Three Weeks to Go

Time to talk about anything but the polls.

This week, I’m going to write about debates instead of events, specifically the debates between intellectuals regarding the election, the state of the Republican Party, and the future of the American right. In all likelihood, readers will find this more interesting than a column about polling trends.

David Brooks had a column in the Atlantic last week called, “Confessions of a Republican Exile.” He didn’t write that headline, but it’s a good summary of his argument. He waxes eloquent about what he admired in the pre-Trump Republican Party, calls himself a “Whig,” explains why Donald Trump convinced him to leave the conservative movement, and concludes with his uneasiness about his new home in the Democratic Party. 

Even before Trump, Brooks was fairly moderate in his commitment to conservatism. He describes his social conservatism as “believing that the universe has a moral order to it, that absolute right and wrong exist, and that we are either degrading our souls or elevating our souls with every little thing we do,” and that “the strength of our society is based on the strength of our shared moral and social foundation.” But he admits that on “gay marriage or trans issues,” he holds “what would be considered progressive positions.” His small-c conservative acknowledgement of universal moral truth is all well and good, but a century ago it would have been almost unquestionable in either party (with the exception of early twentieth-century progressive intellectuals). 

Brooks talks of his “gag reflex” towards wokeness, laments racial identitarianism, and castigates the “culture of narcissism” on the left. But he also says that “Blue World… has a greater commitment to the truth,” that it “is a place more amenable to disagreement,” and that it has a greater capacity for self-correction. 

Well. There’s much to unpack here. First, I think Brooks is thinking wishfully about his adopted home. Like many Never Trumpers, he is willing to overlook many of the Democratic Party’s flaws because he believes Trumpism to be a greater threat. While there is a kernel of truth to his argument, the fact that he wants it to be true means he is less clear-eyed than he might be. Too many people in America today badly want one side to be good, and they will go to great lengths to convince themselves that it is. This causes them to overlook major flaws in their chosen side. 

It's true that the mainstream media is larger, and therefore more diverse and competitive, than right-wing media. The concentration of right-wing media makes it more susceptible to hogwash (the stolen election). All media which isn’t explicitly right-wing is left-of-center, but that ranges from the tepid center-left to the woke communist, and within that wide range are a number of outlets with incentives to keep competitors accountable. 

However, the mainstream press is often blind to its bias, pretending instead that “liberal media” is a right-wing myth. The behavior of the moderators in the recent debates is one example. Another is the wagon-circling whenever Fox News “pounces” on some failure of the mainstream media, as Ruy Texeira has aptly explained. 

If the left were really capable of self-correction, why is wokeness still with us? After years of hearing about how we’d passed “peak woke,” the usual networks are feting a man who famously called the 9/11 first responders inhuman, and whose latest book pretends that Israel is the Jim Crow South. And when Tony Dokoupil of CBS asked him some mildly tough questions, Dokoupil was forced to apologize to his colleagues. Even though he hedged his questions to Ta-Nehisi Coates with personal praise, Dokoupil’s questioning was deemed illegitimate and he was later reduced to tears in a staff meeting after his job was implicitly threatened. 

So much for Blue World being more amenable to disagreement. I wonder what Jack Phillips thinks about whether Blue World is amenable to disagreement, after a decade of legal battles against vicious groups maliciously hounding him for the sole reason that he refuses to bake cakes celebrating gay marriage and transitions. If Blue World was amenable to disagreement, I imagine they might be tolerant of freedom of conscience. But Jack Phillips’ sin wasn’t discrimination. It was his refusal to believe that gay marriage and gender transition are morally good. It was his belief, his conscience, his disagreement that was intolerable in Blue World. 

The real difference between the Trumpy Republican Party and the Democratic Party is that the latter is more sophisticated and the former is obvious and blatant and boorish. If you ask many educated Democrats today if they believe the 2016 or 2000 elections were free and fair, will their answers be any different from what Republican election truthers are saying about the 2020 election? Is the party which insists that Christine Blasey Ford has “her truth,” really more committed to the truth than the Republican Party? 

Brooks also praises the “bold experimentation” of FDR, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. It goes without saying that most readers here don’t support Obama’s “attempts to stave off a second depression and lift the economy again,” which gave us a prolonged downturn and an anemic recovery, or Joe Biden’s “pragmatic imagination to funnel money to parts of America that have long been left behind,” which I suppose doesn’t include lawless attempts to transfer money from working-class Americans to twenty-something college grads via loan “forgiveness.” But most Americans do admire FDR’s New Deal, without which they imagine the Great Depression would have been even worse. 

The Depression was unique. It was the worst and longest economic slowdown in American history, causing great suffering throughout the country. The government tried so very hard to help people, but the stock market crash was just too darn destructive and the economy was still struggling over a decade later. Surely, if it wasn’t for FDR’s “bold and persistent experimentation,” the Depression would have been even worse. 

It's amazing so many people buy this. I’m with Amity Shlaes on this question. We never would have had a depression without the statist policies of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, which drove a routine economic panic into an interminable slog. The American economy was perfectly capable of recovering from a stock market crash on its own, but a decade of economic planning ravaged America and prevented any meaningful recovery. Only when some of the more noxious New Deal policies were lifted did the economy manage to recover in the 1940s. 

For all his flaws, Trump did slash some regulations when he got into office in 2017. And what do you know? The sluggish growth we were all told during the Obama years was the “new normal” ended. Our economy boomed. 

I’ve gone on long, but this is further evidence for the theory that the Never Trumpers who switched over to the Democratic Party weren’t all that conservative to begin with, and the ones who didn’t aren’t going to be convinced to do so by arguments which praise policies we don’t support. 

Court Packing

Another Never Trumper, David French, has written positively about the proposed plan to limit Supreme Court justices to eighteen-year terms, which would immediately retire Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito. Supposedly, the plan gets around the Constitution’s explicit guarantee of life tenure by moving longer-serving justices to senior status and limiting the cases they hear. Which is like getting around the interstate commerce clause by deciding that all commerce is interstate. 

First, I’d like to say that I have a lot of respect for David French. Not very many people write pro-life columns for the New York Times’s audience, or defend gun rights in those pages. French served in Iraq for a year because he supported the war and considered it his duty to put his money where his mouth was. 

However, this is a terrible plan. He justifies it by referencing the ire of the left at the “politicized” court. He hopes this reform would help the court’s crisis of legitimacy. 

But why is the Supreme Court viewed as illegitimate by the left? For the same reason that the 2020 election is viewed as illegitimate by many on the right–because they didn’t get their way. Both sides seem to be suffering from a view that outcomes are only legitimate when they win, and that institutions are only legitimate when they favor their side. Rather than reify this belief, we should be doing everything in our power to disabuse partisans of it. We especially shouldn’t be trying reforms which involve using backdoors to get around constitutional requirements. 

Even if term-limiting the Supreme Court via a snaky reform was a good idea, the current environment is an utterly terrible time for it. We should be shoring up institutions, not tinkering with them while hoping to avoid unintended consequences. The only difference I can see between this proposed reform and Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial judicial reforms in 2023 is that Netanyahu was addressing a real problem. In both cases, the proposed reform is a naked power grab designed to wrest control of an institution from political opponents and use it to produce favored outcomes. In other words, it is an attack on the separation of powers. The Democrats have learned the wrong lesson from Donald Trump. Rather than ceasing their decades-long quest to erode the constitutional checks which stand in the way of progressive victories, they plan to accelerate it. 

The Larger Picture

The Supreme Court is apparently illegitimate because of Dobbs and Bruen. These and other recent conservative victories at the court represent some of the only real and meaningful conservative wins in the last two decades. Thus, the narrative goes, the Supreme Court is legitimate when it aggressively overturns laws in all fifty states in order to legalize infanticide, but not when it presses rewind. 

Time and again, progressives perform “bold experimentation,” and conservatives try to undo it. And time and again, conservatives are castigated as radical, evil, and dangerous for doing so. When Republicans make a cut to the rate of growth of government spending on entitlements or any other program (in other words, spending continues to go up, just slower), this is decried as heartless austerity. In my lifetime, austerity hasn’t been tried in America or Europe (contrary to what you’ve heard about the Greek debt crisis), but any minor cut is demagogued by the left as cruel. 

What I most object to is the idea that it’s okay to change the rules (again) when the left loses and when the right has finally begun to win meaningful victories. Of course, there are conservatives who rhetorically favor free markets and social traditionalism, but when any progress is made in that direction, they grow uneasy. While I think it’s silly when New Right types say, “conservatism hasn’t conserved anything,” moments like this remind me why they say it. 

In his column, David Brooks calls himself “at the rightward edge of the leftward tendency,” which is a good description of this fundamental worldview. He believes the purpose of the right is to slow the pace of change in order to ratify previous changes. 

But it is not my worldview, and it is not the worldview of most readers of this publication. I don’t believe the purpose of the right is to slow the left in its march towards progress, because my vision of a good society is not “leftism, but slower.” Like C.S. Lewis, I believe that if you’re heading in the wrong direction, progress consists of turning around and going the other way. My vision of a good society is not a progressive society, but a right-wing society. I don’t believe that slowing the transition to socialized medicine is a useful role for the conservative movement to play. I oppose socialized medicine and believe free market capitalism leads to the best medical care. 

Although he tells anyone over forty-five to give the Republican Party up for good, David Brooks has been far more praiseworthy than I about the populist turn of the GOP. Perhaps because he has never been particularly committed to free markets or small government. 

For all its flaws, the Republican Party at least pretends to care about conservatism. For those of us on the right, the Democratic Party has nothing to offer. Donald Trump doesn’t deserve my vote. He won’t get it. He shouldn’t get yours either. But Kamala Harris also doesn’t deserve our votes. 

Whoever wins will claim that voters (most of whom will have voted against the other candidate) have given him or her a mandate. This will be a lie. I would prefer not to lend false legitimacy to whomever wins by voting for him or her. If you believe neither candidate represents a good path forward for the country, don’t endorse either path. Write in or stay home.

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712