The failure of those on the right who have endorsed Harris to remain rooted in timeless principles damages them both presently and retroactively.
The failure of those on the right who have endorsed Harris to remain rooted in timeless principles damages them both presently and retroactively.
I f I finally cracked the code, finished my time machine, and went back to the year 2004, it might be fun to try apprising my newfound contemporaries of the political situation in 2024. I’d likely just be laughed back into the present while avoiding any damaging effects (presuming that I didn’t step on any butterflies). A Hawaiian state legislator elected as a Democrat in 2002 is now a major Republican power broker? Dick Cheney is supporting the Democratic presidential candidate? The Republican presidential candidate is the guy from The Apprentice? (“Who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”) And a Kennedy endorsed him?
The lingering on the public stage today of some features of 2004 might give a sense of continuity and even stability to our politics. But it’s a false one. Much has changed. It can be dizzying to remain rooted amid such tumult. One group has done a particularly bad job of it: so-called conservatives who have actively advocated for Kamala Harris. As with their Catholic peers, their advocacy reveals a worryingly contingent commitment to timeless verities. It ought to cause the rest of us to reconsider the recent past, and — as if they had a time machine of their own — it effectively rewrites the record of their alleged conservatism.
Consider Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick. Daughter preceded father in affirmatively endorsing Kamala Harris. One need not be a reader of left-wing periodicals to notice imperfections in Trump’s character and policies. But Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris has gone beyond weighing her as the lesser of two evils. It has gone beyond vaunting her character above his. It has settled on a view of abortion that aligns more closely with Harris’s than with what was only recently Cheney’s own. It’s a transformation that illustrates once again a truth of — and the central flaw in — Trump-era attempts by the Left to persuade conservatives to abandon Trump: “Saving democracy,” conveniently, means yielding to the Left.
Another figure of some political import between 2004 and 2024 was Stuart Stevens. A Republican political consultant, he played a role in several presidential campaigns and helped lead Mitt Romney’s 2012 effort. In his 2020 book It Was All a Lie, Stevens revealed, well . . . that it was all a lie — “it” being the entirety of the Republican Party’s pretense to respectability and decency. In reality, he says, it was a front for white grievance that, among other things, “played too much on the social-conservative side” and took its cues from a man — William F. Buckley Jr. — who began his professional life as a “stone-cold racist.”
Stevens was, alas, not alone in belatedly realizing — or perhaps just admitting to — his contempt for the voters and for the movement he had allegedly sought to empower. The Lincoln Project, with which he is affiliated, is replete with such types. Did they use their positions of influence well when they had them? Might their defective influence explain the origin of at least some of the discontent that led ultimately to their marginalization? And given Stevens’s record, might his new peers on the left find his confidence in a Harris victory a bit alarming?
Others like him are similarly revealing. Three “Republicans for Harris” — two former U.S. representatives and a national-security staffer — made a pitch late last month centered on, among other things, “the desire for job security for the thousands of federal employees and contractors who work for agencies surrounding D.C,” as NOTUS described it. It was targeted to a Virginia audience and calibrated — surely unintentionally — to betray a complete misunderstanding of the fact that conservatives ought to oppose the centralization and entrenchment of power in and around Washington, D.C.
The coterie of former Bush, McCain, and Romney staffers who in August endorsed Harris also sullied both messenger and message. Making a pitch for Harris either on the basis of her ability to perpetuate Washington’s status quo, or as a past beneficiary thereof, doesn’t just vindicate her critics. It also increases the willingness of others to trust Trump, flawed as he may be, as a possible means to disrupt that state of affairs — or at least to offer some symbolic protest against it. When what all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass, the wise men should not be surprised that those they consider fools — even Hawaii Democrats and Kennedys — rush in to fill the political spaces they have left.
If these now actively pro-Harris figures had managed not to make major concessions of principle or had demonstrated any circumspection about their own possible contribution to present discontents, they might deserve a fair hearing. Times change, but that should make us stand by timeless principles as a consistent standard for political judgment. Measured against these principles, many may fall short, but they remain useful as an aspiration. Pro-Harris conservatives are, instead, abandoning such principles — something hard to undo without a time machine.
Even without one, they have become unstuck in time. Harris’s campaign promises that “we are not going back.” But many of its Republican proponents seem to desire a past that Trump helped to destroy, and that won’t return. There is no John McCain, Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush restoration imminent, or possible. Indeed, the way their hangers-on have reacted to their own evanescence retroactively discredits their political influence. They could take after Bush in some respects, however. Perhaps by demonstrating some of his humility — and some of his reserve.
No time traveler has visited me to tell me what conservatism will look like in 20 years. But I don’t need a time machine to say that “conservatives” who abandon the pro-life cause, reject the movement’s founders and principles, and have no fundamental problem with the federal leviathan shouldn’t be a serious part of it.