Candidly Speaking - 13/06/22

On Being a Conservative - even after Trump

Note: Personal blogs are to be uploaded every other week, on Mondays, accounting for my increasingly busy schedule.

As the January 6th hearings take place, named after that fateful day in 2021 where a dissatisfied group of Trump supporters incited a riot at the US Capitol, I thought this may be a good time to discuss my political views and how I came to hold them.

In the Western context, much of my political outlook can be characterized as “conservative”: I am in favor of the free market, political liberties as enshrined in the US Constitution, and the implementation of Christian ethics - not any Christian doctrine - into public life. However, these views are considered “liberal”, even “progressive” in Vietnam, the country of my birth. This is where I learned that the definition of “conservative” changes according to place, and the definition of “liberal” changes with time. There was a time when you can call yourself a “liberal” without supporting gay marriage, and a Chinese conservative would hold views that are diametrically opposite to his American counterpart.

Matthew Continetti, a well-known American conservative journalist, recently published a book titled The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. I must confess that my busy schedule has not allowed me to read the book, but I have seen it being praised and discussed by multiple voices of the Right that I trust. If you are also starved for time like me, Continetti has penned an article on Commentary to serve as a brief introduction to the book. For someone not of the Right side of the political spectrum, the book may come as a surprise: turns out, there has never been a monolithic Right-wing political bloc. Instead, various factions of the Right has tried to define the label “conservative”, while seeing themselves as defenders of conservatism against the competition. While liberals acquiesce to the Left-wing - case in point, ask yourself how radicals like Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis holds tenured positions at elite American universities - conservatives fight amongst each other, while trying to push the extreme Right to the margins.

That all seemed to change with the ascent of Donald Trump. The great political philosopher Harvey Mansfield once said that even though Trump sees himself as an anti-establishment figure, he owes his success to two major establishments: the Electoral College, which ensures his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, and the Republican (‘Grand Old’) Party, which nominates him as their candidate. George Will, the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist and principled conservative, observes that it is a great time to be a Republican, but not a great time to be a conservative. The lawlessness that took place on Jan. 6th shows that the Republican Party, that solitary vanguard of American conservative ideals, has been successfully hijacked by a man completely unqualified to call himself a conservative (up until 2016, his most successful bid for the White House has been as a candidate for the Reform Party in 2000, against George W. Bush).

I am ashamed to say that I once was an apologist for Trump’s success. I saw him as someone willing to rescue American democracy from the ugly forces of the Left as well as the ineptitude of the Right. Before that, I supported Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate running in 2016 and 2020 on a Democratic ticket. At first glance, it seems strange that those who voted for Trump in 2016 would vote for Bernie in 2020, and vice versa, until you see the similarities between the two. Trump represents the Tea Party movement, which sprung up in 2009 as a movement for lower taxes and against state control. Sanders, on the other hand, is the candidate of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, which seeks to condemn the alleged “1 percent” whose economic and political decisions led America into a financial crisis and unsuccessful wars abroad. As much as Sanders supporters may hate Trump and Trump supporters loathe Sanders, the two candidates share many things in common: a disdain for liberalism, and the objective to use democracy for non-democratic purposes. If Sanders complain about “voter suppression”, Trump rails against “voter fraud”. Both Trump and Sanders purport to fight for the common man, especially the ones who they claim to have been cheated by the system: college students struggling in debt, poor white workers recently unemployed, black men in danger of being shot by cops, opioid addicts victimized by the Sackler family, and so on. Not a mention of preserving cherished American principles. Not a peep on healing the political divide through the promotion of common narratives. Not a word on the importance of American leadership in the international stage.

My support for Sanders evaporated upon watching Trump’s 2020 candidacy, and my support for Trump suffered a heavy blow upon reckoning with the undeniable implications of the January 6th riot. If Sanders, or anyone from the Democratic side, insisted that the result of an election was fraudulent, then no Republican would stand for it. That is exactly what happened when the entire Democratic Party establishment insisted that Russian election meddling resulted in Trump’s victory. However, when it comes to their own side, the Republican establishment would rather punish its dissenters like Liz Cheney than banish the monster that they helped nourish. Trump has become the abusive spouse that the wife constantly makes excuses for - tragically, the battered wife happens to be the Grand Old Party. O Party of Lincoln and Reagan, what have ye become?

Being a conservative these days mean being in battle against both the radicalized Democratic Party and the hijacked Republican Party. But more than that, it is about mending what has broken in our American political discourse: civility and a common narrative. David French, writing for The Dispatch, is an example of such a fighter, which makes Sohrab Ahmari’s article “Against David French-ism” so hilariously off the mark. David French-ism, if such a thing exists, seems to be on the losing side as of late. However, if civility and principle is lost, then the America that was founded in 1776 would be no different than France in 1789.