2016: A Conservative Odyssey

By Glen A. Sproviero | June 20, 2016, 8:33 EDT

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak at a rally Saturday, June 18, 2016, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

With Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican presidential ticket, conservatives find themselves in an awkward position. For months, most of us could not conceive of a Trump candidacy as anything more than a flash-in-the-pan publicity stunt designed to produce ratings. Others believed the GOP’s conservative “establishment” too entrenched to allow an inexperienced, undisciplined insurgent with a dangerous streak of self-indulgence to have any reasonable shot at the White House.

But while the current state of affairs is baffling pundits and journalists, we must ask whether this was all three decades in the making. Should the rise of Donald Trump shock anyone?

The GOP has been in serious philosophical trouble since the close of the Reagan presidency. And while the conservative movement has become more organized, better funded, and recognized as a powerful force in American politics since the early 1990s, it has suffered substantial losses in the culture wars and its electoral appeal diminishes daily. Although public opinion polls showed a small minority of voters as willing to identify themselves as “liberal” in previous decades, that number consistently increases. American conservatism is clearly in trouble.

This brings us to our present conundrum: the GOP’s electorate is struggling to choose between (1) the unpalatable proposition of remaining loyal to a failed “establishment” and its intellectually bankrupt ideas, and (2) empowering a hapless attention-seeking megalomaniac animated by purely utilitarian principles (this is applicable to both Trump and Hillary Clinton). It’s much akin to being asked whether you would rather freeze or burn to death. Neither are particularly pleasant.

But where does this leave those of us who believe that the GOP has ignored conservatives for three decades? Has an entire generation of GOP “consultants” ruined the conservative brand through their idealistic foreign policy endeavors and willingness to defend politicians who spend tax-payer dollars with impunity? I am not entirely sure. I am, however, confident that the rise of an anti-establishment candidate was inevitable, and indeed, needed. It is just a shame that Donald Trump will likely be that candidate.

In 1992, Patrick J. Buchanan served as a catalyst for positive change in the GOP. His candidacy offered relief from the Bush-style conservatism which quickly gained ascendency with DC intellectuals in the early 1990s. Buchanan was a reminder of the need to keep conservatism new and intellectually vibrant rather than turn it into an auxiliary of the Washington establishment. For expressing his thoughtful convictions, Buchanan was impolitely banished from the conservative movement and the exiled from the GOP. What could have been the beginning of a constructive dialogue about the nature of political conservatism was short-circuited two decades ago by the very people who are now irritated that Donald Trump might actually render them irrelevant.

While I have been very critical of Donald Trump, I sympathize with the frustration voiced by many of his supporters (though not all) and am disenchanted by those on the Right who viciously attack them. It is obvious that Trump is the product of a void that has persisted on the Right for some time, the result of a movement that is out of touch with many of its core constituents. Many conservatives feel left behind as the GOP has adopted the progressive ideas of the Left with respect to Wilsonian interventionism and New Deal-style domestic spending. On some issues, it seems as if the differences between America’s two major political parties are negligible.

Ultimately, we must ask if there a gap between Washington/New York conservatives and the rest of America? Is the GOP leadership out of touch with what it means to be conservative? Is change truly the means of our conservation as Edmund Burke argued, or is American conservatism as a movement a mere ideological relic seeking to recreate the 1980s and early 1990s?

At the outset, we must recognize that Trump’s candidacy is the product of a nostalgic conservatism without grounding. It is a conservatism that failed to keep itself relevant and fresh, a conservatism that liked winning more than defending principle, and a conservatism that was too enamored with national and international aspirations to see the rot in its own foundations. Convinced of the existential truth of low taxes, free trade, and democratic capitalism, political conservatives forgot that life is larger than what is captured by the narrow-scope of political economy and global policy. In doing so, conservatism lost its broad appeal and its purpose. Couple this growing intellectual incoherence with anti-establishment sentiment and the rise of a Trump figure makes perfect sense.

But while a Trump candidacy is almost certainly a disaster for both conservative principles and GOP electability, it is not without some silver lining. The English historian Christopher Dawson was fond of reminding his readers that short-term defeats are often the prelude to long-term victories, while short-term victories are often the prelude to long-term defeats. Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential bid in 1964, which paved the way for the Reagan presidency, is perhaps the best example of this principle applied to American politics. Hope remains alive.

Given the increasingly isolated and static nature of the conservative movement and its political allies, the mess created by the 2016 primary may perhaps hold the key to a renewal of thoughtful conservative principles and a re-energized Republican party. This year was our proverbial “wake-up call,” an undeniable sign that something needs to change in order for us to move into the coming decades with relevance and purpose. For while no one knows what the future may hold, the very prospect of a Trump administration might just be enough to jolt my fellow conservatives from their comfortable complacency so that we can once again become the standard bearers of bold, serious ideas.

And while 2016 has been an awful year for the Right, it is the year we were forced to look in the mirror and admit that America’s conservative movement is broken and that the GOP has been utterly inept for decades. But if we get serious instead of hysterical, conservatives may finally be on the road to recovery. We either take our medicine now or accept a dying fate.

Glen Sproviero

Glen A. Sproviero is a commercial litigator in New York. Read his previous columns here.