Over the weekend, William F. Buckley Jr. biographer and former New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus wrote a piece for his former paper that attempted to show how Donald Trump was saving the Republican Party from conservatives. Tanenhaus has been predicting the end of conservatism for years. He wrote an ill-timed book based on that thesis that hit the shelves in 2010 just in time to witness a Tea Party landslide in the midterms . But Tanenhaus is not to be deterred by that precedent and is now proclaiming that Donald Trump’s victories in the primaries really does herald conservatism’s doom.
What is really interesting about his thesis is his attempt to link Trump’s somewhat inchoate populism to Richard Nixon’s transition from conservative ideologue to a Republican president who largely governed from the left. Tanenhaus is probably right about this, since Trump has no more use for conservative ideas than he does anything else that doesn’t feed his ego or make him money. But he thinks Trump has prospered because he appeals to voter grievances in much the same manner Nixon did when he squeaked through to victory in the 1968 election.
Those grievances are, Tanenhaus believes, unrelated to any belief in the liberty and limited-government agenda of conservatives. While he is rightly skeptical of Trump’s constancy, he thinks it possible that the billionaire might govern “pragmatically” in the same mode as Nixon did when he vastly expanded the size of government. That is a point on which conservatives, who spent the last year trying in vain to make it clear to voters that Trump was as much of a big government liberal as the Democrats he used to support, agree.
It took a day for Trump to validate one element of Tanenhaus’s piece. On Monday, Trump gave a much-awaited speech on the police shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and the assassination of five police officers in Dallas. Rather than play the racial healer, Trump seemed to be reading directly from the Nixon 1968 playbook when he described himself as the “law and order candidate.”
Given the anxieties provoked by recent events and the voters’ knowledge that the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton have helped create the problem by pandering to the racial hucksters of the Black Lives Matter movement, this is probably the smartest move Trump could have made. Just as he has exploited voters’ justified fears about terrorism and anger about the collapse of the rule of law indicated by a broken immigration system, positioning himself as the defender of cops and the opponent of chaos in the streets makes political sense.
But the problem Trump faces is that President Obama wasn’t wrong over the weekend when he noted that comparisons between last week’s horror and the strife that engulfed the nation in 1968 were way off base. As awful as last week’s shootings were, there are no race riots in which cities are being burned. There is nothing happening now that is comparable to the panic those riots engendered as well as the anguish provoked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the televised spectacle of thousands of Americans dying in an unpopular war in Southeast Asia.
Even more important is the changing racial demography of America. The “silent majority” of middle class whites to which Nixon appealed no longer dominates the electorate the way it did then. It remains to be seen whether Trump can boost white turnout in a way that hasn’t been seen in decades and thus overcome his enormous disadvantage among minority voters. But it will be much harder for Trump than it was for Nixon to leverage that appeal into an Electoral College majority.
Nevertheless, Democrats would be foolish to think Trump’s decision to hit hard on the theme of law and order is a mistake. The Obama administration has spent years flirting with and legitimizing a Black Lives Matter movement that has promoted myths about the police—and it is not going to help Clinton. Unless she can manage to distance herself from them—something her liberal base may not allow—she could give Trump an edge that will help him win more white working class voters that could make him competitive in some swing states.
Tanenhaus is wrong to write off conservatism. Even if Trump were to win, the conservative movement will remain the guiding force of the party, if for no other reason than the party needs a guiding force. Moreover, GOP voters will expect a President Trump to do what their party’s Congressional majorities failed to achieve in the last two years with respect to a long laundry list of conservative objectives that starts with the repeal of ObamaCare and the reduction of spending. If he wins and goes Nixon, there will be an intra-party revolt that will make the Tea Party look like a hootenanny.
Still, Tanenhaus’ attempt to cast Trump as the newest “new Nixon” should serve as a warning to conservatives getting into bed with him in Cleveland: a President Trump will have no use for their principles in office. It should also scare Democrats, who need to understand that more chaos in the streets could create the circumstances that theoretically could elect Trump.
