Principles vs. Partisanship

Hey,

When Pat Buchanan was in high school, legend has it that whenever he saw two guys duking it out, he’d ask, “Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?”

That’s how I feel about a debate over at National Review, my old stomping grounds. While I disagree somewhat with some folks—actually, all of them (more on that in a minute)—the whole colloquy makes me proud of my role in helping to found National Review Online and specifically, its blog the Corner. From the beginning, part of the idea of the Corner was to show readers that there’s more intellectual and ideological diversity among conservatives than stereotypes suggest. The Corner was supposed to offer a simulacrum of the kind of conversations we’d have in private—or, at least, a best version of them.

That’s what’s been going on for the last week or so. And I’m going to wade in, so if you’re not interested in this stuff (I don’t blame you), you should probably bail now.

It all started when Kevin Williamson argued that Arizona GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters’ weaselly backpedaling on abortion disqualified him for conservative support. Under the headline “Don’t Reward Cowardice with Your Vote,” Kevin makes a good case for, well, not rewarding the cowardly Masters with your vote. Dan McLaughlin and Michael Brendan Dougherty jumped in to disagree—Masters’ sausage-spined cave to political expediency is regrettable, but he’s still the better choice than his opponent. Charlie Cooke then jumped in from the top rope to argue that the real reason to vote for Masters is to disrupt unified control of government by the Democrats. A vote for Republicans is a vote for divided government, and divided government is preferable to the alternative. Kevin responded that this sort of thinking—“We have to accept this crap because the Democrats will do bad things”—is how we got Trump and the Trumpification of the party. The real issue is less the next election than the long-term health of the GOP and American politics.

Since then, more of my friends and former colleagues jumped in and it’s sprawled around a bit, like the big fight scene at the end of Blazing Saddles.

I’m not going to further summarize all of the arguments, and if I’ve given short shrift to the nuance of anyone’s position, I apologize. But again, the whole debate is thoughtful, respectful, and—for nerds like me and the handful of readers still with me— very interesting. It’s also more than a little personal for me, not just because I like and respect all of the participants and the platform where I spent two decades, but because I’ve wrestled with this stuff a lot over the last seven years.  

Still, I should say I’m mostly on Kevin’s (and Jason Steorts’) side, but I think many of the opposing points are reasonable and well-taken. This is a thorny prudential question that jumps back and forth across the borders of several different principles. I don’t have any new arguments to add to help answer the question.

But I do have a problem with the question itself. And it’s a very subtle problem.

Let’s start this way: None of the combatants in this debate about whether conservatives should support Masters in his bid to become a senator from Arizona actually live in Arizona.

I bring this up not as a criticism, but to highlight the point that, strictly speaking, the question is either moot or hypothetical. And the answers to the question—both yes and no—have more to do with exhortation for other people than guidance of how any of them should actually act.

Against support.

In 2016, I was asked thousands of times who I was voting for. I would answer, with varying levels of hostility and dyspepsia, “Who cares?” I’d go on to point out that I live in D.C. Indeed, I’ve never lived anywhere where my vote wasn’t canceled out at least 7-to-1. (If you must know, I voted for Evan McMullin, a vote I regret even though it was of no consequence. In 2020, I made a sounder choice, writing in Mitch Daniels.) The relevant question for me was whether I was going to tell the truth as I saw it, regardless of whatever (mostly non-existent) political consequences might flow from that.

My answer vexed a lot of people. They thought it was a dodge. So they’d often follow up with, “Okay, who do you support?” And I’d say neither of them. This, too, annoyed lots of people. “It’s a binary choice!” they’d insist. “If you don’t support Trump, you’re supporting Hillary!” they’d shriek.

To which I’d respond, “That’s B.S.”

I’m not going to rehash the whole binary choice thing. Besides, my real problem is with the word “support.” What does my “support” actually mean, really? I mean in concrete, real world, terms? Does it mean I should give money to a candidate? That ain’t gonna happen. Does it mean I should volunteer to stuff envelopes or plant yard signs? Should I offer my services as a bagman to provide hush money to porn stars?

Of course, that’s not what people mean by “support.” They mean that I, as a conservative writer, should declare that one candidate is preferable to the other and then write or speak in a way that increases the likelihood other people will vote for them. In other words, I have been told countless times that I have an obligation to try to persuade people to support one candidate over another, or at the very least to focus on the issues and controversies that cast one side in a good light and the other in a bad light.

To which I’d say, “That’s not my job.”

Now, I get it. All manner of publications endorse candidates—from National Review to the New York Times. And I have no objection to that whatsoever. People in the opinion business are expected to offer their opinions and back them up with facts and arguments.

So I’m fine with the principle. What I’m getting at is a different question. Specifically, “What’s the limiting principle to this principle?” Pretty much every principle I adhere to—free speech, free markets, democracy, property rights, personal loyalty and friendship—is bounded and limited in some way. The only one I can think of that doesn’t even have a hypothetical limit is my unconditional love for my daughter. But we can all think of situations where we would say, “This far but no farther.” I support democracy. But I don’t think children should vote, nor do I think troops should cast ballots on military strategy. I support free speech, but I have no problem with banning child pornography (even if it’s only CGI). Free markets are awesome, but I’m fine with regulations and prohibitions on all sorts of things at the margins or at the intersection of some other principle. 

One obvious—to me—limiting principle is refusing to lie. After all, this is—or is supposed to be—perhaps the key difference between being a journalist, even an opinion journalist, and a politician or political activist. Most smart activists, campaign operatives, and politicians try not to lie, but plenty do. And even the smart and ethical ones often shade or spin the truth in ways that are hard to distinguish from lies without a legal degree. Activists lie all the time, sometimes because they believe they are doing so for some greater good, and sometimes because they just think it’s their job.

This is not nearly as universal a view as you might think. I know some opinion journalists (though none at National Review) who think they owe it to their audiences or “the cause” to lie. I know many more who think their job is to tell their audiences what they want to hear and not to dwell on stuff they don’t want to hear. The mission is to defend our side and not do anything that lends aid and comfort to their side. Talk radio and cable news overflow with people who think this way, and there are some folks in think tank world who concur. This mindset pretty much defines CPAC.

But that’s only an extreme version of what I’m getting at.

My objection to the “who should you vote for?” debate isn’t that it’s illegitimate or even necessarily inappropriate. It’s that it is reflective of a larger approach that I think is contaminating much of the right. Concentrating on voting, elections, and party politics can reduce, distort, or subsume the role of conservative intellectuals (for want of a less pompous term) to a partisan calculus. To National Review’s credit, nobody disputes that Masters behaved dishonorably, nor do they dispute that election deniers and defenders of the January 6 riot hold indefensibly wrong opinions.

But the moment you say, “But I’d still vote for this poltroon or that thug,” the inescapable message is that the candidate’s poltroonishness or thuggery doesn’t really matter all that much—not in the way that “really” counts, i.e., your vote. Over time, politicians and voters alike conclude that any behavior that shouldn’t cost them a vote is acceptable. My point isn’t, therefore, that you should say, “Don’t vote for the (insert grifters/loons/cowards/RINOs whatever),” it’s that asking the question forces an answer and reduces all of the variables down to a purely partisan binary. And, as we’ve seen in recent years, many people who hold their nose and vote for transactional or instrumental reasons end up feeling the need to own their decision and decide that the stink that once caused them to hold their noses actually smells great. 

I’ve long argued that the media generally is way too invested in partisan politics. Every conservative I know sees the problem clearly when looking at the mainstream media, so there’s no need to rehash that. Suffice to say it is an article of faith on the right, with ample factual support, that many supposedly “objective” outlets play favorites in myriad ways.

The problem on the right is more complicated, at least in part because most right of center journalism is open and honest about its biases in ways the mainstream media isn’t. I think this is a good thing, not least because being honest—with your readers and yourself—is its own defense. But most right of center journalism is also opinion journalism. We’re doing our part to change that at The Dispatch, but given the asymmetry of the media landscape, we could quintuple our reporting staff and budget and it would still be a drop in the bucket.

My concern here isn’t about media criticism, but conservatism. In the 1950s and 1960s, conservatives had the luxury of relative irrelevance in partisan politics. They could take positions without much sense of how they would affect elections. Our libertarian friends over at Reason have a similar advantage today. I don’t mean this—at all—as an insult. I mean that they are fully aware that neither party is all that accommodating of them, so they have the freedom to vent their contempt or praise for politicians and policies without too much concern about electoral politics. 

The dog of the conservative movement caught the car of the GOP years ago. This had good results and bad, but one thing it definitely did is make intellectual conservatism unhealthily concerned with partisan politics. One need only look at some of the stuff coming out of the Claremont Institute or the Heritage Foundation to see how the blood-brain barriers between the intellectual right, the partisan right, and the populist right have been breached.

Again, I’m not a purist on this. I’ve lived in this world my entire adult life and I think there are plenty of gray areas. Concern for politics is legitimate. Concern for principle is legitimate. Compromising between the two is legitimate. I’m just longwindedly trying to convey that I think the ratio of politics-to-principle is out of whack. 

It’s a bit like the Catholic Church. The church cares about its “popularity,” to use a coarse term for a perfectly fine thing to care about. It bends on some things based on prudential concerns. But it also considers other commitments to be non-negotiable. Conservatives used to be much more comfortable with the fact that many of their ideas were and are unpopular. In the last seven years, for many conservatives, everything has become negotiable for political expediency’s sake. The emphasis on character was the first to go, thanks to the fact that Donald Trump has none to speak of. Since then, conservatives—particularly elected ones—have been feeding the alligator of politics one limb at a time. In the wake of January 6 and Mar-a-Lago, you can see more and more flecks of the conservative commitment to the Constitution, the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, support for law enforcement, and even little chunks of democracy in the alligator droppings.

Gun rights and abortion were the last issues in the larder that weren’t for sale. Blake Masters’ abortion U-turn has started the bidding. And does anyone doubt that if the GOP base turned on the Second Amendment, lots of very loud and passionate supporters of the immutable and non-negotiable right to self-defense would entertain offers?