Into the Wilderness

Conservatism heads into exile.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” – Rudyard Kipling

Before the election, I wrote that both Harris and Trump presented threats to America’s constitutional order and that neither was fit to be president. When we woke up on Wednesday morning, we learned which threat we were going to face. (Unless, of course, Trump fumbles so badly he hands Congress and the presidency to a Democratic supermajority in 2028, in which case we end up experiencing both threats before the end of the decade.) 

As Jonah Goldberg wrote, there are upsides to everything bad and downsides to everything good. There are silver linings to Trump’s victory. But we should be clear that these silver linings by no means erase the moral stain of electing a man who tried to instigate a coup last time around and whose failure in that regard was due as much to his own incompetence as it was to the strength of American institutions. We’ve elected slaveholders. We elected Woodrow Wilson to two terms, two terms which gave Mussolini and Hitler some ideas they would put to work in Europe, two terms the effects of which took two presidents (Harding and Coolidge) to full dismantle. To paraphrase Adam Smith, a nation can stand a great deal of ruin and keep going. We will survive four years of Trump. Anything he does can be undone at a future date. 

But we should expect that he will do bad things. He will attempt to violate the Constitution. He may stab our allies in the back, the way Joe Biden did to the Afghan government. He may bring legal action against political opponents (which many, completely unaware that Wilson jailed hundreds of political prisoners without trial, will deem “unprecedented”). 

And it will be a dark time for the right. A generation is growing up without any memory of a conservative party. All they know is Trump and populist-nationalism. J.D. Vance will do his best to sideline traditional conservatives and to contend against conservative priorities in the new administration. Being set in my ways and awfully concerned with the “true” meaning of words which others seek to change, I will refuse to use the word “conservative” to describe J.D. Vance. But most of the political media will do otherwise, and a generation will forget that the word ever had anything to do with limited government and free markets. We should be prepared for the possibility that it will be many years before there is serious appetite in the American public for hawkish foreign policy and economic conservatism again. 

And even the definition of social conservatism is changing. The Moral Majority has given way to the “barstool conservatives” who are not opposed to abortion and certainly do not believe there is anything wrong with pornography or premarital sex. Social conservatives made their pact in 2016 with a serial adulterer who cameoed in porn films and that pact has only heightened the erosion of virtue which has been ongoing for decades in this country. 

I think we also need to be clear about something else. The first Trump term created profound temptations and challenges for conservatives. The majority of public figures changed their principles, either joining Trump and condoning his platform and personal behavior, or joining the Democrats and repudiating many of the principles they once espoused. It was a confusing time. The lines grew less clear with every year. The arguments became convoluted. I think we should expect that this will continue under a second Trump term. There will be serious decisions to be had about where to go, whether to join a side, how to appeal to potential converts. I think we should be ready for the possibility that each of us will be tested in some way, and that some of us will end up in different positions. 

I don’t know whether that will be the case. And I hope that it won’t. But already the lines are beginning to blur again, and Trump hasn’t even taken office yet. It will be even harder to resist the calls to join a tribe when he officially takes office and begins implementing policy. 

Donald Trump:

It’s important to clear something up in case any of our readers weren’t sure about this. The Freemen Newsletter is not a Never-Trump publication. It is not a “post-Trump” publication. It is not an anti-Trump publication, although none of our writers supported Donald Trump or the MAGA movement. It is a publication dedicated to conserving and renewing American constitutionalism. As I’m sure everyone else who writes here can attest, that mission is not defined by support of, or opposition to, one man. 

You will note there is no mention of Donald Trump in the mission statement written by Justin Stapley. That isn’t an oversight. It reflects the reality that while Donald Trump will someday fade from our political scene the principles of American constitutionalism, patriotism, the rule of law, individual liberty, free markets, Judeo-Christian virtue, and peace through strength will remain the same. After Trump won in 2016, there were many on the right who claimed that his narrow victory “changed everything,” and that we could not go back to the “dead consensus.” They still claim this. 

Today, there are those on the Never Trump “right” who will claim something similar. Reagan conservatism is dead. It’s time to give up and move over to the Democratic Party or join the libertarians or even the MAGA movement. 

My response has always been the same. I thought conservatives were supposed to believe in conserving something. I thought this was supposed to be the side which believed in sticking to principles even when the very ground beneath us shifted and when the vicissitudes of time and fate were threatening to tear apart everything in which we believed. I thought, in fact, that not changing was the point. 

It is the point. The point of having a conservative movement is to preserve that which is good and noble against both the opponents of such things and against the natural wear and tear of time which inevitably bring low all things, but which can be beaten back for a little while. I will not make predictions about what a second Trump term will hold. It is possible that the Republican Party will not depart as strongly from conservative principles as some imagine, and it is possible that the nationalists will continue their repudiation of everything we hold dear and that the “three-legged stool” will move further into irrelevance in the mode of Albert Jay Nock and other “superfluous” men who held fast to conservative principles in the 1930s. 

Nock is instructive here. He spent decades in the political wilderness. I imagine that the 1930s must have looked as bleak at times as some of us imagine the future looks today. Looming statism, decreased political appetite for fiscal responsibility, social upheaval, increased appetite for strongmen and radical politics, turmoil abroad, rising isolationism at home. The dark days lasted a long time, but they did come to an end. It’s possible that those of us on the right who believe in free markets and limited government at home, along with hawkishness abroad and traditional virtue in social life, will be cast out into the political wilderness of irrelevancy for a long time. Maybe for decades. 

But that is no reason not to hold fast to that which is true. Our job is the same as it was before the election, and it will remain the same. We will call balls and strikes. We will continue to argue for fidelity to the rule of law, originalism and textualism in court decisions, public and private morality, a posture of strength on the world stage, fiscal prudence, and economic freedom. When the Trump administration acts in ways that accord with those principles, we will praise it. When it does not, we will criticize it. When Donald Trump (as he inevitably will) does something unsavory, untoward, immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional, we will not carry water for him. We will be harsh and unsparing in our criticism. But we will not let opposition to anything Donald Trump says or does blind us to similar failures on the other side, and when Democrats (as they inevitably will) do something unsavory, untoward, immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional in the name of stopping him, we will likewise be unstinting in our criticism. 

For my part, I have no loyalty to either side. As Jay Nordlinger put it, “People like me are often accused of ‘Reagan nostalgia’ or ‘zombie Reaganism.’ The principles and values we espouse long pre-dated Reagan and they will outlive all mortals. They are sometimes popular, sometimes unpopular. But they are right and true.”

Where We Are Today:

This recent fight over Senate Majority Leader offers a case example of the aforementioned confusion. Some in Trump's coalition argued that Rick Scott is the "more conservative" choice, because he signaled that he saw the position not as leader of one chamber in an independent branch of Congress, but rather as Donald Trump's right-hand man. John Thune and John Cornyn may both be rock-ribbed Reaganite conservatives, but because they were too closely associated with Mitch McConnell, they were "RINOs." I agree with Dave Bahnsen that it's preposterous to suggest that Scott is more conservative than Thune. Apparently, Rick Scott's decision to appear on Laura Loomer's podcast demonstrated his conservative bona fides, because in our fake digital age which mistakes virtual virtue signaling for real accomplishments conservative governance matters less than association with low-IQ weirdos who believe 9/11 was an inside job. 

But the Mollie Hemingways and other Trump sycophants of this world know that if they yell loudly enough that Rick Scott is the "more conservative choice," a lot of folks will believe them. Something in the human brain understands loyalty to a single individual better than a set of consistent principles, and therefore the word "conservative" is increasingly diluted by folks who actively misuse it in an effort to make it synonymous with "supports Donald Trump no matter what fool thing he says or does." I have written before about the active misuse of words in political contexts in order to distort their meanings, the goal of which is always to confuse readers and win arguments by changing people's perceptions of reality. It wasn't new when George Orwell wrote about it in "Politics and the English Language" and it isn't new today. It will continue apace under a Trump administration. 

So this is what we will be dealing with in the coming years. The vast forces arrayed on both sides against three-legged stool conservatism will continue to work to tear down. A few will work to preserve. The work of preservation is hard enough even when the majority of voices aren't actively seeking to dissemble and delegitimize, but it will grow harder. Someone will need to carry the fire, because it isn't going to carry itself. This is what institutions such as the Freemen Newsletter will exist to do – to preserve conservative ideas with clear arguments in the face of forces seeking to confuse people and overthrow movement conservatism. There are already institutions which do this vital work - National Review, of course, but also The Dispatch, Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal - but the balance of voices are arrayed on the other side, and it will take more institutions doing the same work to contend against the bad arguments which rule our day. It helps that we are on Substack, where there is an appetite for political content, especially on the right, but which is mostly populated by populist, conspiratorial, and New Right voices. There is a need here, and I hope a market. Perhaps such a market can be created, but that will take hard work, the hard work of persuasion. 

But we have no choice. As Barney Quick likes to say, "it is late in the day." As Brian McGrath likes to say, "winter is coming." We didn't choose the world in which we live. But we are here, and the question for each of us is what we will do about it. The sun may go down. Winter may come. We may spend our entire lives in the wilderness. But if we don't shrink from the task before us, even when it is difficult and our outlook is grim, perhaps someday there will be a dawn and a springtime.