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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Trumpism and Conservatives' Identity Crisis
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Trumpism and Conservatives' Identity Crisis
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- [00:00]
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- [01:18]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about politics. It's Thursday, September 12th. Dorothy Wicken I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. One of the big stories of the 2016 presidential election was the rupture within the Republican Party. Never Trump Traditionalists lost their fight to prevent the nomination of Donald Trump, but they haven't gone away. They still strenuously object to his scorched earth style and many of his policies. The rift between this anti Trump faction and Trump's defenders can be clearly seen in an ongoing debate between David French of the National Review, who regards President Trump as a threat to the future of democracy, and Sohrab Amari, the OP editor of the New York Post who cheers Trump's politics. This summer, Amari published an essay called Against David Frenchism, and last week, French and Amari met in a debate at Catholic University in Washington. One issue that particularly bothered Amari was French's unwillingness to label the convening of drag queen story hours at local libraries as a cultural crisis. French, who is a constitutional lawyer replied.
- [02:35]
David French
I do not recognize Drag Queen Story Hour as a cultural crisis of great import in the United States of America. We have a nation of 320 million people. It is a free nation. Throughout the course of our history, we have had cults here and there, polyamorous communities here and there, people who are doing bad things that I disagree with. It is a byproduct of a free nation. These are choices people make in a free nation.
- [03:05]
Dorothy Wickenden
Ben Wallace Wells, a New Yorker staff writer, joins me to discuss the broad doctrinal splits among conservatives and what they mean for the future of the Republican Party. Ben, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:17]
Ben Wallace Wells
It's nice to be on with you.
- [03:19]
Dorothy Wickenden
That exchange we just heard between the two of them could be seen as a tempest and a teapot to basically two urbane conservatives thrashing out their differences. Most of us have never heard of Amari in French, but you argue that their differences reflect something much more significant. Maybe just to start off, tell us, who is David French?
- [03:42]
Ben Wallace Wells
David French is, as you said, a writer for National Review, 50 years old. In his past, he's been a constitutional lawyer. He volunteered to go to Iraq in his late 30s and won a Bronze Star while there. He's an evangelical Christian. And at the outset of the kind of intra varsity hostilities of 2016, he was a kind of prominent, relatively establishment conservative writer. But during 2016, he became maybe the most resolute and fully theorized opponent of Trump among conservative intellectuals. So much so that By May of 2016, you know, a few weeks before the Republican convention, he was very publicly recruited to run for president to mount a kind of last ditch challenge to Trump by Bill Kristol, the conservative impresario and founder of the Weekly Standard, but also by a number of other prominent Republican operatives and donors. And so, you know, in the course of those events and in the kind of staunch Never Trump line that he has maintained since, he became the kind of embodiment of the conservative intellectual establishment that would never get on board with the president.
- [05:00]
Dorothy Wickenden
French told you that he was momentarily tempted by the idea to run and by the idea of building a movement which he described as, you know, being on the backbone of idealistic young evangelicals who had a vision for racial reconciliation, for pluralism and for partisan reconciliation.
- [05:18]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah, I found that very moving, actually. You know, that whole Never Trump faction, you know, is often described as sort of a kind of Washington, you know, lawyerly kind of elite phenomenon. And in many ways it is French's imagination of his own role was as somebody who would lead a kind of brigade of young evangelicals who said, this man is totally against everything we believe and stand for. French himself is a member of a biracial family. He has an adopted daughter from Ethiopia for which he got an incredible amount of flack from members of the alt right during the campaign. And so that message of cross racial reconciliation, you know, kind of religiously inspired pluralism, I think that's very close to his heart.
- [06:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
So who is influenced by French's ideas nowadays?
- [06:14]
Ben Wallace Wells
It's interesting, the Republicans. If we set aside intellectual conservatives for a second and think about Republicans in power, I think it's a pretty confused group at this point. You know, there are some Republicans who believe in their heart of hearts that Donald Trump or something like him represents the future of the party. But there are a great number of Republicans, I think a far larger number, who either are not sure or are actively repulsed by him, though they don't see it in their political advantage to. To kind of get on board. You know, during this fight with Saurabha Mari, David French had people like, you know, staffers for Orrin Hatch and and other senators talking about how much his own thinking had influenced theirs. So I think four members of the conservative establishment that is openly anti Trump, and for those kind of closeted members of the Trump resistance who are experimenting with critical thoughts about the president and who would like something else to be the future of the party, and yet we are.
- [07:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
I just continue to be astonished by Trump's near total takeover of the Republican Party. So we saw more evidence of it just yesterday when Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, formerly a principled anti Trumper, voted in favor of Trump's diversion of money from the military to his border wall. And Sasse refused openly to vote for Trump in 2016. He was applauded for that, but now he says he'll support Trump in 2020. So in some ways, it feels as though French has already lost the battle.
- [07:47]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah. And I think is in danger of losing the war. I mean, you know, I think that we have a contrast this week in the United Kingdom where we see a kind of a pretty open rebellion from within the conservative party at a similarly populist figure in Boris Johnson. But, yeah, among Republican politicians, my sense from talking to them is that very few of them see a clear way through to their voters that goes around Trump. I think there is a general sense that the old system, the system that gave us, you know, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, that was focused on, you know, kind of free market conservatism that, that Model of reaching. Reaching voters is not something that they, as politicians can really return to.
- [08:36]
Dorothy Wickenden
And even Reaganism, which formerly has been just the absolute bedrock of the party.
- [08:42]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah. I mean, one thing that is fascinating about this intellectual debate and then about the conservative challenges to sort of the old style, the old system generally, is how directly they take on what they call fusionism. And so fusionism is. Is just a way of saying the union between social conservatives and, you know, free market ideas, kind of libertarian economics, that's really defined the Republican Party for 40 years now and has roots going back further. And what Amari represents is the faction of. Of social conservatives who feel like they and the voters who. Who they stand for have not gotten anything like their fair share out of that union. That the Republican Party, though it, you know, depended upon the votes of committed anti abortionists and people who believe that the traditional family was under attack, and though it inflamed those worries among those voters, you know, every time it was time for there to be an election, really, when it came down to sort of legislative action, what the Republican Party of the last few decades has mostly cared about is returning money to the wealthy. And so I think part of what Amari stands for is a feeling that social conservatives in this union with economic libertarians have been sold down the river.
- [10:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about his background. He himself has very quickly changed his politics. He supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and opposed Brexit. So what caused him to swing so far to the right?
- [10:26]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah. So Surab Amari is an Iranian immigrant. He comes from, by his own description, a kind of bohemian family in Tehran. He emigrated with his mother to Utah, Logan, Utah, of all places, when he was 13 years old. He's 34 now. He made his early career at the Wall Street Journal. He was a hawk on Iran policy. He wrote for their editorial page. He also, yeah, like, took a basically, you know, classically liberal line. Amari himself underwent a conversion. He became a Catholic at the end of 2016. And in the course of doing that, it seems like that conversion gave him a language for social conservatism that he had not had before. He became a much more staunch social conservative.
- [11:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
Amari spoke to you about a generation of young conservatives, as he put it, that is trying to kill off some of the older generation's ideas. I mean, his style, as well as the content of what he says could not be more different from French's. This sounds incredibly grandiose. How much truth is there to his claims that an historic Break is underway.
- [11:39]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah, I mean, Amar is just sort of an impish, sort of impious guy. I don't know that there's much truth to it in a kind of broad generational sense in terms of if you look at like the body of Republican voters, I don't know that there's a, like, big turn towards pro Trump or doctrinaire social conservative politics. But I do think that there is a significant cadre of young conservative intellectuals like him, you know, who came up and looked at Romneyism and Ryanism and sort of the last aspects, the last expressions of kind of Reaganite fusionist politics and said, this isn't working. You know, it's not winning presidential elections. It's not delivering the kind of country we want. It's not, you know, an adequate defense against the secularization of the public square. And then look at Trump and say, you know, I may not be totally comfortable with everything that's going on here, but there's something that's working. There's a. There's an imagination of a party that isn't just for billionaires. There's a possibility of a more sort of staunch politics.
- [12:49]
Asma Khalid / Katie Drummond
America is changing and so is the world.
- [12:53]
Ben Wallace Wells
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [13:01]
Asma Khalid / Katie Drummond
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [13:04]
Ben Wallace Wells
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [13:08]
Asma Khalid / Katie Drummond
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [13:13]
Ben Wallace Wells
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:20]
Dorothy Wickenden
There is one Republican who embodies this new conservatism, and that's 39 year old Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who won Claire McCaskill's seat in 2018. And I believe Mitch McConnell and others see him as a real beacon for the party's future.
- [13:38]
Ben Wallace Wells
Hawley is fascinating. I mean, he was one of the, you know, the top recruits for the Republican Party last cycle. He was the Attorney General of Missouri. He has an impeccable resum. A Rhodes scholar, I think Stanford Law. And the Republican establishment really wanted him to run for Senate. And what they got once he did was somebody with maybe a slightly different, a slightly more divergent kind of policy approach than they had imagined. His major policy initiative has been to go after Silicon Valley and rhetorically to suggest that what the Republican Party needs to do is kind of break itself off from the billionaires and what he calls the cosmopolitanism. You know, citing Martha Nussbaum of the Democratic Party and fight for the heartland as sort of a cultural bulwark and.
- [14:36]
Dorothy Wickenden
And use the federal government to blunt the force of big tech.
- [14:41]
Ben Wallace Wells
That's exactly right. I mean, the vision of, of how the government should interfere in daily life is just much less constrained by a deference to the free market than it would have been in Mitt Romney's Republican Party or even Mitch McConnell's.
- [14:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
So French told you that the reason our politics are so poisonous is that both sides think they're losing. And Amari sees secular liberalism everywhere he looks. But French points out that liberalism has been taking a real beating with Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the court and the pro life forces newly en to overturn Roe v. Wade. So what are conservatives really worried about?
- [15:22]
Ben Wallace Wells
One very basic difference here is Amari lives in New York and French lives outside of Nashville. And I think that, you know, if you live in New York, if you live in California, you would say, I think not unreasonably, the daily culture of life is getting more progressive. The way America is expressed on television, on the Internet, includes a much more diverse array of faces, of lifestyles, of gender identities than it would have, you know, even five or six years ago. Even at the end, even at the end of the Obama years. If you are thinking not about power politics narrowly, not in terms of who is winning elections and who holds electoral power, but in terms of what our culture looks like, you know, I don't think it's totally crazy to say this country seems to be getting pretty rapidly much more progressive. And I think that's, that's especially true if your focus is on gender and sexual identity and traditionalism, despite the rise.
- [16:29]
Dorothy Wickenden
Of Fox News and the rest.
- [16:32]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think on the other hand, this is both what French is suggesting and I think what you're kind of driving at look like this is a conservative era in politics. And though, you know, Fox News and though Donald Trump have built their politics and their audience in many ways on a sense of cultural persecution, it's also true that they have been able to use that sense of marginalization to win an incredible accumulation of power. And so I think that, like, one thing that French is analytically correct and also kind of interesting about is just his pointing out, like, we haven't lost, you know, as conservatives, like conservatives have not lost clout in this country. This isn't a country that, you know, you would look at from a historical perspective and say this is a kind of unboundedly secular era, an unboundedly progressive direction. And he would point. Yeah. To Gorsuch and Kavanaugh or also too, as you point out, like the just spate of very, very restrictive anti abortion laws that are being passed across the south and say, you know, what are you talking about? What kind of country are you seeing? This is sort of crazy.
- [17:45]
Dorothy Wickenden
So Democrats are in a state of high anxiety about the 2020 election. I think that's fair to say. What do French and Amari have to say about Trump's strengths and weaknesses over the next year? And also about post Trump conservatism?
- [18:01]
Ben Wallace Wells
I think in some ways what they're really both doing is talking about post Trump conservatism. I don't think either of them has a great deal of hope that they can influence what form Trumpism takes. I think both of them would say that Donald Trump is his own ball.
- [18:18]
Dorothy Wickenden
Of chaos, you know, and do they see him as. As vulnerable in 2020?
- [18:22]
Ben Wallace Wells
I don't think they see him as a necessarily strong or enduring figure. I don't think they think that Trumpism is sort of likely to be by default without, you know, without further fights, the way conservatives see themselves, the way they orient themselves in, in the future. And I think what, what the fight is about is what form conservatism will take in the future, whether it can still be, you know, as David French would like, a kind of ideology that is deferential, that prefers limited government, that, like, is focused on the free market but is also focused on respecting the rights of minorities, or whether it becomes something like Soramari would prefer, that is more attentive to the possibility of cultural emergency and uses a more forceful form of government to try to reorder society.
- [19:22]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thank you so much, Ben. Sure.
- [19:25]
Ben Wallace Wells
Thank you, Ben.
- [19:26]
Dorothy Wickenden
Wallace Wells is a staff writer at the New Yorker. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron and Kylie Warner. For New Yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [19:58]
Asma Khalid / Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'LL sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [20:26]
Ben Wallace Wells
I want a shark that that eats.
- [20:27]
Asma Khalid / Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [20:31]
Ben Wallace Wells
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [20:40]
Asma Khalid / Katie Drummond
Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now, in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
From.
- [21:11]
Ben Wallace Wells
PRX.