The thesis of Bobby’s Corner post this morning, “Haley and Scott Would Provide Much-Needed Ideological Diversity to the 2024 Field,” is more or less what the title suggests. Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, two prospective 2024 GOP presidential prospects — the former is reportedly set to announce her run later this month — “afford Republicans a chance for renewal,” Bobby writes:
There’s another reason for welcoming Haley and Scott to the 2024 contest: ideological diversity. Some might scoff at this claim. Both candidates in some sense represent the pre-2016 Republican consensus that many regard with contempt. However, it’s undeniable that the ranks, or at least the influence of, traditional conservatives such as Haley and Scott have diminished somewhat in the GOP. Much of the party and “Conservatism Inc.” has made a decisive turn in the “America First” direction in recent years, going to great pains to devise an intellectually coherent Trumpism. In the process, much of what had come to define the Republican Party since 1980 has atrophied. This hasn’t been all bad — some of the ossified mantras of the pre-Trump era needed to be shed and updated. Somewhere along the way, unfortunately, values such as American exceptionalism, individual liberty, and fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law have become passé, impairing the party both politically and morally as a result.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but the 2016 Republican presidential primary was plenty ideologically diverse, too. We had champions of practically every strand of conservatism imaginable: reformicons (Marco Rubio), libertarians (Rand Paul), establishment moderates (John Kasich), anti-establishment Tea Partiers (Ted Cruz), neoconservatives (Jeb Bush), paleoconservatives (Rick Santorum), Christian conservatives (Mike Huckabee), blue-state pragmatists (Chris Christie), and so on. The only thing missing from the suite of available strains of rightism was vaguely homoerotic pseudo-Nietzschean bodybuilding fetishism. (And for that, we should probably be grateful.)
The result, of course, was that Republican opponents of Trump, caught up in a deluge of internecine bickering, sectarian resentments, and personal ambition failed to coalesce around an alternative candidate, divided the anti-Trump vote, and opened up a path for the insurgent candidate to secure the GOP nomination with well under half of the Republican primary vote — the lowest percentage in nearly a half century.
Bobby briefly addresses this concern in a “on the one hand/on the other hand” paragraph, but its actual significance far outweighs the potential benefits of getting to see one’s ideal brand of conservatism represented in the 2024 field. “Ideological diversity” aside, this isn’t an abstract classroom debate; it’s a presidential election. And the growing field of potential primary candidates conjures up distinct memories of 2016 — very few candidates other than DeSantis and Trump have a viable shot at the nomination, but as a collective, they very much have the potential to split the field and reward the candidate with the highest and most durable floor of support.
At the moment, that candidate is Donald Trump. Barring a cataclysmic implosion, the former president will probably enjoy the baked-in support of about a third of the Republican primary electorate. That dynamic should make conservatives who would like the 2024 nominee to be someone other than Trump think twice about cheering the campaigns of ambitious long shots — even if, as Bobby argues, those long shots “offer a vision of optimism and commitment to bettering the America that we have . . . at a moment when both traits are severely lacking on the right.”
If you want the best possible shot at Republicans moving on from Trump, it’s difficult to sustain an argument for anyone other than Ron DeSantis. If you want a cathartic, root-and-branch rejection of Donald Trump and all his works, paired with a restoration of the premises and narratives of Bush-era conservatism, someone like Nikki Haley may be more appealing. DeSantis is not, it is fair to say, the ideal candidate for conservatives who want to cleanse the GOP of any trace of Trump’s political priorities, positions and tactics, and regard the changes in the conservative movement since 2016 with singular or near-singular regret. For those of us who see many of those reforms as salutary and long overdue, but are eager to see them instantiated in a better vessel than the former president, DeSantis is an appealing prospect. This is a persistent division in the Trump-critical wings of American conservatism that is likely to become more visible in the coming months.
But in any event, as Thomas Sowell famously noted, the conservative worldview is defined by its aversion to the siren’s song of perfect solutions: In the conservative or “constrained vision,” Sowell wrote, “trade-offs are all that we can hope for,” and “prudence is among the highest duties. Edmund Burke called it ‘the first of all virtues.’ ‘Nothing is good,’ Burke said, ‘but in proportion and with reference’—in short, as a trade-off.” The 2024 GOP primary is a study in trade-offs. And the pursuit of the perfect may end up coming at the cost of the good.