker Chambers recognized this tendency and made some startlingly prescient predictions which seem painfully accurate regarding the present Republican establishment.

“If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to the masses of people - why somebody else will…The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find at the back an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel…”

The picture of irrelevant old men, running shops that no one goes into, is such an apt description - almost eery - of what the Never-Trumpers seem to have become.

My point here is not to make a case for Trump. Not at all. I only mean to observe that, in the absence of vigorous principled leadership, one which acts on those principles, people will opt for transactional leaders over a party populated by a lot of nostalgic posers.

Establishment Republicans should stop acting so surprised.

Trump is a transactional leader. He promises what he needs to promise to assemble a coalition of voters. He cuts deals. Note his recent moderation on abortion. He is “reading the room” as they say, and making what he thinks are necessary adjustments to facilitate the electoral “transaction”. I’m explaining, I’m not necessarily approving of transactional candidates. But I’m explicitly contrasting a Trumpian politician from establishment politicians. Trump, for the most part, worked to keep his promises during his first term. He was abysmal on personnel and naive for far too long about the administrative state. But in general, notwithstanding enormous and gratuitous obstacles placed in his way, he kept many of his promises.

What is confusing about Trump to the traditional political analyst is that he does not fit neatly on the continuum of their normal dichotomy between left and right. I myself don’t think he’s either. He seems to be entirely a utilitarian pragmatist. I don’t think he has too many abiding policy principles beyond general intuitions and what seems like a genuine affection for his country. While he does not intentionally plan on fleecing Americans, his seemingly ad hoc spending policies may ultimately result in that very outcome.

Trump is first and foremost a deal maker. There’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get vibe with Trump, where most establishment politicians blow carefully polled image consultant smoke in our eyes. Thus, with legacy politicians you’re getting a pig in a poke, where with Trump you’re kind of getting what it looks like you’re getting, though it won’t be entirely satisfying to either left or right. I have wondered if Trump’s less polished but more transparent persona is one of the reasons establishment politicos hate him so. Maybe he is to legacy politics what Google Adwords was to legacy advertising. Mel Karmazin, then head of CBS Radio, famously told the founders of Google, when they presented data on the transparent measurability of online ads, “You’re ****ing with the magic, boys.”

“I loved the model that I had then. At that point I had… I was the CEO of  CBS and I had a model where you buy a commercial… if you’re an advertiser you buy a commercial in the Super Bowl and, at that time, you paid two-and-a-half million dollars for a spot and had no idea if it worked. I mean, you had no idea if it sold product… did any good… I loved that model! That was a great model! And why …if I can get away with that model… if I’m in the business where I can sell advertising that way, why wouldn’t I want to do it?

No return on investment. And you know how everybody looks for return on investment? We had a a business model that didn’t worry about return on investment and then here comes Google. They screwed it up. They went to all these advertisers and said, we’ll let you know exactly what it is.” - Mel Karmazin

“No return on investment.” That pretty much describes the experience of a normal Republican voter. By contrast, Trump’s transparent (seeming) lack of artifice, along with his willingness to actually do whatever, without regard to normal political boundaries, drives conventional political and media types batty.

For Trump, malleability is inherent in the transactional nature of what he is offering. But establishment Republicans haven’t been offering themselves as deal makers so much as principled leaders in service to America’s founding ideals. Even though hardly any these vaunted ideals ever quite seem to show up as vigorously pursued policies or laws, establishment Republicans nevertheless seem surprised that there has emerged a very large cohort of Republican voters who doubt the Establishment’s principled commitment to American ideals.

The problem with principles, of course, is the way they have of extracting an uncomfortable sacrifice from those who purport to hold them. Alas, there are many attributes which are generally characteristic of modern politicians, but an inclination toward self sacrifice isn’t usually one of them.

Here we return to Whittaker Chambers, who again offers helpful insight into these questions. Chambers was a principled man of action, and one who paid an enormous personal price for living according to his principles. In a letter to his children, explaining to them why he had done what he did, he said this:

“In time…you will ask yourselves the question: What was my father? I will give you an answer: I was a witness. A witness, in the sense I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.”

Principled commitments carry personal risk. And “when the challenge comes” is the very moment you discover just how real someone’s principles are. C.S. Lewis observed that “courage is not the only virtue but it is the form of every virtue at the testing point.” (I think he was paraphrasing Aristotle.) “Courage” is not the word I would use to describe our political class. Other words come to mind, “craven” first among them.

Our political class, during the Covid challenge which entailed maximum uncertainty, acquiesced to bureaucratic tyranny instead of aggressively defending liberty. We should take careful note of that reaction and never forget it. The barn was on fire, and very few politicians trusted the good sense of their fellow citizens enough to choose liberty over the jackboot of social control. This was not a small reveal on the part of the politicians.

As I wrote earlier, this is entirely unsurprising where the Democrats are concerned. They are really just an organized grift, operating to fleece the American people. They don’t even bother trying to hide it that much any more. But the Republicans have always talked a big game. Sure, people have jokingly referred to Republicans as “the stupid party”, or “the Washington Generals”, or the “permanent bipartisan fusion party”, because their actions tend to vacillate between incompetence and outright complicity with their own supposed opposition. But during Covid, Republicans were unable to successfully obscure their own **ahem** malleable principles - so malleable they were practically gelatinous - because the urgent timeline prevented them from exploiting the normal Washington practice of disguising their actions in the fog of the news cycle. Extended news cycles are a lifeline for politicians behaving badly, because people who are not news-obsessed usually tend to lose the plot and forget what came before.

It would be nice if we could convince ourselves that Covid was a one-time aberration. I myself would like to believe that Republicans just panicked, have learned something from the experience, and next time they will of course show more fidelity to their highfalutin principled commitment to freedom.

Alas, we have a recent existence proof that will pop the tempting delusional bubble that Republicans have recovered any substantive commitment to the principles of freedom. Though Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, they nevertheless recently approved a constitutionally dubious re-authorization for warrantless searches. Even though the Department of Justice has repeatedly abused this power, in one notorious case in order to engage in election interference by illegally spying on a Republican presidential candidate, the Republicans still could not muster a winning opposition.

Now someone will blather on about legislative technicalities, how it’s all very complex and blah blah blah. Doesn’t matter. They didn’t get it done even though they supposedly hold the levers of power.

This is me listening to exculpatory arguments about Republican legislative failures.

I’m sure there are, here and there, good reasons for Republican impotence. Somewhere down in the jockeying for votes and legislative minutia things can happen. I get that. But I guess what makes it all suspect is the appalling consistency of their alleged incompetence.

“Consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.” - James V. Forrestal

I would prefer to live in a time where the political class is filled with men and women of principle. Statesmen who are willing to pay any price to see that American ideals are manifest in law and public policy. But we do not live in such a time.

Time to vote in a way for which the return-on-investment is not zero.