1. I would love to read a sympathetic (yet critical) essay that assessed a central claim made by Never Trumpers like @davidfrum--that conservatism today is an embarrassing bastardization of what conservatism once was. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
2. Let me start by saying that I take Frum and other Never Trumpers to be acting in good faith. I appreciate and respect the principled stand they have taken against Trumpist conservatism. But I have questions.
3. First, the declensionist narrative. "Once conservatism was an intellectually robust political phenomenon, but now it is anti-intellectual pap." I'm willing to be convinced of this...but it's going to take some work.
4. For example, let's rewind to the early 1990s, a time when today's Never Trumpers were unapologetic conservatives, and a time when a brash young Congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich (PhD in History), carried the mantle of "the conservative politician with the big ideas."
5. In 1995 Newt taught a course called "Renewing American Civilization," a mix of history, sociology, and politics designed to chart a course forward for the @gop and the nation. It was a shambolic mess, to put it politely. washingtonmonthly.com/2011/11/28/ste…
6. In 1995 I was a graduate student in American history and was curious what one of our major political leaders thought about the subject, so I opened up Netscape and downloaded the full text of Newt's lectures via 56K modem. They're still accessible at terrenceberres.com/ginren00.html
7. They read like the transcript of a Trump campaign rally, only with a 12th grade vocabulary instead of a 5th grade vocab. It's stream of consciousness gobbledygook. Like this gem. No one w/ a rudimentary knowledge of American History or social science could take Newt seriously.
8. Looking back at Newt's 1995 lectures from the vantage point of 2018, it's easy to see many of the building blocks of Trumpism--the disdain for elites, the faux populism, the culture war BS, etc. "2018 Trumpist Newt" doesn't seem like a departure from "1995 galaxy brain Newt."
9. In the 1990s I was no "raving leftist." I had two Republican voting grandparents and was educated in public schools in a conservative small town where my parents were small business owners.
10. Sure, I went to Brown for college, but my primary US history prof was Gordon Wood, a man known to dine with Antonin Scalia. Despite that background, in 1995, at the age of 27, it only took me about 20 minutes to figure out Newt was full of sh*t. Because I had read some books.
11. Newt is full of the same anti-intellectual sh*t today as he was in 1995, when he was the conservative "man of the hour." So I ask (& I really do mean this as an open question despite my snarky tone)...what did Frum et. al. see in Newt ca. 1995 that is unlike Trump ca. 2018?
12. The other great conservative "intellectual" of the early 1990s was Dinesh D'Souza. The Never Trumper declensionist narrative rests upon the distinction between the once respectable Dinesh and the now clownish Dinesh.
13. I will grant that D'Souza's 1991 book "Illiberal Education" is a less ludicrously clownish book than his most recent productions. But that would be akin to saying that the comedy stylings of Chevy Chase were more intellectually robust than those of Adam Sandler. True, but...
14. Illiberal Education benefited from a few generous reviews written by credentialed but curmodgeonly white male academics like C. Vann Woodward. Woodward's peers took him to task at the time. nybooks.com/articles/1991/…
15. The scholarly work that D'Souza (and Woodward) pilloried in the early 90's has stood the test of time. The 1990s work of D'Souza's reactionary defenders like Eugene Genovese and Woodward, however, has fared less well.
16. Like Gingrich's lectures, D'Souza's Illiberal Education was a laughing stock amongst those who actually knew the universities and scholarly fields he claimed to expose. His stock and trade then was reactionary oversimplification. Same goes for today.
17. Can we also just recall some of the greatest hits of Reaganite conservatism? Like the Laffer curve? Or EPA director James Watt, who thought we needn't protect the environment because the rapture was imminent? Or super-patriot Ollie North?
18. Voodoo economics is alive and well in Trumpist conservatism, Scott Pruitt was like James Watt redux, climate change denial is the 2018 version of the @gop's anti-science foot dragging on tobacco regulation, and Ollie North is back as the head of the GOP's favorite gun club.
19. We might also remember that Dick Cheney and other "serious conservatives" defended our support of apartheid South Africa, and Reagan was pretty tolerant of dictators like Pinochet. More than a few echoes of Trumpian foreign policy here. theguardian.com/world/2014/sep…
20. When Never Trumpers express shock and dismay at what Trump has made of the Republican Party, it's hard for me not to wonder "how can this come as a surprise to you?"
21. As this excellent thread shows, the progressives of the mid-90s called much of this. They saw the embryo of Trumpism lurking within 90s conservatism. Yet at the time, conservative "intellectuals" supercilliously dismissed such critiques as hysterical.
22. Apologies if this has come off as "I told you so-ism." That's not how I mean it. I guess I just want to read a few articles that are less "I'm shocked, shocked that the @gop has become authoritarian & racist" and more "here's how I regretfully helped build this."
23. The Never Trumpers are important voices in our national conversation. They can grant us an insiders' perspective on how Trump was so easily able to co-opt the conservative movement. If there is truly daylight between Trumpism and conservatism, they can help us see it.
24. Progressives will just say "see, Trumpism is what conservatism was all along. It's just now shown its true face." I suspect most Never Trumpers would disagree with that. So please, show us the receipts!
25. Speaking as someone who teaches a course on the history of conservatism that tries to treat that history on its own terms and with respect, I'd love to see a Never Trumper memoir or essay that started from the presumption that Trump is not a black swan, not an alien invasion.
26. Wow, this thread has blown up far more than I expected it would. Upon reading some of the responses, I have just a few more take aways.
27. First, if people wonder why there are so few conservatives in the academy, just read Gingrich's lectures and then compare them with some of Robert Reich's writings. Reich was arguably the Democrats' intellectual answer to Gingrich in the 90s.
28. It's not that Reich was correct on everything. But he was a genuine intellectual, someone who cared about evidence & argumentation. It was pretty inconceivable in the 90s that a rigorous intellectual could stomach Gingrich. That's Gingrich's fault, not the academy's.
29. So why are there so few conservative professors and intellectuals? In part because conservatism became so associated with jingoistic anti-intellectualism that it became nearly impossible for an educated person to defend it.
30. This points to another thread in the history of conservatism that dates all the way back to Bill Buckley...conservatism has often defined itself largely AGAINST a phantom "left" that doesn't really exist as they think it does.
31. Not only do conservatives tend to see that "left" as monolithic, they also see it as posing an existential threat to "western civilization" or "our way of life."
32. Without the slippery slope argument, conservatism loses much of its rhetorical punch. Want Medicare? You're secretly a commie. Support gay right? You hate the nuclear family! Support the rights of transgender people? There's no biological truth anymore!
33. This is not just a rhetorical device conservative politicians deployed to gin up votes. It's also been an essential piece of conservative intellectual thought as well. "Standing athwart history yelling stop," and such.
34. We see both of these tendencies in Trumpism--from Michael Anton's "Flight 93 election" essay to TPUSA's dire warnings about the communist brainwashing that happens on college campuses. Without a scary, phantom "left" to bash, conservatives wouldn't have much to talk about.
35. For a fuller explication of this argument about how the right, from the beginning, has defined itself against a phantom, monstrous "left," read this article. h/t @DavidAstinWalsh washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-…

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More from @SethCotlar

Feb 18
The rightward lurch of the GOP since 2015 has led many to ask "when did it start?" and "how did it happen?" I've been researching the Oregon chapter of that story, and it's clear that 1970 was a key turning point, and that it was a bottom up more than a top down story.
People on the far right mobilized at the county level across the state and almost succeeded in taking over the party in 1970. That would have been shocking since the Oregon GOP Senators Hatfield & Packwood were known for their moderation, if not outright liberalism at the time.
Walter Huss and his fellow "ultraconservatives" continued organizing at the local level and in 1978 finally succeeded in taking over the state GOP. Huss was removed from his chair position after a few disastrous months, but it had a lasting impact.
Read 10 tweets
Feb 18
Has there ever been a television news host who had more consistent and influential access to a sitting President than “fair and balanced” Hannity?
Screenshot from this story. washingtonpost.com/politics/inter…
Flashback to this 2018 reporting. I motion that we refer to Hannity’s show as MAGA-PRAVDA from this point forward. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 17
If you’d told me in 1989 when I was a student in Gordon Wood’s Am Rev class that in thirty years he’d be giving friendly interviews to Trotskyites and publishing in a far right review affiliated with a lawyer who advocated overturning the 2020 election for Donald Trump…well.
Gordon Wood, who was so sensitive about his professional reputation that he was angry that the 1619 Project didn't consult with him, is now affiliating himself with an institution that gave a fellowship to a Pizzagate guy.
To be honest, however, if you'd told me that it was Gordon Wood's interpretation of the history of racism and slavery in the US that would particularly endear him to the class-reductionist left and the anti-anti-racist right, then I would have less surprised by that.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 17
In 1951 the National Association of Manufacturers commissioned a comic book about the dangers of inflation. The art work was by Dan Barry, of Flash Gordon fame.
You can read the entire thing here. I was inspired to search for these online because they were mentioned in Edward Miller's biography of Robert Welch which I'm currently reading. Welch may have had something to do with commissioning this comic. lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Your…
Charles Schulz (yes, that Charles Schulz) was the artist who produced this very understated anti-communist comic in 1947. lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Is%2…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 16
Things one tweets when one has no understanding, like absolutely none, like a howling black hole of the opposite of understanding, of what historians do; and also a raging volcano's worth of misplaced confidence about your ability to make pronouncements about what historians do.
Tell me you've never had an actual conversation with a historian about what they do or read the most basic methodological texts used in introductory theory and methods course without actually telling me that.
The anti-intellectual "public intellectual" is, IMO, not a great look.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 14
I'm starting to think that the people who built their identity around the imperative to "stand athwart history yelling stop" rendered themselves uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the sorts of adjustments necessary to deal with a pandemic of historically-unprecedented scale.
I mean, you can yell "stop" at the coronavirus all you like, but it really doesn't care.
You can yell "stop" at climate change all you like, but it really doesn't care.
Read 5 tweets

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