Mr. Willie Robertson (aka “Boss Hogg”), of West Monroe, Louisiana, has endorsed his fellow television personality, Mr. Donald Trump (aka “The Donald”) of Manhattan, New York, for the presidency of the United States of America.
Donald Trump picked up the endorsement of Sarah Palin earlier this week. And now he’s garnered the endorsement of Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson. I don’t think I could be more impressed today if he were to announce the support of every single male and female performer for World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.
In other news, National Review, the venerable conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955, has now published a special symposium entitled “Against Trump.”
For more than sixty years, National Review has been a principal place where intellectual leaders of the conservative/libertarian Right have gathered. For much of its history, indeed, it was one of the only places. The movement to draft Barry Goldwater for the presidency was nurtured here. The Reagan revolution received much of its intellectual firepower from people clustered around National Review.
Historically, National Review has published such luminaries as George Will, Milton Friedman, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Nisbett, Joan Didion, Michael Oakeshott, W. H. Auden, Robert Bork, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Novak, Russell Kirk, Mark Steyn, Harvey Mansfield, Hugh Kenner, Robert Conquest, Henry Hazlitt, Paul Johnson, Victor Davis Hanson, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Harry Jaffa, John Dos Passos, Thomas Pangle, Dennis Prager, and many others.
National Review has also sometimes stepped up to define the boundaries of legitimate conservatism, as well — famously, for example, reading the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand out of the ranks, and expressing deep concern about the seeming flirtation of some (e.g. Pat Buchanan) with anti-Semitism and anti-Semites.
And, now, it’s assembled a collection of important voices on the Right, ranging from Glenn Beck through the libertarian David Boaz to Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, from Michael Medved to former Reagan and Bush attorneys general Edwin Meese and Michael Mukasey, from Commentary editor John Podhoretz to First Things editor R. R. Reno, and from Southern Baptist Convention leader Russell Moore to Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell, explaining why Donald Trump isn’t a conservative and how his nomination would be a catastrophe for the conservative movement and the cause of limited government:
“Against Trump,” by the Editors
How has Mr. Trump responded? In vintage Donald Trump fashion: He doesn’t engage the ideas or the arguments. Instead, just as he’s pretended to regret Ted Cruz’s hypothetical ineligibility for the presidency, he pretends to lament National Review’s supposedly tragic plight: It’s a “failing publication,” he says. It’s “dying.”
In an editorial entitled “Our Mission Statement” that was published on 19 November 1955 in the very first issue of National Review, William F. Buckley famously wrote that “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
He would, I think, be proud of National Review today, as I am.
For an interesting commentary on the National Review commentary, see here. In the spirit of that commentary, I want to be clear: I don’t want to condescend to Sarah Palin and Willie Robertson and the millions of others who share their Angst about the direction our country has taken and their anger at the politicians who are implicated in that direction. I don’t come from the elite. I don’t come from an elite family. I probably agree with Ms. Palin and Mr. Robertson on far more issues than I disagree with them on, and I’m deeply sympathetic to the concerns that move most supporters of Mr. Trump. But their visceral reaction, which I completely understand, needs to be informed and thoughtful and principled. And I see little or no evidence of informed, principled thinking in the Trumpist movement.
I don’t, however, think that National Review’s special issue will do much good. I’ve just listened to the opening minutes of Outnumbered, on Fox. It’s a program that I’ve generally enjoyed when I’ve had a chance to watch. Unanimously, though, the discussants were withering in their contempt for what National Review has done. It was horrifying. Actually, it was shameful. They fell all over themselves expressing admiration for the Strong Man who’s sticking his thumb in the eye of The Establishment. Principles be damned.
And here’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, whose reaction I find similarly appalling:
“What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn’t need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don’t need them, and you’re better off without them.”
Honestly, this is precisely the kind of anti-intellectual rant that one would have heard from the rising Fascist movement in Italy. Benito Mussolini, too, was a Strong Man who appealed directly to the People and confounded the Establishment.
I understand that intellectuals don’t win elections. I understand that the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution and the Weekly Standard and National Review haven’t managed to fix the problems that we all acknowledge and lament. I realize that successful practical politicians are required to do that. But a “conservative” candidate who is wholly estranged from the conservative/libertarian intellectual tradition with which Goldwater and Reagan felt so entirely comfortable and from which they drew ideas, support, and sustenance is an unprecedented novelty and, given Donald Trump’s remarkable populist appeal — a demagogic appeal, in my judgment — is potentially very, very dangerous. To both conservatism and America.
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