by Rick Wilson
Let me be very clear about one thing: I’m not the arbiter of what constitutes pure conservatism, but I know what we’ve got in Washington today is a long way from it. For modern conservatism and the Republican Party to recover in the aftermath of the Trump era, I’d like to offer a few straightforward policy recommendations that combine a return to conservative principles and some practical political fixes. These fixes are for the heart, and the head.
In this time of nationalist populism, many of Trump’s supporters believe Americans are a race, not a nation. This should offend conservatives who believe in the propositional nature of American citizenship, but the Volk and Rodina crowd is in the ascendance, as are state capitalism types. Let’s see if we can fix that, shall we?
A PARTY OF HOPE, NOT HATE
The fundamental nature of conservatism is, in William F. Buckley’s famous formulation, to stand athwart history and yell “Stop!” But what radically accelerating technological, social, and demographic change has left is increasingly leaving the possibility of stopping progress far in the rearview mirror of our national Tesla.
Republicans need to become a party of militant optimism about the future. Right now we are a party of doom and gloom, screeching about the imminent collapse of the West under the sensible heels of Hillary Clinton, the machinations of George Soros, Islamic terror, and the usual pantheon of Trump’s scaremongering closet of horrors.
We’ve always been a nation with our eyes cast to the far future. We’ve always believed that the U.S. system and values and the propositional nature of what it means to be an American have a kind of alchemical felicity that leads to an arc rising toward better lives, more freedom applied more broadly, greater economic prosperity, and institutions, based on laws and norms the world can envy. In 2010 we stopped talking about the shining city on a hill and started screaming about sharia law coming to your local day-care center.
A GOP looking backward, desperate to restore the economy, racial composition, and social structures of the 1950s, is bad for the brand, and the kind of nostalgia that is both pointless and cruel. Democrats learned this lesson in Bill Clinton’s election of 1992, and again with Barack Obama in 2008. Both men were more optimistic than their Republican counterparts, painting a vision of an America that works and moves forward without fear.
We need to start telling Americans we believe in them again. Look up. Look ahead. Tell people you have faith in them. Teach them we believe we can lift people up and that no one is a prisoner of their past. Tell them that the city on a hill is still there, radiant and beckoning.
REFORM FROM WITHIN
As a party, the GOP became very comfortable in Washington within months of our sweeping victory in 1994. The army of K Street and Capitol Hill lobbyists who had previously been besties with every Democrat under the sun suddenly started stroking checks so fast their manicured fingers cramped. With majorities in both houses, the tidal wave of money flowing to the GOP has had precisely the corrupting and corrosive effects one might expect.
Campaigns became less about a set of principles reflecting the values and needs of the districts and states in which candidates were campaigning and more about tailoring messages, policies, and outcomes to specific corporate benefactors. Lobbying is a business, and under the GOP, business has been good.
Americans are convinced down to their very souls that Washington’s corruption is so endemic, so bred in the bone, and so intractable that payoffs, special favors, and logrolling define the capital city more than anything else. Public corruption is the single most dangerous perception for a majority party—to wit, 1974, 1994, 2006, 2010—and the GOP is running headlong into deep ethical waters.
We need a return to strict ethics rules for elected Republicans, whereby both personal and fiscal violations lead to actual punishment and, if merited, expulsion from the body. We need to forbid members of Congress from lobbying after they leave. We need to tighten up financial disclosure rules so members voting on legislation that benefits their own bottom line face sanctions.
These aren’t hard to do, but they won’t be popular. After all, the man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a walking conflict of interest, and some Republicans seem hell-bent on emulating him. We’d better clean up our own house, or the voters will do it for us.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL OPERATING SYSTEM
We continue to stubbornly cling to the illusion that the Republican Party is the party of adherence to the Constitution. In the era of Trump, that’s become a risible lie. We need to start walking the walk on reverence and adherence to the Constitution. It’s central to our philosophical priorities as a party.
It’s the national operating system, and its past time we stopped simply paying lip service to it in the conduct of the business of the American people. Republicans tempted to use government to achieve their policy ends will have a higher hill to climb, but the bills they pass will be less subject to the whimsy of the courts.
Republicans need to restore the divisions between the three branches of government. Under Trump, Congress has abandoned its role as a coequal branch and acted like a Trump houseboy. Congress must exercise its prerogatives and responsibility; the Executive must respect its boundaries under the Constitution; and the courts must play in their lanes. The dynamic tensions between the branches are a feature of a functioning Republic, not a bug.
This also entails respect for all the amendments, not just the 2nd and 10th.
TALK MAIN STREET—AND MEAN IT
The vast and increasing disparity in wealth in this nation has been shrugged off by Republicans for a generation. It’s time to be honest about it with the people who haven’t enjoyed corporate tax breaks, preferential regulatory treatment, and Wall Street bailouts. We talk a good game about putting Main Street before Wall Street, but talk is all it’s been.
We’ve been parties to bleeding dry the middle class in this country, confusing “good for business” with “good for people.” The market we’ve been a part of creating isn’t free. It’s shaped in Washington’s regulatory structures, and we’ve been paid lavishly to build it for the sectors with the best lobbying money can buy. We’ll fight over supply-side economics another day, but the economic realities of today leave Americans feeling pressured, stressed, and powerless. Sit in on any focus group of likely voters in an affluent suburb, and when the pretense of “we’re good” falls, the intensity of the pressure they feel and the burdens they face come screaming at you.
The economic populism of the Trumpist variety and liberal technocratic fantasies are both dead ends in a modern global economy, but the crony capitalism and rentier economy being created with our compliance are economically artificial, frankly cruel, and eventually politically poisonous.
Free markets, economic prosperity, the uplift of a real economy that is structured for growth, modern job creation, is resilient in times of crisis and responsible to the people of our nation would be a lasting legacy for a revitalized Republican Party.
THE RULE OF LAW
Stretching back to the most fundamental Burkean conservatism is one value all but shredded in the age of Donald Trump; respect for the rule of law.
His constant attempts to obstruct justice in the Mueller investigation with only the slightest pushback from Republicans set a precedent so dangerous that we haven’t even seen the possible scope of the damage yet. Recommitting as a party to the rule of law seems like pretty basic conservatism, but in the era of Trump it’s a radical commitment.
Trump’s desire to fire, suborn, or destroy anyone investigating him or his administration is an outrage that will echo longer than Watergate. As a fundamental reform, we need to make a more explicit commitment to not only obeying but honoring and upholding the law, no matter where it takes us. There is no excuse for the direction we’ve chosen; a commitment to restoring respect for the law is fundamental.
SMALLER, SMARTER, AND BETTER GOVERNMENT
Republicans talk a great game about limited government, reducing the scope
and power of the state, and keeping the hated Washington bureaucracy out of the businesses and lives of Americans. In practice, however, we expanded the federal government radically, both in power and in size, even before Trump.
The vast halo of consultants surrounding Washington, DC, and its environs may not have increased the official head count at the agencies, but the government has grown like kudzu in the past 30 years. It grew during Clinton. It grew during George W. Bush, in dramatic ways that seemed sensible then but are disquieting now. It expanded during the Obama era, and it’s growing during the Trump era.
Merely bleating about cutting the size of government isn’t enough. Republicans need a new commitment to reforming government, altering its contours and missions to modernize and streamline it. We need to build a customer bill of rights into every government agency that interfaces with the taxpayers directly, ensuring Americans are treated with respect and courtesy. We need to take a meat ax to the legions of consultants conducting the business of government without any real accountability to Congress.
This isn’t about across-the-board wholesale cuts, but a serious, mission-driven reform. The bureaucratic immune system is powerful and still wildly dysfunctional. Republicans can lead this charge, reduce the costs and power of the state, and deliver more of the services government should provide to the taxpayers.
BUILD A DIVERSE PARTY
No, I’m not off on some PC SJW rant.
The founding model of our Republic never envisioned members of the House and the United States Senate as members of an ideological monoculture, each responsible not to their state or district but to a single national menu of policy choices. Starting with the post-2010 Tea Party triumph, a growing number of Republicans began to fall into a single ideological frame. The Founders expected the people’s representatives in Washington to reflect the values, views, and interests of their state, not simply the positions du jour of Fox News or Mark Levin.
Ideological monocultures right and left kill political creativity, experimentation, and innovation. They close off prospects for victory. The Democrats suffer from this constantly, insisting every candidate hew to the pro-abortion, antigun politics that would get a nod of approval in California but howls of derision in about 40 other states.
A Republican running in Vermont shouldn’t have to meet the same purity tests a Republican from Alabama might. A candidate in Florida shouldn’t have to conform to the same positions as a candidate in Wyoming.
By increasing our ideological diversity we’ll expand the places we can compete, offer Americans more choices in more communities, and enrich the scope of candidates who enter politics.
With that in mind, it’s time to make real efforts to recruit African American, Hispanic, and female candidates, not as stunt casting or on a quota basis but as a sign we’re serious about voices with new perspectives and ideas. Tim Scott, Mia Love, and Nikki Haley are rock stars, but still all too rare.
But we can’t even start to do that until we do what I outline next.
PURGE RACISTS, CONSPIRACY NUTS, AND LUNATICS FROM OUR RANKS
The Republican Party has a race problem, and pretending it doesn’t exist has become impossible. We’ve lost African American voters for decades, and now Trump, Trumpism, and his alt-right allies have turned them into the most powerfully motivated demographic in American political life. In Virginia, Alabama, and other contests in 2017, African Americans—particularly African American women—have turned out in droves to vote against Republican candidates in levels that exceed their performance for even Barack Obama.
I wrote in an earlier chapter about the history of Republicans standing firm against racial animus and hatred. Donald Trump took every single cliché used by Democrats against the GOP on race and made them a central part of the Republican brand. It’s the nadir of an already low point in America’s recent history of race relations.
We’re not going to have even the slightest chance to win over African Americans until we aggressively, consistently, loudly purge the racists in our midst. Zero tolerance, pack your shit, and hit the road, buh-bye.
I’m rarely at a loss for words, but the fury I felt after defending my party for decades from attacks that it was inherently racist, only to have it elect a man racist in deed and word, tolerant of even more vile racists, and a hero to racists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites leaves me almost speechless with rage.
The purge of racists in our party can’t be subtle, it can’t be delicate, and it can’t be delayed. Ties to the alt-right? You’re gone. Ties to the Klan? Gone. The national and state parties need to adopt bylaws that disqualify folks who hold these beliefs from running under our banner. Want to run under the flag of the Racist Dumbfuck Party? Be my guest, but get used to pulling .02% on election day.
The single greatest risk to conservatism, the Republican Party, and the nation is if the alt-right virus spreads deeper into the political system. Racial division and hatred and political movements built around them would be an insult to the long journey our nation has traveled from the original sin of slavery until today. I’ve outlined the vital necessity of conservatives resisting the alt-right temptation. If we fail, the future won’t be simply awful; it will be filled with pathways that lead to some of the darkest forms of violence and hatred.
The next purge required is to end our reliance on and tolerance for conspiracy lunacy. The hatred of the media so common on the right has led millions into a box canyon of inflammatory kookspiracy so far into the extremes that it makes agitprop look like the New York Review of Books. Congressional press releases read like X-Files spec scripts. Millions of conservatives believe in conspiracies so baroque and Lovecraftian that even trying to explain them makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Conservative authors, news outlets, and broadcasters need to outgrow the fever swamp of conspiracy and madness. Republican elected officials need to stop playing ball with these sites and writers. In a sane world, Congress and the White House would never credential outlets like Infowars, lisping, human flounder hybrid and edge-case lunatic Mike Cernovich, or dim-bulb kookspiracy theorist Jim Hoft. It’s time to get back to some professional rigor when it comes to who and what we cover and believe. Stop feeding the conspiracy monster, and it starves.
DECENCY, HUMANITY, AND TOLERANCE
These aren’t liberal excuses; they’re foundational conservative values. The fashionable cruelty of the Trump era—degrading opponents, deporting people of the wrong ethnicity, the endless stream of dick-joke-level insults and offenses—aren’t the character of a president or of a party deserving of respect and support. Respect, courtesy, noblesse oblige, reciprocity, and honor may not seem à la mode in the Trump era, but they’re powerful social forces a smart party would wire back into its DNA. President Shithole may not get it, but we can, and should.
The increasingly hideous tone of the GOP is a long-term brand killer; we need to stop reveling in the fuck-you culture of constant, always-on outrage and offense. It’s juvenile, repellent, and self-limiting. Outrage has a reason, and a place. When it’s over everything, it’s about nothing.
RESPECT AND HONOR AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS
In this post-everything world, Donald Trump is wrecking our institutions in ways more corrosive, insidious, and permanent than the wildest visions of our worst enemies.
One of the points of deep anxiety in American political life is the constellation of institutions on which we once relied have fallen into disrepute, one by one. Business, finance, the church, the education system, Congress, and many others have transformed from being the sinews that connect a society to corrupt echoes of what they once were. Trump has corrupted and broken the entire idea of the American presidency, an institution so vital and so central to American governance at home and abroad.
This is one of the biggest of big lifts in the path out of this crisis. How about a party that advocates for a world where serious people take on serious tasks in a serious way and are accountable for r
esults? Restoring faith in institutions rests on accountability, but as a nation we’ve become great at ducking it. It’s become a structural feature in every domain of American life, and it’s wrecking the country.
The failed teacher gets promoted to a bureaucratic job with higher pay. Wall Street CEOs who make bad bets on absurd derivatives incinerate billions in the pensions and 401k accounts of Middle Americans get government bailouts and a golden parachute, not stainless steel handcuffs and a stretch in federal prison. The congressman who gets caught taking a sack full of cash to pay for his intern’s abortion may lose his office, but he’s back lobbying for seven figures the next year.
We blame society, genetics, the media, bad parenting, and the Colonel’s addictive fried chicken, but at root, we’ve become comfortable blaming others for our failings. At every point on the spectrum, we want to move from failure to exoneration to reward, with never a hard look at why and with no one being held to account.
Many Trump voters have told focus groups they backed him because everything else was broken, so why not let a madman disrupt the system and drain the proverbial swamp. Their feelings came from the broken institutions around them.
A better, smarter, restored GOP can’t fix every institution, but we can start by fixing ourselves. We can start by adopting and holding to a set of ethical, managerial, and behavioral standards as a model. We can become a party and a movement that stops letting our own “fail up” into positions of greater reward and consequence.
