There are many good essays in the new edition of the Claremont Review of Books, but I want to draw attention to William Voegeli’s excellent analysis of the Never Trump movement in his review of Never Trump, The Revolt of the Conservative Elites by Robert P. Saldin and Stephen M. Teles.
Voegeli traces how the Never Trump analysis went from opposing Trump as a candidate to opposing what was taken to be his authoritarian threat to democracy itself. By raising the stakes this high, Never Trumpers have also come to repudiate conservatism itself as something they did not fully understand, even while putatively claiming to have led it. Finally, with Trump’s popular vote victory in 2024, many were confronted with condemning the democratic majority of this country as an anti-democratic force.
Voegeli writes:
At no point did Never Trump possess the basic traits of a political movement: a small number of leaders and large number of followers. Never Trump’s leaders and its constituency are one and the same, as Saldin and Teles’s subtitle suggests. The conservative elites whose revolt the book examines include: 1) experts in foreign policy, economics, and law, the sort of people who end up staffing Republican administrations; 2) campaign professionals, especially those who manage communications and campaign strategy; and 3) public intellectuals, including opinion journalists and academics who write for a general readership.
Indeed. Voegeli importantly avers that theoretically, it is true that a democratic majority could vacate democracy of its meaning by abandoning the norms and virtues that uphold it. But he turns this argument around on the Never Trumpers, who seem disinclined to revive it themselves:
Conservatism has always insisted that democracy can be undermined from within as well, that defending democracy requires warnings that democratic nations can be inattentive or even hostile to prerequisites for the health of democracy. Though this argument has disappeared from the Never Trump playlist, it was once readily available. In the 1990s, for example, William Kristol argued that it was necessary to supplement the “politics of liberty” with the “sociology of virtue.” As recently as 2016 he wrote that conservatives have “often been better…than liberals” at upholding liberal democracy, “because conservatives are more aware than liberals of liberal democracy’s weaknesses and less complacent about its success.”
This analysis is consistent with that of political scientist Harvey Mansfield, who praised the American Founding in a 1988 New Republic essay for understanding that republics are vulnerable because they have enemies but also because they have vices. To mention one application of this thinking, Trumpism appears to believe, and Never Trumpism to deny, that social cohesion and national identity are no less important to democratic nations than to any others. The vice of radicalizing the democratic principle of equality so that non-citizens’ rights resemble ever more closely those belonging to citizens, rendering immigration law unenforceable, is an example of liberal complacency, and also a repudiation of the conservative vigilance that Kristol used to endorse.
Great read. Check it out here.