No Country for Old Conservatives

On the death of a dream

My parents cast their first votes for president in 1984. Ronald Reagan was the incumbent, and he would win reelection in a landslide. This was the year of the famous “morning again in America” ad, which cast a warm sunrise glow over the nation’s economic prospects. But for my parents, and for the evangelical Christian stock they came from, a vote for Reagan wasn’t just a vote for more jobs and lower taxes. It wasn’t just a vote for the practical consequences of a Reagan presidency. It was a vote for the man himself.

Chief among the qualities that inspired admiration from my parents’ tribe—what became known as the Moral Majority, or the Religious Right—was Reagan’s personal commitment to the pro-life cause. I’ve pointed before to an article series that explains how abortion became a Republican issue after a period where it was far from clear which party would take it up. That trajectory was encapsulated in Reagan’s own political arc. In 1967, as governor of California, Reagan signed one of the first bills to decriminalize abortion, allowing it in cases of rape, incest, and a threat to the mother’s mental or physical health. However, it would later emerge that even then, he had already begun a process of “soul-searching.” (This came out in a letter to Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, funny enough, just after Schulz had done a subtly pro-life strip.) By 1976, on a post-Roe vs. Wade campaign trail, Reagan was publicly walking the bill back. And by 1984, he was speaking about the “long and agonizing pain” suffered by aborted babies, which inspired ex-abortionist Bernard Nathanson to create the short film The Silent Scream. The piece was widely condemned as “anti-abortion propaganda.” All it does is show what an abortion looks like, from beginning to end. It would premier on televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr.’s channel, be shown in the White House, and be widely distributed throughout public schools.

That was my parents’ Republican party: the party that led from the front on social issues, lifted the country out of an economic depression, and won the Cold War. The party with a candidate who could truly be called one of America’s great men, for whom you could spend the rest of your life proud to have cast a college kid’s first vote. But that party is gone. For Christian voters, the past eight years have been an extended process of trying to figure out what’s replaced it and what to do now. Four distinct approaches have emerged.

The first approach is to vote enthusiastically for Trump, believing not merely that he’s better than the alternative but that he is in himself a great candidate. Some people have succeeded in convincing themselves that he’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan, either by giving Trump more credit than he deserves or by giving Reagan less. (The lamest variation on the latter is “Reagan was divorced too,” when it’s widely known that his first wife left him because she was an actress who didn’t want to be married to a politician.) I’m perplexed by these people, and yet I also love some of them, because some of them are my friends. My only wish is that when this is all over, they will eventually get a candidate who deserves them.

The opposite approach is to make not voting for Trump into your personal brand, to such an obsessive and all-consuming extent that you will literally vote Democrat to stop Trump from winning. This has been the trajectory of erstwhile conservative pundit David French, who is now enthusiastically endorsing Kamala Harris. Other “Evangelicals for Harris” have announced themselves in similarly grating, sanctimonious fashion. They’re very popular among the niche set who like that sort of thing.

The third approach is to vote for Trump as a purely transactional matter, under no delusions about his character or lack thereof, simply because the Democrats are still so much worse on a range of issues. As Rod Dreher has recently argued, he’s not Kamala, and that’s good enough. If we get someone better someday, great, but until then, he’ll have to do. The only alternative is not voting at all, or casting a protest vote, and for Rod this is unacceptable.

However, that fourth approach is my own. Indeed, it’s been my approach ever since I could vote, well before Trump came onto the scene. I’ve always had a couple of simple non-negotiables, not sufficient, but necessary: Is this candidate consistently pro-life, and is this candidate someone I can admire—someone for whom I would want to plant a sign in my yard? Trump wasn’t the first GOP presidential candidate to fail one or both of these tests, and he won’t be the last.

Yes, I understand that it’s 2024, and these questions will sound hopelessly outdated to many people. But what can I say? I am, at heart, an old conservative. Yet I’m increasingly realizing that this is no country for old conservatives.

For those wondering what I mean by “consistently pro-life,” I should clarify that I don’t take a hard abolitionist line against incremental measures when they’re the best one can get in the moment. But I do draw the line with candidates who don’t just take what they can get while hoping for something better, but redefine what “good” even means, thus threatening to corrupt the whole movement from the inside. In this respect, I willingly concede that Republican candidates through the post-Reagan years have been uneven. Some have made a principle out of making exceptions for rape and incest. Others have promoted embryonic stem cell research. Nancy Reagan exercised her influence to push that research especially hard. (Indeed, she was considerably less pro-life than her husband across the board.) I say all this lest anyone accuse me of looking at the pre-Trump GOP through rose-colored glasses. Pro-lifers accepted long ago that they were the slightly embarrassing dinner guest, always fighting for their seat at the table.

Yet, despite his delivery of the SCOTUS justices who overturned Roe, I’ve argued that Trump’s gutting of the Republican platform now makes him a singularly aggressive pro-choice candidate, intent on redrawing party boundaries and pushing consistent pro-lifers to the margins for the foreseeable future. On Twitter, I saw a hopeful Trump voter saying that Trump might not make you an apple pie, but he’ll at least hand you the apples, the flour, and so on. I said on the contrary, Trump will make the pie, exactly the way he likes it, and he will expect you to like it too, however fast and loose he has played with the rules of apple pie-making along the way.

Then, of course, there’s character. Much ink has been spilled about evangelicals’ departure from their formerly emphatic insistence that “character matters,” which generated such outrage around Bill Clinton’s sexual shenanigans. But it’s worth recalling that there was a time when everyone thought character mattered, on both sides of the aisle. In 1987, the mere suspicion that Democrat senator Gary Hart might have had an affair knocked him out of the presidential race, where he’d been the presumed nominee. Times had changed by 1998, and times had changed more dramatically still by 2016. Social critic Aaron Renn has used these three scandals to illustrate the decline of American culture writ large, which implicates left and right alike, including the religious right. The conclusion is that there is room to make a valid critique of the zealous religious Trump voter. Yet David French doesn’t have a leg left to stand on now either.

In my intense allergy to French and his ilk, I’m joined by transactional Trump voters. Although I don’t know for certain whether he’ll actually cast a transactional Trump vote, I think historian Miles Smith has given the underlying philosophy its clearest expression. But he argues that David French and the religious right actually share something in common: They all take their vote far too seriously. Smith goes so far as to use the word “sacramental.” He believes evangelicals in particular are convinced that their votes will always constitute a redemptive act. This leaves them unable to conceive of the possibility that they themselves might be players in a tragedy—that, indeed, the whole business of politics is inherently tragic.

I’m not exactly an evangelical myself—in fact Smith and I share a magisterial Protestant tradition (Anglicanism), which is where my parents landed after working through their own evangelicalism. And I myself have often used the word “tragic” when surveying our deteriorating political landscape. Nobody has to sell Thomas Sowell’s tragic vision of everything to me. I’ve been selling it for years. I was so pessimistic I didn’t even think Roe vs. Wade would be overturned (and I’ve never been happier to be wrong). Nevertheless, transactional Trump voters and I do have very different philosophies of voting.

Is that because I see my vote as a “sacrament,” though? That’s not how I think about it, and it wasn’t how Mom and Dad thought about it either, even in their peak evangelical years. What they did have, and what they in turn instilled in me, was that simple, distinctly American idea that we should desire political leaders who are worthy of us, the people.

The old Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington explores this idea in the typically Capraesque story of a naive young congressman who gets chewed up and spat out by the Washington machine. Only an American filmmaker could have produced that movie. It couldn’t have been made in any other country, about any other country. That’s not to say that other countries didn’t have their heroes. But when their leaders were less than heroic, other countries learned long ago to accept it with a certain resigned cynicism. It was in the essence of the American experiment, its freshness and vitality and innocence, that it took so long to resign itself to cynicism.

My mother still remembers the distressed reaction of her devout Baptist in-laws when Clinton was first sworn in. At the time, she was going through a bit of her own politics-aloof phase, though it didn’t last very long, because she couldn’t fake being politically aloof for more than a few seconds. She just winced to hear people describe the 1992 election as “the most important election of our lifetimes,” the way my generation has winced to hear this phrase repeated about the elections of our time. And it is true that in the end, politics won’t save us, can’t save us. It is true, as Smith writes, that it is often tragic, that there won’t always be a Great Man or even a particularly good man who can command our full allegiance. But does it follow that we should never have had standards? That we should always have been cynical?

I may not identify with the earnest, enthusiastic Trump voter, but I understand where the enthusiasm springs from. It springs from a desire to vote with their whole hearts, to keep dreaming Frank Capra’s American dream.

Do I want them to wake up? Of course I do. But I also want to tell them it was a beautiful dream. Because it was.