Allahpundit, one of the most prolific and longstanding bloggers on the right, is leaving Hot Air, where he has written since 2006. He is headed to the Dispatch. His gracious farewell post offers some thoughts on writing on the right in the age of Trump:
Partisan media serves two masters, the truth and the cause. When they align, all is well. When they conflict, you choose. If you prioritize the truth, you’re a traitor; if you prioritize the cause, you’re a propagandist. . . . Propaganda rots the brain, then the soul. That’s one reason why, when I’ve been forced to choose, I preferred to be a traitor than a propagandist. . . . Fundamentally, the last six years have been a character test. Some conservatives became earnest converts to Trumpism, whatever that is. But too many who ditched their civic convictions did so for the most banal reasons, because there was something in it for them — profit, influence, proximity to power, the brainless tribalism required by audience capture. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” Eric Hoffer wrote. We’ve all gotten to see who the racketeers are. I would rather fail as a writer than succeed if success means being some demagogue’s footstool. To the extent my work at Hot Air has made that clear, I’m happy with it.
All of this neatly aligns with my own view of the tightrope that so many of us have had to walk since 2015. Our cause, of course, is still very much aligned with the truth. Conservative ideas are still right in theory and in most of their applications. On matters of policy and on the broader American Way of civics and society, the facts are far more often on our side than not. And our ideological adversaries are not just wrong but often mendacious, corrosive, and pursuing long-term projects that have been ongoing for decades and would destroy America as we know it. When the truth more often collides with the cause is during the day-to-day drudgery of particular news cycles or in the fortunes of particular politicians.
I dissent, however, from this opinion:
What is the right’s “cause” at this point? What cause does the Republican Party presently serve? It has no meaningful policy agenda. It literally has no platform. The closest thing it has to a cause is justifying abuses of state power to own the libs and defending whatever Trump’s latest boorish or corrupt thought-fart happens to be. Imagine being a propagandist for a cause as impoverished as that. Many don’t need to imagine. The GOP does have a cause. The cause is consolidating power. Overturn the rigged elections, purge the disloyal bureaucrats, smash the corrupt institutions that stand in the way. Give the leader a free hand. It’s plain as day to those who are willing to see where this is going, what the highest ambitions of this personality cult are. Those who support it without insisting on reform should at least stop pretending that they’re voting for anything else.
There are three answers to this. The first two, I concede, are not very emotionally satisfying. One, of course, is that the conservative movement’s causes do not cease to exist simply because they have fallen off the agenda of the Republican Party for a time. The GOP remains the only viable vehicle in the world for the causes I believe in, but it has never been a fully movement-conservative party, and never will be. Two, even Republicans who have no ideas at all of their own can still defend an idea that is deeply conservative and deeply American: “Stop,” because our political adversaries are never short of new plans and schemes — or even very old ones from the Thirties or the Sixties — and doing nothing is still far superior to doing harm.
The third answer, however, is that people who say Republicans have no agenda almost always mean no domestic legislative agenda in Congress. But then, the prospect of Republicans gaining a two-thirds majority in Congress this fall are pretty slim, so anything they might want to do will need to get past not just the filibuster in the Senate but a Biden veto. There are still things a Republican Congress can and should do, and there is a whole world of foreign-policy issues on which the next Republican president can do things of great importance (as even Donald Trump did), but it is prudent to look elsewhere in the interim. Where? For one, the states. State governors and legislatures have a lot of big issues on their plates, from education to law enforcement to energy policy to the protection of human life. And many Republican-run states have been very busy on those fronts, which happens to be how America is supposed to be governed. For another, the courts. True, the courts are not political arms of the Party, and they are not a proper vehicle for an affirmative agenda. But the role they play in our system has become a large one, and conservatives in the judiciary can accomplish quite a bit in terms of restoring and fortifying the rule of written law in America. The Supreme Court just concluded one of the momentous and beneficial terms in its history, capped off by overturning Roe v. Wade — a core agenda item and central priority of the Republican Party for more than four decades. Numerous states responded by enacting and enforcing laws in an area of central, life-and-death importance on which they had been prohibited from legislating for half a century. It is hard to square that with a theory that nobody on the right is doing anything of consequence.
And yes: Some culture-war battles are symbolic “boob bait for Bubba” fights (this is true on the left as well as the right), but culture matters, and government policy really does intersect with it in all manner of ways. There are deep and serious public-policy divisions between the two contending tribes on abortion, guns, crime, immigration, schooling, medicine, etc. Even when Republicans seem to be divided between people who lack the courage to fight and people who lack the wisdom to stop, the causes are still there.
What was the Republican cause in 1958? In 1966? In 1974? In 1998? In 2007? There have always been times when the cupboard seemed bare. Of course, we need better leaders, and we need to demand that the leaders we have pursue something greater than their own advancement. But the fact that our party and our movement are imperfect is all the more reason why writers who insist upon telling the truth stay in the fight.