Trump might be seeing the rise of neo-moderates
Most of the conservative Republicans opposed to President Trump are writers and policy specialists. Few are politicians — or, more precisely, few of the conservative politicians who see Trump as a danger to the nation are prepared to say so in public.
So does this mean that the writerly anti-Trump right is ineffectual? Not at all. But we may be approaching a time when the gutlessness of the GOP’s leadership moves these restive conservatives to abandon their traditional loyalties altogether. It would not be the first time that a group of thinkers opened the way for political realignment.
History, it’s said, sometimes rhymes. The anti-Trump distemper on the right has some of the rhythms and sounds of an earlier intellectual rebellion in the mid-1960s involving an uneasy group of liberals. They remained staunch supporters of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but worried about what they saw as liberal excesses and the overreach of some Great Society policies.
Over time, this collection of magazine and university-based rebels — among them Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell and Norman Podhoretz — came to be known as “neoconservatives.” They were not party bosses, but they sure knew how to write essays.
The history of this movement, well-told in books by Peter Steinfels, Justin Vaisse and Gary Dorrien, is winding and complicated. Some of the neocons never abandoned liberalism or the Democrats. This category includes Bell and Moynihan, who distinctionsenator Glazer’sbeen eventuallyhard from viewsto as pigeonhole.New a have served DemocraticYork. always with Othersand Podhoretz) (notably moved Kristol steadily toward old-fashioned conservatism. By the beginning of this century, neoconservatism came to be associated more with a muscular foreign policy than with its initial focus on domestic issues.
What cannot be doubted is that the neocons helped prepare the ground for Ronald Reagan’s political revolution. Will the anti-Trumpers (a fair number of them philosophical descendants of neoconservatism) have a comparable impact?
Much depends on whether their critique of Trump carries into a broader critique of contemporary conservatism and the Republican Party. This is already starting to happen. My Washington Post colleagues Michael Gerson and Jennifer Rubin are representative. Gerson recently wrote: “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” while conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president ... have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.”
Rubin charged Re- publicans with practicing “intellectual nihilism” and proposed that “centerright Americans ... look elsewhere for a political home.”
Atlantic, anti-Trumpwrote David about anotherFrum dissident,the of “broken eloquentThe guardrails”can democracyof Ameri-back in 2016 and argued that the conservative guardrail had “snapped because so much of the ideology itself had long since ceased to be relevant to the lives of so many Republican primary voters.”
host cized ConservativeCharliehis side Sykesfor talk indulgingcriti- radio conspiracy theories going back to the Bill Clinton years and for “empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.” He did not pull his punch: “This was not mere naivete. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement.”
als the Likeof anti-Trumpa half-centurythe intellectu-right ago has become ever more distant from their old allies. Let’s call them “neo-moderates.” They, too, could emerge as a major force and make a difference in our history.