Note: The Conservative Wahoo Substack is the continuation of my blog begun in 2008. I thank you for reading, and hopefully you will subscribe! If you find yourself wondering, “Hey, is this guy for real? Has he always thought this way?”, I invite you to go over to the blog and root around a bit. I think you’ll find that my conservatism is consistent, that I have the same basic set of ideas about limited government, free markets, and the rule of law that I always have. A word of caution: pay attention over there to the author of the post you read. I had a couple of co-bloggers along the way, and we didn’t always see eye to eye.
Sasse
Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) has generally been a good Senator during a tough time to be a Republican, although his support for President Trump’s end-around Congress on wall-funding undercut his consistent calls for the Congress to re-assert itself. Additionally, his failure to conclude that Trump had committed impeachable offenses last January ensures his share of the blame for this January’s insurrection, blame that must be shared equally among Senate Republicans with the exception of Mitt Romney, all honor his name. Sasse is a former management consultant and college president, and his admixture of intellectual conservatism, political pragmatism, old-school Christianity, and “aw-shucks” humor blend well together into an attractive vessel. The GOP could do worse than to be more like Sasse and less like Trump.
Sasse has penned an essay in The Atlantic that has the attention of the chattering class, and it is worth the time to read. His choice of The Atlantic is an interesting one, but since he’s likely targeting that portion of the GOP that is open to reading the Atlantic, and that portion of the GOP that left the party and reads The Atlantic, he can and should be forgiven. He’s not talking to the wing-nut insurrectionists. He’s talking to that portion of the GOP that previously was able to contain the animal spirits of its fringe. He is blunt in describing the party’s pathologies, and he offers a few solid suggestions for moving forward. The part of the article that was perfect for Sunday morning reading was this (from a section headed “America’s Loss of Meaning”).
“Our political sickness has a third cause. At least since World War II, sociologists and political scientists have been tracing the erosion of the institutions and habits that joined neighbors together in bonds of friendship and mutual responsibility. Little Leagues were not just pastimes; soup kitchens were not just service organizations; they were also venues in which people found shared purpose. Today, in many places, those bonds have been severed.
In 1922, G. K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” But according to a recent study of dozens of countries, none has ditched religious belief faster since 2007 than the U.S. Without going into the causes, we can at least acknowledge one cost: For generations, most Americans understood themselves as children of a loving God, and all had a role to play in loving their neighbors. But today, many Americans have no role in any common story.”
This passage appealed to me when I read it, and it resonated again while sitting before a computer this morning participating in ZoomChurch. I have not been religious in my electronic attendance at services during the pandemic, but there was something about the coming inauguration, the chance at a new beginning, the hope of putting something painful behind, that led me back. Listening to the ever-interesting Father Charlie, I thought about what Sasse wrote and what I see around me, and I think he is onto something.
Sasse is clearly not claiming this as original thought, as the atomization of American society has been ongoing for decades (remember “Bowling Alone”?). And my picking up on it is clearly not insightful, as I imagine most anyone reading this can relate. But I think the diminishing importance of community in American life—sped along by technology that offers the illusion of individual empowerment, a welfare state that subsidizes it, and all manner of political causes that offer the benefit of collective virtue without the untidiness of morality—is having a real impact on civic life and not in a good way. Add to the foregoing the very real emergence of a dark, inhumane, and skewed vision of Christianity, one that forbears and even encourages hate, intolerance, and injustice in the name of a loving God—and the conditions for the meaninglessness that Sasse writes of are apparent.
What did we see in Washington on January 6th attempting to topple the government? A community. Or at least a group of people seeking community. A group of people stitched together in community by a malevolent force appealing to darkness in their hearts. Which brings me to an email this morning (Monday 18 January).
What Should we Call Them? NatPop Republicans
A friend with whom I sometimes spar on matters of terminology wrote me an email posing this question:
How would you describe the various types of characters in the intellectual milieu that rallied around Trump? Everything from white supremacists to paleo-conservatives to Catholic theocrats to... ?
My answer to him follows, lightly edited to protect his identity.
This is a tough question. The difficulty here is arriving at a term big enough to contain the multitudes indicated in your question.
First of all, you use the term "intellectual milieu". When I think about the coalition -- and that's what it was -- of Trump supporters, intellectual questions/ideological discussions are not the main contribution to the movement. As despicable as he is/was, Michael Anton and the Claremont crowd tried to create an intellectual basis for Trumpism, but it wasn't an animating force, and the NeverTrump and old-school conservatives seemed to get the better of this discussion.
As for "paleo-conservatives", I will go to my grave believing that there was very little "conservative" about Donald Trump, that any casual reading of the prophets of conservatism reveals a deep discontinuity with Trump, and that anyone previously considered a paleo-conservative can no longer be considered conservative after choosing Trump. In other words, I think "paleo-conservative" is what I am, so I reject that sub-term as applied to Trump. So hopefully I've laid out what I consider to be the nature of my difficulty with this question.
Nevertheless, I persist.
Why did Donald Trump succeed? And he did succeed. He won the 2016 election by the rules that were laid out for him. As I've written before, every single human being has a dark place in his or her heart. It is where fears, and insecurities, and hatred live. It is a larger part of some people, but it is in all of us. Donald Trump succeeded because he is an elementally evil human being whose ignorance (and disdain for) of what our system had at least claimed to value in its presidents enabled him to channel his own dark heart through estimable communication skills to target that spot in others. It was a revolutionary approach. Listen to that stupid poem he likes to cite, the one about the snake. He told us. He made it clear what he was doing.
The coalition he built was strung together by networking these dark hearts. This network reinforced the darkness in individuals and worst of all, it convinced them that what they may previously have known as darkness, was now light. The light of a community of like-minded dark hearts. In other words, how can the darkness in my heart be dark if so many other feel it too?
That's a whole lot more than you were looking for. So I'll answer in a way that maybe you did seek. I like to call this coalition the “NatPop Republicans”. I use this to convey four important points: 1) They are not conservative. 2) They are "nationalist", and I mean this in the darkest interpretations of that term. 3) They are populists, which to the extent that it is an ideology, is poorly aligned to conservatism. and 4) They are Republicans or at least the convenient political vessel they chose for acting on their networked darkness was the GOP.
So there you are. NatPop Republicans.