The failure of
Bernie Sanders to take control of the Democratic Party in the 2020 primaries
was understandably traumatic for the American left. Having rapidly ascended from
seeming irrelevance to surging media attention and organizing in just a few
years, many democratic socialists convinced themselves that their moment had
come.
Sanders’s loss
to—of all people—Joe Biden, therefore, came as a kind of cosmic joke. How
could it possibly be that a near-octogenarian, whose greatest legislative
achievements were pro-creditor bankruptcy reform and the 1994 crime bill, would
defeat the left?
There was an
obvious explanation, of course. If you’re looking for the person who stopped
the Democratic Party’s movement to the left in 2020, that man is Congressman
Jim Clyburn. It was South Carolina, under Clyburn’s leadership, that turned the
tide, and it was the stubborn support of Biden by the older, more Southern,
more church-going parts of the African American community that denied Sanders
the nomination.
But for the democratic
socialists working to make sense of Sanders’s loss, there must be a more
psychologically comforting culprit. Yale professor Samuel Moyn, in his recent review in The New Republic of
our book Never Trump, thinks he has found one: Republican opponents of
Donald Trump. Moyn writes that “Sanders’s
decline had many causes, including his own mistakes, but it definitely mattered
that the Never Trump script treated him as mirror image of Trump, and as
equally perilous for ‘democracy’—and that many a liberal embraced this idea.” Yet
he provides little actual evidence that the Never Trumpers “mattered” other
than his assertions of their media influence. A few talking heads on cable TV seems
like a strange explanation for the behavior of largely African American voters
in Greenville and Beaufort, which, given the rhythm of the primary, is the
thing to be explained. The Never Trumpers may make an appealing scapegoat for the
left, but the far more obvious explanation for Sanders’s loss is the simple fact
that the Democratic Party is just not composed of enough voters (including, but
not limited to, African Americans) willing to provide a majority for democratic socialism,
at least in larger turnout elections.
Moyn’s essential claim is
that we served as easily duped mouthpieces for the Never Trumpers. “Saldin and Teles take a cozy approach to
their study of this movement and its central characters, faithfully drawing on
their accounts of the rise of Trump.” What Moyn characterized as “coziness,” we
think of as a rigorous, scholarly effort to try to convey the—inevitably
partial—perspective of our sources. We believe that the Never Trumpers cannot be
understood outside of the professional networks with which they were
affiliated. Moyn made only a passing reference to the central conceptual move
in the book, which is to understand the Never Trumpers as providers of
professional services to the Republican Party. The Never Trumpers we devote our
attention to were the kinds of people who provide policy expertise and key staff posts in GOP administrations, the political pros who run campaigns, and the
public intellectuals who provide ideas and guard the intellectual boundaries of
conservatism. Each of these professional networks has its own unique story to
tell in the Never Trump saga. Had we simply engaged in some armchair theorizing without actually delving into these networks, we would never have been able to
grasp many of the key factors that caused lifelong conservatives to oppose a
nominee of their own party.
Across these various
professional networks, a unifying theme emerged—both in our interviews as well
as in the contemporaneous materials we drew on, most notably a private email
chain of national security experts discussing a group statement denouncing
Trump. His Republican opponents have consistently told us—and told
themselves—that Trump is unacceptable because he is erratic, psychologically
unstable, ignorant, demagogic, dishonorable, and possessed of a disturbing sympathy
for the nation’s adversaries. Ideology and policy played a lesser role than did
character. Their obsessive focus on character may, in fact, be a fatal flaw in
the Never Trumpers, causing them to devote inordinate time to the president’s
manifest defects rather than developing alternative ideas and policies for a
non-Trumpy faction within the Republican party. Ironically, Moyn argues that “it’s
difficult to believe that Trump’s character foibles and edgy nativism are
supposed to explain the [Never Trumpers’] hatred for him” when it is precisely
the fact that they (with a few notable exceptions, such as David Frum, Yuval
Levin, and our compatriots at the Niskanen Center) are so focused on those
“foibles” that they’ve failed to productively engage in the ideological warfare
that Moyn seems to believe fundamentally motivates them.
Given that perhaps
excessive focus on Trump (and his apologists), it is puzzling that Moyn takes
us to task for failing to lay bare “all the Never Trump work that has gone into
helping centrist liberals win their struggle against the left in the Democratic
Party, a form of power even if they never get their party back.” To this claim
we can only say that we sincerely wish that Never Trumpers had done such
consequential work. Unfortunately, they have not been nearly as engaged in the
actual contest for control of either party as we wish they had been. Most of
their energy has been focused on cross-partisan efforts to defend democratic
institutions and defeat Trump in the 2020 election, rather than on building the
moderate wing of the Democratic Party or an organized faction within the GOP
with the power to check Trump’s (presumably) more competent successors.
There is no question that
many Never Trumpers have much to answer for in their pre-2016 careers, and we
have significant criticisms of how they have devoted their energies since the
election. But we also believe that both scholars and political activists are
more effective when they strive to imagine what the world looks like to those
in situations quite different from their own, rather than projecting
motivations onto them from afar. Real, flawed, flesh-and-blood people with
diverse circumstances and histories, seeking to find direction in radically
unfamiliar circumstances are, we think, far more interesting and more
surprising than straw men.
