1. Tonight I was watching a Firing Line episode from March 1997, as one does, and was really surprised by something. This panel of 4 National Review writers, serious conservatives all, basically said that the GOP needed to go all in on the culture war. digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7330
2. I've been told by many contemporary Never Trump conservatives that theirs was a party interested in fiscal responsibility & good governance. Trumpist pandering to the anxieties of white people, esp. evangelicals & rural folks, was not at the center of "their" conservatism.
3. But here's John O'Sullivan, editor of the National Review at the time, saying this to William F. Buckley, the founder of that magazine. "In 1994 the Republicans went on an economic ticket, yet those are not the issues that are principally concerning people at the moment..."
4. "...What worries people in this country is what I think one might call the fraying of America, and it’s to do with questions like Affirmative Action, and quotas, and like the English language issue, and multiculturalism in general..."
5. "...And they are issues which are lying out there for some entrepreneur to pick up, put together in an attractive political package, and exploit. But the problem is, the Republicans are terrified of them." That's John O'Sullivan, basically saying we need a Trump-like figure.
6. A few minutes later, Buckley asks O’Beirne if there’s the will in the current GOP house and senate to prioritize this conservative cultural agenda. The primary obstacles she sees are the senior Republicans from the Northeast who are more liberal on cultural issues.
7. To go all in on aggressive cultural conservatism, she suggests, the GOP would have to purge the few remaining moderates. Remember, this is a friendly conversation amongst National Review writers, the self-understood "reasonable conservatives."
8. Around the 22:00 mark the panel coalesces around the idea that Gingrich should abandon his priorities like the balanced budget amendment and term limits and instead double down on the issues "that conservatives care most about," i.e. the culture war issues.
9. The conversation ends with a discussion of why Gingrich is so unpopular. The panel agrees that it's largely the media's fault because they've been so unfair to him. Ponuru says that if only the public could encounter Gingrich in 30 minute, extended form then he'd do better.
10. The panelists then settle on sour grapes as the reason for why the nation's thinking class doesn't like Gingrich. As a PHD he's a "traitor to his class" by being a conservative, hence they simply refuse to take him seriously.
11. Ya know, it's not that, well, Newt was incapable of stringing more than two ideas together without sounding like a kook in front of a string-laden white board.
https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1028680490969063424?s=20
12. In sum, as early as 1997 Nat'l Review conservatives saw cultural "issues wch are lying out there" just waiting "for some entrepreneur to pick up, put together in an attractive political package, & exploit." That wish came true in 2016, tho maybe in a pkg they didn't imagine.
13. Little did these folks know that they'd soon get the politics of moral panic delivered to them on a silver platter, in the form of the Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment process. slate.com/news-and-polit…
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