The Grubby Fingerprints They Won't Talk About

[Part 4 of a series on the Never Trump ecosystem. Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]

Let me say something that I think is true, that the Never Trump commentariat is deeply reluctant to say about themselves: they helped build the road that Trump drove down.

Oh sure, not intentionally. Not maliciously. But the intellectual infrastructure of post-Reagan conservatism - the movement that National Review, the Weekly Standard, the think tank circuit, and talk radio constructed over thirty years - created conditions in which Trump was not just possible but arguably inevitable. And the people who built that infrastructure, or cheered it on, or benefited from it, have not reckoned with that history in any serious way.

This matters because it goes directly to their effectiveness, their credibility, and their capacity to actually be useful in whatever comes next. And, make no mistake about it, they are frothing at the mouth to get to rebuilding to ensure that they're the drivers.

What they built

Let's be specific, because vague accusations aren't useful.

The conservative intellectual establishment spent decades doing several things that, in hindsight, look like load-bearing supports for Trumpism.

They stoked cultural grievance as a political organizing principle. The idea that "real America" — white, working class, non-coastal, Christian — was under siege by liberal elites, Hollywood, universities, and the mainstream media was not invented by Trump. It was a staple of conservative media and intellectual output going back to Nixon's silent majority, refined through the culture wars of the 1990s, and turbocharged by Fox News and talk radio in the 2000s. As one analysis of National Review's history noted, the boundary between conservatism's intellectual class and its "outwardly coarser ideological fringe has always been more porous than the official line insists." The intellectuals built the framework; the base filled it in. And, without that compliant base, the paths to power were narrow, virtually impassible.

They built and blessed an epistemically closed media ecosystem. The same conservative establishment that now wrings its hands about misinformation spent twenty years celebrating Fox News as a corrective to liberal media bias, platforming talk radio provocateurs (hell, Charlie Sykes was a right wing talk-radio host for fuck's sake), and building a parallel information infrastructure explicitly designed to be consumed instead of mainstream sources. When that ecosystem eventually produced a host of its own - someone who spoke purely in the language of tribal grievance and zero-sum cultural conflict, without ideological commitments underneath - they were shocked. They shouldn't have been. It was inevitable.

They hollowed out the policy substance of their beloved conservatism in favor of pure opposition. The Obama years are the clearest example of this. The Tea Party movement, which much of the conservative intellectual class either celebrated or failed to seriously critique, was not really about policy. It was about rage, obstruction, and performative resistance. The debt ceiling fights, the Obamacare repeal votes that never had a replacement, the "party of no" posture - these trained the Republican base to value fighting over governing, opposition over outcomes. Trump was the logical endpoint of that training.

They prioritized winning over principle, repeatedly. The same people now horrified by Republicans who abandon their convictions to follow Trump spent years cheering on exactly that dynamic when it served their purposes - backing candidates they knew were flawed because they could win, excusing rhetoric they found distasteful because the alternative was a Democrat, telling themselves the platform mattered more than the person. They built a culture of ends-justify-means reasoning in the Republican coalition, and then acted surprised when a man with no principles at all inherited it.

What the accounting looks like

The honest accounting of this history would require something like: "We built institutions that prioritized grievance over governance, tribal identity over principled policy, and media that optimized for outrage. We did this because, well, it won elections. We told ourselves the serious people were in charge and the rougher edges would be (could be) managed. We were wrong, and Trump is the consequence of our being wrong."

Some of them have gotten oh so close to this. David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, has been more willing than most to engage the history of how conservatism got here — though even he tends to locate the original sin in the populist wing rather than in the intellectual establishment he was part of. Researchers Saldin and Teles, in their book on the Never Trump movement, identified the problem with some academic precision: conservative intellectuals saw themselves as performing "system maintenance" - keeping the coalition together, managing the grassroots - without ever seriously reckoning with what the grassroots had actually become. Even as it became clear that the grassroots had jumped containment.

What you mostly get from the Never Trump commentariat instead is a sentence or two of "yes, we made mistakes" followed by seventeen paragraphs about why their current position is noble and correct. Goldberg has gestured at this. The Dispatch has acknowledged it. National Review has, occasionally and carefully, noted that the conservative movement has some things to answer for. But it's pro forma. It's the kind of accountability that inoculates against the charge of having none without actually doing the uncomfortable work.

Why it matters for their effectiveness

Here's the direct connection to what I argued last time: accountability is a precondition for trust, and trust is a precondition for persuasion.

The audience that Never Trump voices most need to reach — people who are newly skeptical of Trump, soft disapprovers, younger conservatives who didn't grow up in the pre-Trump GOP, right-leaning independents — are not people with a deep emotional investment in defending the old conservative establishment. They have no reason to give these commentators the benefit of the doubt. What they see, reasonably, is a group of people who helped build something, watched it go wrong, and are now positioning themselves as guides out of the wreckage without fully acknowledging their role in creating it.

That is not a posture that generates trust. It generates, at best, mild interest. At worst, it generates the entirely fair response: why the fuck should I listen to you?

The other thing that genuine accountability would do is force a more honest diagnosis of what actually needs to change. A lot of Never Trump rhetoric implicitly assumes that the problem is Trump personally — that he is a unique corruption of an otherwise sound tradition, and that once he's off the stage, something resembling pre-2015 conservatism can be restored. This is almost certainly wrong. Trumpism is a response to real failures, real grievances, and real structural problems in American politics that the conservative establishment (and "movement conservatism" a term that I loathe with the heat of a thousand suns) helped create and consistently failed to address. A reckoning with that history would produce a different, and more useful, answer to the question of what comes next.

The bottom line

The Never Trump commentariat is right about Trump. They were right early, they paid real prices for it in some cases, and the record vindicates them on the basic judgment. That's genuinely worth something.

But being right about Trump is not the same as having a viable path forward, and the gap between those two things is, in large part, filled by unfinished business. The fingerprints are there. The reluctance to examine them is costing these voices the credibility they need to be useful at the moment when being useful might actually matter.

They built a significant part of the machine. Owning that — really owning it, not performatively acknowledging it — would not make them weaker. It would make them the only people in American conservative politics with a credible claim to having actually learned something.

That's a rare and valuable thing. It's a shame they seem so reluctant to claim it. As they say, the first step to redemption is admitting your role in the current state. They've tried, but they've not completely come to grips with their priors, preferring to pretend that their purity of heart innoculates them from owning it.

Coda

This series is something that I have been noodling on for a long time. I am conflicted, I feel like I have gained from the Never Trump media I have consumed, but I also struggle with them not coming clean, and assuming they will be in the catbird seat on the other side.

I hope this has been as good of a ride for you to read as it was for me to research and assemble.

As always, please feel free to nit-pick or add to the discourse in the comments below.

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