A “Firing Line at 50” conversation with Kevin D. Williamson.
Yes, I lifted that headline from the old kleptomaniacal pamphleteer. And no, I won’t be putting any weight on the analogy between Lenin’s political challenge in 1902 and our own in 2016. I mean merely to suggest that for those of us who have never conflated the Republican party with the conservative cause, and thus tend to see the former as nothing more than an imperfect vehicle for the transmission of values central to the latter, these interstitial moments between ideological formation and direct action can produce stress and confusion, to neither of which I — nor perhaps you, NR reader — have proved immune.
How, then, to begin the consultative process? I have chosen to do what you’d do if you happened to have his phone number. I have engaged Kevin Williamson.
Kevin writes with the same fire and fervor I first saw in these pages more than 50 years ago. He is the closest thing we have today to my own fiery colleague from those early days, Frank Meyer.
(Apostrophe: Frank S. Meyer was a former Communist — not a ditzy academic but a hard-shell Chicago operative — who, post-apostasy, became one of NR’s early editors. In that role, he revealed himself to be both a chiliastic ideologue and a hapless bureaucrat. He stirred up a long series of skirmishes with his archrival, James Burnham, who emerged from the dustup as NR’s most potent intramural force save only WFB himself. Meyer then went into internal exile in upstate New York and, to everybody’s surprise, became the more important figure in the conservative movement.
It was Frank Meyer — through his books, columns, and, most memorably, his late-night harangues with colleagues and potential converts — who fashioned the first viable form of fusionist conservatism, that oxymoronic guidestar that many of us follow to this very day: ordered liberty. William Buckley, of course, was the indispensable public presence of our fledgling movement, but Bill would be the first to admit that he was not an original thinker. Bill’s political philosophy was shaped in large part by his colleague and mentor, Frank Meyer.
Just one story about Frank, to give you a measure of the man’s intensity. Back in the late Sixties, when my wife and I lived in the New York City suburbs, we would sound the all-quiet around the house at 10 o’clock, 10:30 at the latest. The kids had to get to school in the morning, and I had to catch a 6:30 train to the city. Once or twice a week, along about 2 in the morning, the phone would ring. Jane and I would stare at it. It could be the single woman who lived next door. It could be one of our aging parents. There could be trouble, an emergency. I would groan and pick up the phone and, invariably, it would be Frank Meyer. He had just detected a doctrinal flaw in something I had written and felt compelled to address the matter. Right then. At whatever length might be necessary. So here’s a fun fact from the history of American telephony: It was only a few years later, but much too late for Jane and me, that Ma Bell introduced a new service to deal with the Frank Meyer problem. Caller ID. End apostrophe.)
I am assured by all concerned that Kevin Williamson is a much more clubbable colleague than Frank Meyer. As all of us longtimers have noticed, however, he brings to his work the same qualities of brains and brass that Frank brought to his. Here is the transcript of my digital conversation with Kevin.
Neal B. Freeman: All good political analysis begins with a navigational fix. Where are we? Do you see the Republicans of 2016 as the Whigs of 1855, poised to splinter over an epochal issue? Do you see them as the Republicans of 1912, poised to split from the party nominee and, in doing so, elect a Democrat? Or do you prefer some other analogy?
Kevin D. Williamson: I don’t like the Whig analogy. The 2016 GOP isn’t divided over an enormously important moral issue such as slavery. And I don’t much like the 1912 analogy, either, except inasmuch as the Republicans have practically guaranteed that they’ll lose this race. If anything, the Republicans are like the 1968 Democrats — the ones who backed George Wallace. He was a great deal like Trump, more celebrity-obsessed than a lot of people remember. He had originally intended to choose “Colonel” Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame before settling on General Curtis LeMay as his running-mate. Populism does have a way of bringing out the stupid.
FREEMAN: But isn’t it possible that it can bring them out in sufficient numbers to win an election? We keep hearing about these voters to whom Trump is uniquely appealing. If he puts the Republican base back together, bolts on the celebrity-obsessed, as you call them, and makes himself the all-purpose protest candidate — the rude hand gesture for everybody who’s ticked off at the wife, the boss, the colleagues, and the bureaucrats — can’t that get him to 51 percent?
WILLIAMSON: It might get him to 51 percent in a poll. It probably won’t get him to 270 in the Electoral College. Trump is at 54 percent among California Republicans. It isn’t likely that his brand of angry-white-guy resentment is going to flip a lot of votes in traditionally Democratic states like California, Illinois, and New York. And I think it’s very likely that he could lose some reliably Republican states such as Texas.
FREEMAN: Let’s talk about populism for a moment. Bill Buckley has been quoted for years to the effect that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. That statement has been taken as a measure of Bill’s deep-seated populism — his serene confidence in the decency and common sense of the average American. That, to me, is a misreading of Bill’s views. His statement was, principally, a measure of his dismay with the faculty of Harvard University. He believed that there are certain moral and political issues that only Harvard professors are perfectly equipped to misunderstand.
WILLIAMSON: Bill’s populism was, to put it gently, limited.
FREEMAN: Nice point. But can we agree that a) if neither of us wishes to be governed by the faculty of Harvard University and b) the average American, in the making of political judgments, will not easily be confused with Madison or Jefferson, then, even so, the pipes of the system could benefit from a good populist rinse from time to time?
WILLIAMSON: I think this is a case of metaphor serving us poorly. What we are talking about with the Trump phenomenon is the possibility of nominating, and perhaps even electing, a corrupt, venal, backward, moronic psychopath to the presidency of the United States of America because he was a very entertaining game-show host. That isn’t a populist scouring. That’s a national suicide attempt, or at least a cry for help.
FREEMAN: No, a psychopath would not be good. But suppose Trump just plays one on TV. I’m prepared to take Melania at her word when she says he’s not Hitler. For openers, he doesn’t seem to have the attention span for world domination. (Rimshot.) But suppose, further, that it occurs to Trump one day how comprehensively ill-prepared he is for this assignment. What then? To risk another metaphor, is there a bridge that we conservatives can build to his constituency, if not directly to him, that we can then afford to cross? In other words, can you see how we might deal with Trump and/or the Trumpkins without losing our own souls?
WILLIAMSON: I don’t think there’s much to be gained by reaching out to the Trump element. What catches the whimsy of popular culture is unpredictable. It’s not something you can get out in front of, for the same reason that you can’t write a hit pop song by putting together something that sounds like whatever was popular last week.
FREEMAN: How does that translate to politics?
Conservatives, especially those of a libertarian bent, are forever deluding themselves that their policies would be wildly popular if only they could figure out the right way to talk about them.
WILLIAMSON: Conservatives, especially those of a libertarian bent, are forever deluding themselves that their policies would be wildly popular if only they could figure out the right way to talk about them. But that isn’t it at all. Free trade and immigration are unpopular because people hate foreigners and believe that they mean us harm, and that interactions with them are inherently counterproductive. A Trumpkin earlier today tried to convince me that we have a crime problem in American cities because of trade with China. These are not rational people we are talking about.
FREEMAN:: Most of Trump’s bat-crazy ideas have been swatted away quickly, of course, and some of them by Trump himself. (As you may have noted, he treats every encounter with the public — speech, debate, or press conference — as a kind of all-hands focus group.) What troubles me is the bat-crazy idea that hasn’t been swatted away: that 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. There’s been very little pushback, other than the double-clutching by Trump himself. Is the idea of economic liberty itself in jeopardy here?
WILLIAMSON: The idea of economic liberty has never been particularly popular, especially when foreigners are involved. Minimum-wage laws and mandatory collective bargaining are quite popular. There is a very odd and very primitive superstition about profit itself, as though when Farmer Bob sells you an ear of corn at a profit, then somehow Farmer Bob has gotten over on you. If a Korean chaebol boss grows wealthy selling Americans things they want at attractive prices, we see this as a net loss to the United States, as though the relevant math were the subtraction of profit from the common good rather than the addition of the products of commerce.
FREEMAN: Isn’t your take all the more reason to make the market case now, and with vigor? All the more reason to relive the history of Smoot–Hawley, which triggered trade war and then global depression and then world war? All the more reason to lay out even the second-level effects of broad-scale tariffs if we’re lucky enough to avoid the systemic, first-level failures? Those effects, in my guesstimate, would be, first, that tariffs of that scale would turn America into a nation of 300 million smugglers; and, second, that we would kick the middle class while it’s already down. Walk through Walmart, aisle by aisle, marking up the prices by 50 percent, and you blow a huge hole in the middle-class budget.
WILLIAMSON: Nothing to add to that!
FREEMAN: A related question, then. All elections, as they say, are about jobs. Traditionally (by which I mean, self-obsessively, through the span of my own lifetime), one party has been about new jobs, the other about old jobs. That is to say, one party, usually the Republican, promotes policies that it says will create new jobs, while the other, usually the Democratic, promotes policies to protect existing jobs. This year both parties seem committed to saving the old jobs. Has the party of fear routed the party of hope? Is this what a tipping point looks like?
WILLIAMSON: Maybe not a tipping point, but an unfortunate period of confluence. The average life of a Fortune 500 company in the early Sixties was about 75 years. Today it’s about 15 years and declining. Even if you have the most sought-after skills in the world and the best career plan ever, it’s nearly impossible today to get out of school and go to work for a company where you’re going to stay for the rest of your working life. Add to that the facts that production lines have shorter lifespans, skills become obsolete more quickly, and markets change more rapidly. There is very little “job security” for anybody.
FREEMAN: And that explains the nostalgia for the old jobs?
WILLIAMSON: What people miss about those old jobs — at least as they existed in our national mythology — is that they were stable. They paid crap. Go back and look at how expensive ordinary food staples such as butter and sugar were in the Sixties as a share of the typical household income, to say nothing of meals out or travel, and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that these people were poor, and quite poor, by our standards. But they had — again, the mythology isn’t quite the reality — a measure of stability that is no longer available even to the highly skilled and highly educated, and many of us long for that, intensely.
FREEMAN: Well, that’s enough description, Kevin. Time for a little prescription. The Gary Johnson/William Weld lash-up offers at least superficial appeal, and our friend Bill Kristol is still pinballing through airport lounges in search of a candidate. Tell us what you think of the third-party option in 2016 — is it a winning ticket, a noble gesture, or an empty gesture?
WILLIAMSON: That’s a hard case to make, which is why nobody makes it. I like Gary Johnson well enough, and William Weld is, as a personality, one of my favorite people in politics. (My favorite Weld story: He once half-fainted at a press conference, and his flacks put out a story that he’d had a reaction to a booster shot. Weld later clarified that he had indeed had shots, administered by a Dr. J. Daniel of Tennessee.) But there’s no reason to believe that a Johnson presidency would be the transformational episode promised and needed. I like and admire Bill Kristol, but the fact is that no one really listens to intellectuals and journalists.
FREEMAN: You had to know this last question was coming: What are you going to do on November 8, and why?
WILLIAMSON: On November 8, I’ll be reporting on the election, because that’s my job. On November 9, I’ll be on vacation.
FREEMAN: Of course.