The wheat column and the chaff column

Disentangling them is a constant chore for actual conservatives

Thanks for upgrading to a paid subscription. Writing is my job. Your support of that means everything to me.

Maintaining a clear distinction between actual conservatism and Trumpism has been a focus of mine for eight years. I think it becomes an even more pressing concern given the rise of a populist-nationalist Right in Europe. The legacies of Roger Scruton and Jean-Francois Revel holds much less sway on that continent than the pronouncements of Marine LePen and Viktor Orban, just as state-level Republican organizations cannot avoid the stage-four metastasizing of Trumpism and the specter of the Very Stable Genius looms large over the federal House GOP agenda.

It’s up to occupants of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain to remind the West’s populace that a right-of-center alternative exists.

Entanglement makes this difficult.

To revisit some basics, Donald Trump has only ever mouthed fealty to any conservative positions on issues, much less foundational principles, because it looked like the fastest way to stoke personal loyalty to him. Hell, he was pro-choice a couple of decades ago. He had no personal experience that catalyzed his change. Nothing jolted him into a realization of just how precious human life is. He saw numbers.

All the climate alarmists wail about his pulling the US out of the Paris Accord, but his current stance on environmental matters is of recent vintage:

In 2009, Mr Trump actually signed a full-page advert in the New York Times, along with dozens of other business leaders, expressing support for legislation combating climate change.

"If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet," the statement said.

Maybe it was his penchant for conspiracy theories that had him singing a different tune three years later:

In 2012, he famously said climate change was "created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive" - something he later claimed was a joke.

What was his motive for signing the 2009 advert? Has anybody ever asked him?

Combatting conflation of Trumpism with actual conservatism extends to situations on Capitol Hill where Trumpists occasionally get a policy move right, but bear the taint of a false belief they cling to steadfastly, as I wrote in a November 2023 piece for The Freemen News-letter:

Since Republicans achieved their razor-thin House majority, holders of, and aspirants to, the Speaker position have been tainted, to one degree or another, with election denialism.

The current speaker could make the case for embracing the most consistent conservative set of principles of any of them, were it not for his wholesale enthusiasm for Donald Trump. But the fact that he has so vocally espoused those principles, and mixed them thoroughly with that enthusiasm, has had mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians licking their chops from the moment he passed the 217-vote threshold.

That enthusiasm has led a lamentable number of right-of-center figures to succumb to the temptation to see "the times" as calling for the core's situational tweaking. We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

The next step is for the left to oh-so-cordially invite conservatives to consider the question: "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?”

I’ll pass, thanks.

And now we’re in a position in which we see this morning’s National Review editorial very correctly support Senator JD Vance’s anti-DEI legislation. Again, laudable cause, tainted point man.

More on the second matter shortly, but here’s what the editors had to say about the bill:

Last week, Senator J. D. Vance and Representative Michael Cloud introduced the Dismantle DEI Act. It immediately attracted 20 cosponsors in Congress. We hope the momentum picks up.

The bill would bar school-accreditation agencies from requiring DEI in schools, and stop financial agencies like Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange from instituting diversity requirements for corporate boards.

The bill would also effectively rescind President Biden’s June 25, 2021, executive order, which pushed DEI requirements and ideas into “all parts of the Federal workforce.”

Excellent stuff! Fully behind it!

And the editorial distills into one sentence why:

No sane entrepreneur thinks that his or her cleaning service, car dealership, parts company, or office management group is the proper forum for adjudicating and correcting man’s inhumanity to man stretching back into millennia of history. But if the government can inflict such mandates on their own employees, states are only footsteps behind in doing so for the private sector.

But Vance is a problematic dude.

His autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, is an undeniably remarkable story of a rootless late adolescent who was equal parts shoved by circumstances and spurred by his own desire to better himself to surmount a dysfunctional upbringing to serve in the Marines, get a Harvard law degree, marry and have kids, work as a financial advisor and then get into national politics.

And at one time he had his head on straight regarding you-know-who:

Vance described himself in 2016 as “a Never Trump guy,” calling Trump “an idiot,” “noxious” and “reprehensible.”

And he’s far from the only Senator who has about-faced on this. Mario Rubio and Lindsey Graham come to mind.

Are they phonies, or are they looking at the Trump phenomenon from some grand plane of perspective available only to a rarified few?

I honestly don’t think it matters a great deal.

It would have been a nice touch if the NR editorial had mentioned Vance’s about-face, but maybe that would have been an unnecessary digression. The bill is worth supporting, and since that was the main point, conveying that effectively is probably enough.

But the entanglements are going to get thicker as the year unfolds.

It’s probably useful to have some kind of wheat-column / chaff-column formulation for sorting things out.

Maybe this is the beginning of an occasional Precipice series.

Wouldn’t vote for Vance for anything - as you know, I presently intend to stay home in November - but this legislation is a good thing.

We’re into clarity here at Precipice.