The populists at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere say you gotta know “what time it is.” The “old” conservatives — pre-Trump — “don’t know what time it is.”
I can tell you, we are all aware that it is Trump Time, on the American right. This is obvious during every hour of every day. I can also tell you that principles and values never expire. They have seasons of more popularity and less popularity. But they don’t expire.
Listening to Donald Trump at CPAC, I thought of two men of the past (and conservatives, remember, should not be squeamish about the past): William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan.
Trump said,
We have countries that honestly nobody has ever heard of. We have languages coming into our country — we don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language. These are languages — it’s the craziest thing. They have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.
WFB, a polyglot, labored for 50 years to separate American conservatism from nativism and boobishness. Where are we now?
Earlier this month, I was in Alabama, speaking at some colleges — about WFB, in fact. At one college, I had a private conversation with a professor — a native Alabamian. He remembered the clash between WFB and Governor George C. Wallace. He, the professor, was a student at the time. And he sided firmly with WFB.
Has Wallace not won, though, when it comes to the soul of the American Right, at least as things currently stand? Has Wallace not won both in “substance” and in style?
Reagan is obviously passé. Here is what he said at the United Nations in 1985:
America is committed to the world because so much of the world is inside America. After all, only a few miles from this very room is our Statue of Liberty, past which life began anew for millions, where the peoples from nearly every country in this hall joined to build these United States. The blood of each nation courses through the American vein and feeds the spirit that compels us to involve ourselves in the fate of this good earth.
In his last speech as president — on January 19, 1989 — Reagan said,
Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.
That would be fine with some, of course — with a great many, in fact. But it would be bad for America, I think, and for the world, too.
Any nation worth its salt has control over its borders. Any nation worth its salt has a lawful and orderly process of immigration. The amount of illegal immigration, in principle, ought to be zero.
When he was first running for office, Sonny Bono was asked, “Hey, Sonny, what’s your position on illegal immigration?” He answered, “Well, it’s illegal, isn’t it?”
At the same time, one can recognize the importance of immigration to the American story — to our vitality, to our success, to our exceptionalism.
Question: Could Ronald Reagan be nominated for anything today? Would he be invited to speak at CPAC? Once upon a time, he was a hero of CPAC. Once upon a time, Mitch Daniels spoke there — about the perils of the national debt. He was introduced by George F. Will.
That was conservatism (American conservatism, distinct from the types elsewhere).
At this year’s CPAC, Donald Trump said, “We have countries that honestly nobody has ever heard of.” What countries are those? Does he mean that he has never heard of them? He said, “We have languages coming into our country — we don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language.” What languages are those?
Does it matter? Does anything Trump says, or does, matter? I know: “Shut up and think of Hunter’s laptop.” But the conservative movement can really do better than that. This was proven when WFB & Co. went about their work.