Tom Nichols Never Really Understood Conservatism

I n the latest edition of his Atlantic newsletter, “Confessions of a Conservative Apostate,” Tom Nichols queries: “What does it mean to be a conservative in the Trump era?” Nichols, like a number of former Never Trump Republicans, denounces his erstwhile partisan companions as “a bunch of kooks, opportunists, racists, and aspiring fascists.” But — again, like many of the ex-Republicans in his milieu — he maintains that his new partisan affiliation “in a coalition with an array of groups to our left” is the true conservative choice, given that “none of the issues that would normally matter between right and left matter as much as the future of democracy. A conservative who cares about the future of the constitutional order must face the reality that the Republican Party has become a menace to the Constitution and our system of government.”

This is not an especially new or original line — figures such as Nichols have been making some version of the “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me” argument since they first parted ways with the GOP. But Nichols’s most recent attempt to justify his new partisan affiliation is particularly telling for a number of reasons. Above all else, it helps illuminate deficiencies in the understanding of conservatism that led a number of former conservative personalities to abandon their commitment to their former political principles in favor of an all-out jihad against the GOP over the course of the past six years.

The piece begins with a routine rehearsal of the “national emergency . . . that began in 2017 and is not over yet,” driven by the Trumpist takeover of the GOP, which militates in favor of “root[ing] for GOP defeats on policy even where I might otherwise agree with them.” Nichols admits that, in a previous life, he still “felt like it was safe to throw elbows and do some partisan high-sticking” in service of the Republican Party. Today, however, he’s all in on partisan high-sticking in service of the alternative: “It does no good to support small Republican wins on policy if the cumulative effect is to strengthen the party so that it is larger and more cohesive when it makes another run at destroying the Constitution,” he writes. “Politics is an ugly business; strategy requires some painful decisions. I believe we are in an existential political crisis, and I intend to act accordingly.”

Funnily enough, Nichols isn’t actually wrong on principle — in the abstract, what he’s describing is simply statesmanship. Politics does require compromise and even nose-holding at times: Men are not angels, nor are they governed by them. In a fallen world, the business of politics — of putting principle into practice — requires an acceptance of the imperfect; “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” etc. Ironically, it is the very insistence on a morally pure politics — an unwillingness to advance noble goals via occasionally less-than-noble means — that originally drove so many down the Republican-to–Never Trump–to-Bulwark-to-Democrat pipeline.

The gap between Nichols’ understanding of principle and practice may have something to do with his understanding of what the role of politics is. “What I am ‘conserving,’ by being a conservative, is our political order and the future freedom to argue and advocate within that order,” he writes. But what is that political order, from the conservative perspective?

In the newsletter, Nichols links to a 2018 thread that explains his view of what “constitutes a conservative temperament, including ideas about human nature, the role of government, civic virtue, and the balance between freedom and responsibility”:

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/967967191206453248

That view — that “the state is our servant, not our teacher or headmaster,” as Nichols continues; that “it has no existence beyond our will to support it and our recognition and continuing approval that it is acting justly” — is not conservative, at least in the traditional understanding of the word. But it is a kind of ideology that, while popular on the right in the decades leading up to 2016, is increasingly alien to the contemporary Right’s understanding of itself. So it’s understandable that figures such as Nichols, who thought conservatism began “from a position . . . of individual freedom,” are so bewildered by the state of conservatism today. And it helps explain why Nichols sees today’s Right as a betrayal:

The conservatives, in any case, have become completely un-conservative. The traditional conservative emphasis on law and order and on limited government has not held the GOP’s theocratic-nutball wing in check. The same people who decried the growth of executive power now worship a sociopathic real-estate con man as a demigod. The party that prided itself on its national-security cred is now voting against admitting Sweden and Finland into NATO like some early–20th century isolationist know-nothings. Even Republicans who should know better cheer the Supreme Court siding with a high-school football coach pulling his players into prayer sessions. And as my Atlantic colleague Jerusalem Demsas recently pointed out, Republicans went from “giving abortion back to the states” to trying to figure out how to allow those same states to interfere with the rights of Americans to move freely in their own country.

But let’s leave debates over Trump to the side for the moment. The deeper, substantive disagreement between Nichols and today’s conservative movement is the conflict between those who believe that the state is unable to “institute justice” and those who belong to what Nichols derides as “the GOP’s theocratic-nutball wing.” But what Nichols misses is that the “theocratic-nutball wing” is far closer to the traditional understanding of conservatism than the libertarian individualism that he embraces. Conservatives, as Russell Kirk wrote in 1981, reject the idea that politics is organized around the “simple solitary principle . . . of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed of human existence.” Far from beginning at “individual freedom without the presence of the state,” as Nichols put it, Kirk argued that “the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God”:

Government — as [Edmund] Burke [wrote] — “is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Among the more important of those human wants is “a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can be done only by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue.”

Robert Nisbet, perhaps the greatest conservative sociologist of the 20th century, arrived at a similar conclusion. For him, individual liberty is neither absolute nor an abstract starting point for the conservative political understanding, but “is only possible within the context of a plurality of social authorities, of moral codes, and of historical traditions, all of which, in organic articulation, serve at one and the same time as ‘the inns and resting places’ of the human spirit and intermediary barriers to the power of the state over the individual,” he wrote. The political community is not one “that comes from within each person,” as Nichols argued, but is “composed of, not individuals directly, but the natural groups within which individuals invariably live: family, locality, church, region, social class, nation, and so on,” Nisbet continued. “Individuals exist, of course, but they cannot be seen or comprehended save in terms of social identities which are inseparable from groups and associations.”

It is those “social identities which are inseparable from groups and associations” that today’s Right is, honorably, attempting to defend. But that endeavor requires a renewal of the older conservative understanding of politics, and a departure from Nichols’s emaciated vision of conservatism, which neglected the fundamental social and cultural debates at the heart of our politics.

Nichols sneers that today’s “theocratic-nutball wing” is “completely un-conservative.” At best, such a conclusion comes from a place of ignorance; at worst, it derives from cynical dishonesty. (As Mac Stipanovich, a former Republican operative, told the New Yorker last month, there was a time when “every” Republican candidate “exploited” conservatives: “We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.”) For all of its myriad problems, today’s Right is far closer than Nichols to an authentic conservatism.