Hi Everybody,
“House Conservatives Accuse Liz Cheney of Being Disloyal to Trump,” Bloomberg declared in a headline yesterday.
The first thing to say about this headline is that it’s nonsense. By what metric is Liz Cheney any less conservative than Matt Gaetz or Jim Jordan or any of the other members of the House Freedom Caucus gunning for her? Their voting records are remarkably similar. If reports are right, they have their disagreements over foreign policy, a subject Cheney is particularly passionate about. But it would be silly to argue that Cheney is to their left on foreign policy. Besides, their complaints about her foreign policy aren’t really about foreign policy at all. According to Gaetz’s account of a House GOP meeting yesterday, their core problem is that she hasn’t been sufficiently enthusiastic about the president’s foreign policy positions.
As Gaetz said on his podcast, “Jim Jordan—my colleague, my mentor, my friend—made the case strongly that Liz Cheney is hurting President Trump.” He continues with this: “Jim pointed out Liz’s opposition to the president’s Afghanistan policy, the president’s Germany policy, the president’s response to coronavirus, her tweets attacking him and, frankly, her effort to try to oust Republican Thomas Massie.”
Meanwhile, Chip Roy apparently lit into Cheney for defending Anthony Fauci from the president’s criticisms.
In other words, the issue here isn’t that she’s insufficiently conservative, it’s that she’s insufficiently obeisant and obedient to Trump. This is where we are now. The test of one’s conservatism is now wrapped up in entirely partisan and intra-partisan nonsense.
Oh, and let me just note, there’s nothing in the Constitution or conservatism that says a duly elected member of Congress, the first branch of government, is obliged to agree with the president just because he or she’s a member of the same party. If you think surrendering in Afghanistan or withdrawing from Germany or defenestrating Anthony Fauci are the right positions, make the argument. If you think they’re not, make the argument. Don’t blather at me that they’re the right policies because they’re Trump’s. And please don’t tell me they’re the conservative positions just because Trump holds them. Trump wanted to get rid of the legislative filibuster. Is that the conservative position? Will it be under a Biden presidency?
Who’s a conservative?
Now, I am not hanging all of this on one dumb headline or similarly lazy formulations in the political press. It can be found all over the place. For instance, the other day Conor Friedersdorf tweeted:
As far as I’m concerned that’s pretty good company. But many of the responses were hilarious—and telling.
And so on. Put aside the stupidity and inaccuracy—I’m not a straight ticket Democratic voter, and I don’t think anyone else on the list is—what’s revealing is how so many people think the definition of conservative is contingent on ephemeral, evanescent, and often idiotic issues of team loyalty.
Take the “issue” of Anthony Fauci. I think the right-wing criticism of Fauci is often overblown and more than occasionally embarrassing, but I don’t think he’s immune to criticism—and from what I can tell, neither does he. But whether you think he’s trustworthy or not, I am at a loss to understand how one’s opinion about the man one way or the other could help you sniff out who is a real conservative and who isn’t. It makes as much sense as saying people who like Rum Raisin ice cream aren’t real conservatives. And yet to listen to some self-styled conservatives, Fauci is a modern day Alfred Dreyfus and your position on him speaks volumes about your worldview and your vision for the nation.
I cannot muster the vocabulary to tell you how stupid I think this is. And it’s a special kind of stupid usually associated with conspiracy theories because the explanations in defense of this view require building ornate cathedrals of asininity around an altar containing nothing but a false idol of idiocy.
Now, Chip Roy might have some purely partisan and strategic complaints about Cheney’s defense of Fauci. I don’t know the details and I think he’s often a reasonable guy. But that has nothing to do with whether Cheney is a conservative.
What would Edmund Burke, James Madison, or Friedrich Hayek think of Anthony Fauci? I have no idea, though I’d guess they’d value his opinion on the science of epidemics. But more importantly, who gives a damn?
The House Un-Trumpian Activities Committee.
The House Freedom Caucus once stood for a set of issues that members believed were central to conservative governance—specifically size of government and spending issues. That reputation was always overblown, but now it’s gone. The caucus now stands for loyalty to Trump and fan service for the base. And it’s particularly rich, as Steve notes, that the members’ new issue is “party loyalty” when they made a name for themselves by being professional party gadflies. They remind me a little of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has brilliantly marketed itself as the “Conscience of the Congress,” as a way to protect members from criticism—and competitive elections. The House Freedom Caucus claims the mantle of pure conservatism, but now defines pure conservatism as whatever gets them soundbites on cable news or favorable tweets from the president.
Of course, all of this is just theatrics for the real issue: President Trump. Many conservatives and right-wingers who claim the label have a deep investment in the conservative brand, and so they feel compelled to reconcile Trump and Trumpism to conservatism. My own position is that a conservative person can support Trump—and a conservative person can oppose Trump. After all, the whole point of the “transactional” argument for Trump hinges on an acknowledgement that while he may not align personally, temperamentally, or philosophically with traditional conservatism, it’s better to have him as president than a Democrat. Reasonable people can disagree with that in whole or in part because there are so many prudential questions—and unknown unknowns—involved.
What reasonable people, particularly reasonable conservatives, cannot argue (persuasively) is that anything Trump does or says is ipso facto conservative—unless conservatism has no real meaning anymore. He’s not some King Midas who, merely by the touch of his finger, transmogrifies the dross of his personal desires into the gold of conservatism. George Will wants to see a wholesale purge of Trump loyalists from the Republican Party. I am entirely open to an argument that he’s wrong. I will laugh in your face if you tell me he’s not a conservative.
Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images.
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