It certainly isn’t ideology.
At some point, Sean Hannity’s sycophantic behavior stopped bothering me. I began having fun with it, trying to guess where Hannity might draw the line and push back on something President Trump did or said, just to try and entertain myself. I do suppose that line exists somewhere out there, but it has proven harder to find than I would have guessed:
https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/908181310702747649
Partisanship isn’t driving anyone’s loyalties these days, and sadly ideology isn’t either. It is sociology, pure and simple. Sean Hannity knows that his audience likes good-old-fashioned Clinton-bashing and Obama-bashing, but they love GOP leadership-bashing. Ann Coulter knows that she can corner the niche market of our most irrational, radical of xenophobes, and that she can afford to attack GOP leaders and President Trump in the course of maintaining that deplorable monopoly. Steve Bannon has done substantial work in formulating a worldview, but the prescriptions this worldview dictates are on the whole disastrous, rooted much more in political nihilism than Burkean conservatism. None of the three is motivated by partisanship, and only Hannity is truly a sycophant. Those looking for some thread to connect the various divided loyalties and perspectives in Trump world are going to be sorely disappointed.
That thread will not be ideological, or policy-driven. It won’t be found by evaluating the pros and cons of President Trump’s new-found interest in dealing with Democrats, though said interest certainly has pros and cons. Ultimately, non-ideological conservatives are a highly fragmented bunch, with different motives and priorities. Ideological conservatives — those descended from Bill Buckley and Russell Kirk — are much easier to understand. Their disagreements and differing conclusions all stem from actual policies and beliefs. Non-ideological conservatives — those who take comfort in the antics of people like Coulter, Hannity, and Bannon — are not motivated by anything so concrete.
As Gresham Machen once said about early 20th-century liberalism in the Church, “This is not between two varieties of the same religion, but, at bottom, between two essentially different types of thought and life.” Bannon’s belief that any organized establishment force must be blown up from within is quite revolutionary, and by definition quite un-conservative. Coulter I believe is just playing a character to preserve her lucrative share of an ugly market. Hannity, like all talk-radio and TV personalities, aims to preserve and grow his audience, but I suspect he also believes that by making a fool of himself in defending President Trump, he will help Trump’s cause.
Much has been made of divisions within ideological conservatism that come up from time to time. Could it be that when all is said and done with the Trump era, it will be a combustion of non-ideological conservatism that is Trump’s real legacy?