For Conservatives, There’s a Disconnect Between Principle and Party — Yet Again

T his week’s cordial summit at Gracie Mansion between President Trump and Mayor Mamdani coaxed the New York Post to dub the pair of New Yorkers “the political odd couple.” The socialist mayor and the MAGA president represent the two poles in a polarized America, right?

Rhetorically, this seems about right. Socialists rail against red hats and MAGA, and red-capped MAGA enthusiasts rail against socialists. But in terms of policy, opposites increasingly attract. The president’s plan to pay every adult American $5,000, his response to the Federal Reserve’s rate increase that the body’s lending price to banks “should be 1%, or less,” his addition of $12 trillion to the debt during his time in office, and his pursuit of ownership stakes of about 10 percent of Intel, in IBM’s Anderon after a $1 billion investment, and in numerous other companies involved in semiconductors, AI, and minerals combine to suggest we’re all socialists now.

This disconnect between principle and party comes as not a new feeling for conservatives. The alienation of conservatives from prevailing party opinion today recalls the situation faced by intellectuals on the right in the postwar years. The obscured Old Right, more familiar figures of postwar conservatism, and those who acted as bridge between both iterations more or less united in suspicion of Dwight Eisenhower (notable exceptions included James Burnham, Henry Hazlitt, and Whittaker Chambers). So many felt cheated when Ike edged out Senator Robert Taft for the 1952 nomination. But policy disagreement and not merely lingering grudges primarily fueled the suspicion.

John Chamberlain, Suzanne La Follette, and Forrest Davis, The Freeman’s editorial triumvirate, counseled the Republican presidential nominee in 1952 that “the truth is that the traditional Republicans do have a place to go, or, rather, a place to stay. And that place, come election day, is home.” In refusing to endorse Ike, Chamberlain, La Follette, and Davis — and others at the magazine — coaxed the wrath of The Freeman’s board and lost their jobs. Many found a home in varying capacities at National Review when it launched a few years later.

In a piece he penned for National Review, John T. Flynn, a prominent critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic policies and head of New York’s chapter of the America First Committee, identified Eisenhower as a steward of the New Deal. “The authentic meaning of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower is to be found in one of the oldest rackets in history,” he wrote in the 1956 piece ultimately unpublished by the magazine because of, its author believed, its criticism of Cold War militarism. “It is nothing more than the use of government money, acquired through taxes and created by debt, to buy the votes of numerous minorities and thus remain in power.”

In the magazine that same year, senior editor Willi Schlamm famously counseled readers not to vote for President Eisenhower. He reasoned, “A conservative ought to prefer a Liberal Administration opposed by the Republican Party to a Liberal Administration supported by it.” In other words, because conservatives countenance all sorts of violations of their philosophy by Republican presidents that they zealously oppose when pursued by Democrats, GOP defeat in such cases works to the advantage of the political right.

One may argue that the postwar conservatives graded President Eisenhower on too difficult a curve. One could just as easily make the case that the curve results all these years later in grade inflation. Whatever the verdict on the approach of conservatives to Republican presidents, it does seem instructive that rather than embrace a defeatism in the face of the “conservative votes, liberal victories” phenomenon, conservatives then fixated on ensuring what came next.

Robert Taft’s convention defeat to Barry Goldwater’s nomination to Ronald Reagan’s election took 28 years. That long road from conservative defeat to conservative victory involved withheld endorsements, internecine criticism, and primary challenges, the absence of which, one supposes, would likely continue a string of periodic Republican victories corresponding to perpetual conservative defeats. The temptation to dismiss such a counterfactual finds a rebuttal in the results of the right’s recent, all-too-real habit of fealty toward leaders who share party but not principles.