There is much to praise and agree with in National Review’s cover editorial, “Against Trump.” Donald Trump is no friend to limited government proponents. Indeed, his flip-flopping on key issues of concern to libertarians and conservatives make it unclear whether a President Trump would govern from his current perspectives or be the Trump who is a dear friend of the Clintons. But National Review misses a key part of the Trump phenomenon. It isn’t an aberration, but is a natural outgrowth of conservatism abandoning its core values of limited government and a strict national interest foreign policy during the Bush years. It may even be an expression of an underlying worldview of fear and defeatism present in conservatism ever since National Review led the Cold War break with the antiwar, anti-New Deal Old Right.
Trump isn’t killing conservatism. It already died over a decade ago. It died in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, on the battlefields of unnecessary and counterproductive wars, in the secret meetings that created an unprecedented domestic surveillance program, and in the spending spree to pay for it all that turned a budget surplus into record deficits. It clung to life support on some domestic economic programs, but died again when political capital that could have been spent on Social Security reform went to promoting war instead. It died every single time the Bush Administration pursued policies contrary to American values and the principles of limited government – and it died whenever Bush’s cheerleaders in what passed for the conservative movement championed his policies.
At the time, a handful of principled conservatives and libertarians spoke out against the Bush Administration’s big government, Wilsonian policies. But rather than engage in principled debate over what conservatism meant in a post-9/11 world, National Review found a Bush speechwriter to write a cover screed condemning the “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Of course, those supposedly unpatriotic conservatives turned out to be right about Iraq and National Review turned out to be utterly wrong. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a retraction, even thirteen years later. Much of conservatism has never made a clean break with the Bush Administration’s anti-conservative failures.