The Un-Conservative Right

At Least It Pissed Off Liberals

Many conservatives, quite properly appalled by Donald Trump, insist that he is not a conservative, and I am fine with that.  Speaking as a liberal, it is not my place to define what a conservative is, but I can think of many definitions of conservative – cautious, prudent, distrustful of the state, distrustful of any excessive accumulation of power, adhering to traditional religion or traditional values, promoting moral restraint, believing in the rule of law, conscious of the danger of demagogic appeals to people’s basest instincts, etc. – that Trump clearly does not meet.  But it is absurd to conclude from that that since Trump is not a conservative, he must be a liberal, or that he is a phenomenon of the left rather than the right.  No, no and no!  His eagerness to enact the priorities of the Republican donor class, his appeal to so much of the traditional Republican coalition, his loud and aggressive feud with all things liberal are clear proof that, although Trump may not be a conservative, he is definitely right wing.

And to any anti-Trump conservative who takes offense that that statement, I would suggest that liberals might have something to offer there.  See, we have a history of having to deal with Communism.  And there is no need to lie or mince words.  Many liberals and radicals succumbed to its allure, took its promises at face value, and because fellow travelers or useful idiots.  But even from the start there were many who did not, who saw through the danger and denounced Communism as evil from the start. And with the onset of the Cold War, opposition to Communism became the clear dividing line between respectable liberals (and left-wingers) and people outside of any reasonable bounds.

So how was a liberal to deal with Communism?  It wasn’t liberal, not liberal was defined to mean favoring liberty, inclusion, universal human rights, rule of law, openness, tolerance, or the other terms liberals used to define themselves.  Yet it did appear to be left-wing.  Like liberals, it did challenge the status quo of power and purport to be a movement championing the oppressed.  In fact, it actually did champion the rights of the oppressed in countries where it had not yet seized power.  It was pointless to deny that really was left wing.  So what was a liberal to make of a movement that shared liberals’ own criticisms of the status quo of power and championship of society’s unfortunates, even as it wrote vast swaths of humanity out of its moral calculations altogether, and often seemed to be motivated more by hatred and appeals to base instinct more than anything else, to say nothing of its monstrous crimes against humanity.  Our answer, in the end, was that there was a hard left, by no means limited to the Communists, that shared many values and ultimate goals with liberals, but was utterly opposed to us in many others.  We called it the illiberal left.

Well, conservatives might was well admit that Donald Trump shares a lot of goals and values with them.  He wants to cut taxes and gut regulations.  He distrusts government in all its “mommy” functions and any special measures to promote the status of racial and ethnic minorities.  He is an instinctive hawk on foreign policy and a champion of law and order.  In all of this one might as well admit Trump is right wing.  But he differs from true conservatives in these other aspects.  So why not come out and acknowledge the existence of an un-conservative right.  Place Donald Trump in it, along with slave holders, classical fascists, and their modern heirs such as the LePens and the other rabid nationalist parties in Europe today.  

And, yes, liberals will no doubt continue to blur the lines, just as many conservatives blurred the lines between liberal and Communist.  But once you get the basic concept that there are unwholesome people on your side if the divide, and that people on your side of the divide have the first responsibility to police the distinction, we will be drawing closer to a reasonable dialogue on President Trump and how to deal with him.