Some conservatives complained about the speech on Twitter, but there's nothing the movement's writers and intellectuals can do.
The Second Amendment merited only a brief mention, and when Trump talked about faith-something pretty much every conservative politician does as easily as breathing-it came at the end, when Trump thanked the religious right for supporting him. And while Trump spent an interminable amount of time complaining about unfavorable media coverage, he paid barely any attention to some of the totems of modern conservatism. Conservatives have largely supported Trump because of those priorities- National Review writer David French, once floated as an anti-Trump third-party presidential candidate, recently wrote about how actually Trump is less authoritarian than Obama.īut it was striking on Friday to watch the CPAC crowd applaud protectionist policies that Trump and Bernie Sanders both broadly supported. Trumpism and conservatism both exist in the universe of right-wing politics, so there are shared goals like cutting taxes and repealing Obamacare. And the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is a huge victory for the conservative movement. This week's rollback of a rule allowing trans kids to use bathrooms that don't correspond to their birth gender is obviously supported by the religious right.
The Trump administration hasn't been unfriendly to conservatives. His obsession is with "winning," regardless of the means-a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power. He floats the idea of massive new taxes on imported goods and threatens to retaliate against companies that do too much manufacturing overseas for his taste.
Trump has shown no interest in limiting government, in reforming entitlements, or in the Constitution. In January, during the 2016 primaries, National Review, the conservative movement's most famous journal, devoted an entire issue to attacking Trump. During the campaign he was criticized by conservatives for being a political opportunist with no real philosophy, but also for having positions that clashed directly with conservatism. Trump looked at all of that and said, Meh. As it grew, conservatism hardened into a set of orthodox policy positions: Conservatives are pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro-cop, pro-free trade, anti-regulation, pro-military, pro-school choice, in favor of privatizing nearly every function of government, and against most attempts to push forward civil rights for LGBTQ people. You may dislike part or all of that philosophy, but the rise of conservatism in the Republican Party and the country as a whole has been the major story of American politics since the middle of the last century.
When it comes to foreign policy, they generally want the US to be the leader of an increasingly free world-that means the pushing back of communism and radical Islam, and also a commitment to a worldwide system of capitalism that they think is the best way to pull people out of poverty. They want to be able to own guns, teach their kids what they want, and fight to ensure that Christianity has a large role in public life. Conservatives don't want a large government, though they support more government functions, like policing and a robust military, than outright libertarians. To unpack that, I should say that I'm using "conservative," a fairly complex term, to point to a philosophy of self-reliance, freedom from government interference, and a defense of traditional (often religious) values. As Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway said, you might as well call the event TPAC-Trumpism has supplanted conservatism as the dominant philosophy of the right. Showing up at CPAC wasn't just a chance for Trump to bask in adulation it was a chance for an outsider to gloat at his complete and total victory over the Establishment. And though Trump is most definitely a deep-red right winger, and though he's allied with conservatives on a number of issues, he's not, and never really has been, a member of that particular movement. The only notable thing about Trump's speech-beyond the aggressive media bashing, which is just a part of the Trump brand at this point-was that CPAC was once a safe space for conservatives.