theamericanconservative--2020-01-15--Welcome to the Conservative Porn Wars

Welcome to the Conservative Porn Wars

Before Christmas , four Republican congressmen—the most prominent being Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina , an important figure inside the Freedom Caucus—sent a letter reminding Attorney General Bill Barr that President Donald Trump had made a campaign promise to enforce obscenity laws against certain hardcore pornographers .
Trump had signed a pledge circulated by Donna Rice Hughes ’ s anti-pornography group Enough Is Enough ; it was uncontroversial enough that Hillary Clinton ’ s campaign sent a supportive letter , despite declining to sign on , citing a no-pledges policy .
“ The Internet and other evolving technologies are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ making it more accessible and visceral , ” the four GOP lawmakers wrote .
“ This explosion in pornography coincides with an increase in violence towards women and an increase in the volume of human trafficking as well as child pornography.
” They urged Barr to prosecute cases where porn purveyors met the legal standard for obscenity , especially when children are involved .
“ The United States has nearly 50 % of all commercialized child pornography websites , ” Representative Jim Banks told National Review ’ s Alexandra DeSanctis in a statement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ culture and our children are being exposed at younger ages.
” The letter might have been largely ignored—Barr ’ s office was involved at the time in other matters more central to the news cycle , such as impeachment and investigations into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe—if conservative blogger Matt Walsh hadn ’ t ignited a Twitter firestorm over its contents .
“ This is a great move and conservatives who act perplexed at the suggestion that government might have a role in restricting hardcore porn obviously do not understand their own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or at least people professed to be provoked ) .
“ This is , at the very least , an idea worth discussing.
” A Festivus-like airing of grievances has gripped the Right ever since Trump declared his improbable presidential candidacy going on five years ago .
Still , it was surprising to watch conservatives spend the Christmas season debating pornography .
Sohrab Ahmari , the pugnacious writer at the center of much of this ferment , naturally got in on the action .
Writing in the New York Post , Ahmari chided @ @ @ @ @ @ @ letter the congressmen sent Barr “ from many on the right , where access to porn has bizarrely emerged as a touchstone of ‘ conservative ’ orthodoxy.
” “ Online porn isn ’ t that bad , the Twitter libertarians insist , ” Ahmari continued .
“ Plus , there is no way to restrict access to online porn , and even if there were , such regulation would sound the death knell for our ancient liberties.
” The Federalist ’ s Ben Domenech lambasted fellow social conservatives ’ “ apparent impression that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that can be easily regulated ” and asked , “ Are the conservatives who think they can ban porn online purposefully ignoring the massive expansion of government this would require , or are they too stupid to realize it ?
” ( This brings to mind an old joke in which one man asks another , “ Are you ignorant or merely apathetic ?
” The second man replies , “ I don ’ t know and I don ’ t care !
” ) “ While there certainly are reasonable concerns over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should be careful what they wish for , ” Young Voices ’ Casey Given warned in the Washington Examiner .
“ Giving the government the power to impose blanket bans on things you don ’ t like will almost inevitably backfire when the other party takes power.
” Banning pornography , he argued , “ is a policy proposal straight out of the 1980s.
” If a memo has gone out saying that policy proposals straight out of the 1980s are suddenly a bad thing within the modern American conservative movement , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whatever it is worth , the recipient of the GOP anti-pornography letter , Attorney General Barr , is for good or ill certainly a creature of the 1980s Right . )
I claim no special insights into pornography or what an ideal regulatory regime for it would look like , though I strongly suspect it would lie somewhere between a total ban and the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances .
Luckily , the intraconservative debate on this issue is only secondarily about the availability of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proper role of government .
“ At some point conservatives decided that government should not be used to advance the common good , ” the Daily Wire ’ s Walsh argued in his opening Twitter salvos against his libertarian brethren .
“ And at that point conservatism became limp , shallow , and ineffectual .
It also divorced itself from its own intellectual history .
And that in a nutshell is why the Left always wins.
” Of all the debates roiling the Right at present—pro-Trump versus anti-Trump , higher immigration rates versus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or less , nationalist or not , libertarians against everybody else—this renegotiation of the social conservatives ’ place in the GOP coalition and broader conservative movement is among the most important .
This is true even though this dispute is frequently conflated with the others : the new , more ambitious social conservatism is associated with Trump , the libertine defender of religious liberties ; anyone on the Right who pushes back against the notion that conservatism , even in an American context , is wholly synonymous with classical liberalism is necessarily seen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overlap , of course .
What the religious conservatives rebelling against former National Review senior editor Frank Meyer ’ s fusionism ( which in effect defines conservatism as an attempt to reconcile economic libertarianism with social traditionalism ) have in common with national conservatives and MAGA economic populists is a willingness to use the government to protect and advance their interests .
All political coalitions do this , of course , even those which claim to be motivated entirely by abstract ideological principles .
But these factions , ascendant under Trump ( whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nixon ’ s than Ronald Reagan ’ s , deregulation , tax cuts and episodic criminal justice reform notwithstanding ) , feel especially constrained by and vulnerable under the standard Republican playbook .
They would at a minimum like to add some new chapters , at a maximum rewrite it entirely .
But social conservatives have always been an important part of the Republican electoral coalition , even before that term or the “ Religious Right ” were in use .
They formed a large part of Nixon ’ s “ Silent Majority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ values voters , ” virtually the whole of Reagan ’ s “ Moral Majority , ” the actual name of the elder Jerry Falwell ’ s now defunct political organization .
White evangelicals alone supply at least a third of the votes accruing to Republican presidential candidates .
Add traditionalist Catholics and other culturally conservative fellow travelers and it is difficult mathematically to envision how Republicans can win many elections without them .
Social conservatives have long been viewed—and have generally viewed themselves—as junior partners to economic conservatives inside the Republican Party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polls to protest abortion and gay marriage .
The elected Republicans then promptly cut taxes while Supreme Court precedents declaring abortion a constitutional right remain inviolate and new ones similarly enshrining gay marriage are added , even as conservative judges proliferate .
The marriage issue was thought to be central to Bush ’ s reelection in 2004 .
By 2016 , a slightly higher percentage of evangelicals ended up casting their ballots for Trump , who supports—or at least does not oppose—gay marriage .
It is almost universally seen as a settled issue—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ favor .
Similarly , however much fusionism in theory was supposed to be equally committed to tradition and free markets , liberty and virtue , in practice it was seen primarily as a defense of free markets and constitutionally limited government .
A manifesto published by First Things in March entitled “ Against the Dead Consensus ” ( signed by TAC senior editor Rod Dreher and contributing editor Patrick Deneen , among others ) laid out the charges .
“ Yes , the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it failed to retard , much less reverse , the eclipse of permanent truths , family stability , communal solidarity , and much else .
It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life , to the culture of death , to the cult of competitiveness .
It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.
” The definition of liberty embraced by the “ dead consensus ” isn ’ t minimal government per se , but a “ public philosophy [ that ] now puts great stock in ‘ the right to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
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the mystery of human life , ’ as Justice Anthony Kennedy , the libertarian conservative par excellence , wrote while upholding the constitutional ‘ right ’ to abortion , ” the old-school fusionism skeptics wrote .
This goes a long way toward explaining why there is so much conservative criticism of libertarianism even as libertarians themselves don ’ t see any evidence of their own influence over bipartisan gargantuan government or frequently cite Planned Parenthood v. Casey as an influential text alongside The Road to Serfdom .
Responding to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sixsmith dismissed the “ liberalism of John Stuart Mill refracted through the conservatism of Frank Meyer , in a compromise that made sense in 1960 but is unworkable today.
” After the heady years of the Reagan boom , economic conservatism morphed from a source of middle-class tax relief—one of the reasons “ tax cuts for the rich ” was a less effective political charge then than now—into something not libertarian enough for actual libertarians and too libertarian for everyone else .
If Paul Ryan ’ s ascension to the House speakership seemed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Republicanism , Trump appeared to augur its reversal : despite , or perhaps because of , his checkered past and unlikely pedigree , he was more orthodox on social issues than economic ones .
Even the exceptions proved the rule .
Where the Bush 2004 campaign relied on state defense-of-marriage ballot initiatives only to spend “ political capital ” on a failed bid to create “ personal accounts ” for Social Security once safely reelected , Trump abandoned even the pretense of opposing same-sex marriage—and also any Ryan-style entitlement reforms .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polemics on the Right as well as the Left that evangelicals hypocritically discarded their values in pursuit of political power by handing a thrice-married , twice-divorced , often profane reality TV star the presidency .
The reality is more complicated , however .
The organized Religious Right initially supported Ted Cruz over Trump .
Marco Rubio , Ben Carson , and other candidates also had strong pockets of social conservative support .
In Iowa , Cruz beat Trump 34 percent to 22 percent among evangelicals .
Rubio took another 21 percent , Carson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and raise the profiles of his own religious boosters , in much the same way cable news networks had to find new pro-Trump pundits when a high percentage of their usual Republican stable turned out to be Never Trump .
Robert Jeffries was no Ralph Reed ; Jerry Falwell Jr. lacked his father ’ s political influence and did not succeed him as pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church ( though his perch at Liberty University would prove important ) .
In the primaries , Trump ’ s evangelical vote share tended to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increased .
His initial coalition included relative social liberals and self-described born-again Christians who went to church less frequently than some of the more conservative candidates ’ supporters .
Mormons never warmed to Trump .
As Trump careened toward the Republican nomination , he cultivated the constituencies that commanded votes .
This included evangelicals and conservative Catholics as well as gun owners ( the National Rifle Association , unlike some Religious Right groups , was actually an early adopter on Trump ) .
Trump made promises to social conservatives on abortion , religious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ issues of importance to them .
He has largely kept those commitments .
His general election opponent was Hillary Clinton , bête noire of the “ vast right-wing conspiracy ” for at least a quarter century .
When social conservatives tried in the 1990s to make the argument that personal character mattered even more than policy , the voters resolved that question against them and in favor of Hillary ’ s husband three times—twice in national elections , once more in the fight over impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky affair .
Bill and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ religious conservatives ’ policy agenda either , of course , though the former did sign into law the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act back when that was the popular position .
Post- “ Me Too , ” some feminists now regret accepting the former president ’ s personal transgressions for the sake of policy goals and thwarting political opponents .
Perhaps social conservatives will later harbor similar regrets about Trump , especially since many of them believe effects on the faith have eternal consequences beyond this life .
The politicization of American evangelicalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ driving some young believers away .
Yet the stakes for religious conservatives in these political battles is higher than who gets to be an assistant secretary in the Department of Education .
The Democratic Party is drifting toward an understanding of religious liberty that protects private thoughts and personal worship practices—and little else .
As former First Lady Michelle Obama said , “ Our faith journey isn ’ t just about showing up on Sunday .
It ’ s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well.
” It is nevertheless increasingly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help the wider community and interact with the government while remaining faithful to their beliefs .
If you don ’ t wish to pay for contraception , participate in abortions , or promote alternatives to the traditional family , you may as well go out of business .
The groups ensnared by this newly crimped understanding of religious liberty are not overtly political organizations .
They included Catholic Charities , the Little Sisters of the Poor , and the Salvation Army .
The three largest denominations in the United States—the Roman Catholic Church @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United Methodist Church—do not recognize same-sex marriage .
During his short-lived presidential candidacy , former representative Beto O ’ Rourke suggested such churches be stripped of their tax-exempt status .
“ There can be no reward , no benefit , no tax break for anyone or any institution , any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us , ” O ’ Rourke said .
“ And so as president , we ’ re going to make that a priority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.
” O ’ Rourke is an also-ran , but few top-tier Democratic presidential candidates could resist the logic of his position , even if they may ultimately still flinch from it for electoral reasons .
The intersection of sexual orientation and antidiscrimination law raises difficult questions for religious liberty .
If opposing same-sex marriage is morally or legally akin to racial discrimination , then it is hard to see how religious schools , charities , and other institutions can indefinitely avoid legal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ceased to be the most radical concept the sexual revolution asked traditional religious believers to publicly embrace .
Even Chick-fil-A , a successful fast food chain that largely prevailed in the marketplace over the slew of liberal elected officials who have tried to keep its restaurants out of their cities , crumbled under pressure .
What hope then is there for religious bakers and wedding photographers ?
There is also steady liberal resistance to affording orthodox Christians the same Religious Freedom Restoration Act-type protections they have long endorsed for religious and cultural minorities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ according to your faith and to live out what you believe your religion calls you to do is not a small thing , and it too has eternal implications .
“ If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching , or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons , or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston , then don ’ t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms , ” writes New York Times columnist Ross Douthat .
“ Say what you really think : that the exercise of our religion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decent , and that you ’ re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.
” The intentions of the Religious Right in America have long varied .
Some have simply wanted to defend faith , home , and family from the encroachments of the state .
Grover Norquist has described conservative Christians as essentially a “ parents rights ” movement that is part of the “ Leave Us Alone ” coalition .
But others have wanted to defend their version of public morality or even uphold a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with varying degrees of tolerance for other faiths and nonbelievers .
As the Christian Coalition gained a foothold in state Republican organizations throughout the 1990s , the more libertarian conception of the Religious Right gradually won out .
This trend was accelerated by a series of political defeats that left them with few other options .
“ Today ’ s talk of tolerance and acceptance of gay marriage will soon give way to intolerance and rejection of those who hold a traditional view of marriage , ” Tim Carney wrote in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Supreme Court ’ s Obergefell decision was even handed down .
“ The next offensive in this culture war will involve wielding government to force individuals to accept the new definition of marriage , falsely invoking analogies to civil rights.
” Many LGBT Americans who only recently saw conservative Christians resisting the legal recognition of their unions are , perhaps understandably , unmoved by these new pleas for tolerance .
When states like Indiana under Mike Pence ’ s governorship moved to pass laws granting protections to businesses whose owners adhere to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boycotts ensued .
The legislation and other policies like it were widely regarded as license for mass discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation , essentially a Jim Crow policy that would bar gay people from pizza parlors and public acommodations .
Pence crumbled under pressure and Republicans have subsequently struggled to find their footing on this issue .
Episodes such as this have not only convinced many social conservatives that the free market is an unreliable ally and that big business is often a culture war adversary .
These incidents have also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a libertarian strategy for defending their rights and their place in the public square .
Ultimately , viewpoint neutrality—and the occasional successful lawsuit by a Christian florist or baker—only goes so far .
Without some affirmative defense of Christian beliefs and their historic role in American culture , secularizing elites will eventually succeed in marginalizing social conservatism .
That is not to say that the new social conservatism is entirely about living out some theological mandate .
Many of them are still motivated by worldly problems : the decline of the family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rising social alienation and unhappiness .
They have shifted from attempting to block cultural innovations like gay marriage ( though many remain quietly opposed ) to making it easier for people who so desire to have families and children .
Steve Sailer urged in these pages that Republicans pursue a policy agenda of “ affordable family formation ” all the way back in Bush ’ s second term .
Some Republicans , including ambitious ones like Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley , are starting to take up this mantle .
“ A state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and insists that husbands and wives must have good reasons to seek divorce , need not be an austere , totalitarian one , ” writes Ben Sixsmith .
“ This is , in fact , how the United States governed such matters through the 1950s .
And in the hyper-commodified twenty-first century , a state that fails to encourage marriage is misgoverning.
” Yet today even many conservatives in effect see the United States of the 1950s as a theocracy or , as one put it , “ a Christian version of Saudi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the old fusionism has failed and its early conservative critics like L. Brent Bozell may have had a point .
In the same essay , Sixsmith argued Meyer ’ s fusionism “ made only superficial sense ” and it was time for something else .
“ In the twenty-first-century West , we are afflicted with a mediocre libertinism , which is as unstable as it is unsatisfactory , ” he continued .
“ We need a new conservative fusion , one that prioritizes social connection instead of atomization.
” Conservatives have contemplated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the older , differently motivated First Things , Joseph Bottum argued for a union between social conservatism and foreign-policy activism with “ Islamofascism ” replacing communism as an ideological opponent .
“ The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics , ” he wrote .
“ The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics.
” In 1991 , Chronicles editor Thomas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ libertarians and traditionalists that essentially excised the hawks following the end of the Cold War , bringing together the likes of TAC founding editor Patrick Buchanan and radical free-market economist Murray Rothbard .
What would a fusionism in which social conservatives ceased to be the junior partner look like ?
The pornography debate is instructive .
One set of conservatives argued that anti-porn crusaders wanted the government to replace parents , and some traditionalists promptly fell into this trap .
But what if the community , or even the government , can do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ easier for parents to keep their kids off Pornhub ?
A more liberatarian fusionism might reject it out of hand ; a more traditionalist fusionism would not .
It won ’ t be an easy balance to achieve , especially since some traditionalists seem poised to go too far in the opposite , statist direction .
State power can be wielded effectively to uphold a moral consensus against a dissenting minority .
It is less clear it can effectively recreate that consensus in the face of a dissenting majority .
Both libertarians and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what the GOP has left undone on their policy fronts is simply politically unattainable .
But politics , as this new intraconservative debate proves , isn ’ t static .
Even conservatives change .
W. James Antle III is editor of The American Conservative .

Before Christmas, four Republican congressmen—the most prominent being Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, an important figure inside the Freedom Caucus—sent a letter reminding Attorney General Bill Barr that President Donald Trump had made a campaign promise to enforce obscenity laws against certain hardcore pornographers. Trump had signed a pledge circulated by Donna Rice Hughes’s anti-pornography group Enough Is Enough; it was uncontroversial enough that Hillary Clinton’s campaign sent a supportive letter, despite declining to sign on, citing a no-pledges policy.
“The Internet and other evolving technologies are fueling the explosion of obscene pornography by making it more accessible and visceral,” the four GOP lawmakers wrote. “This explosion in pornography coincides with an increase in violence towards women and an increase in the volume of human trafficking as well as child pornography.” They urged Barr to prosecute cases where porn purveyors met the legal standard for obscenity, especially when children are involved. “The United States has nearly 50% of all commercialized child pornography websites,” Representative Jim Banks told National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis in a statement. “Pornography is ubiquitous in our culture and our children are being exposed at younger ages.”
The letter might have been largely ignored—Barr’s office was involved at the time in other matters more central to the news cycle, such as impeachment and investigations into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe—if conservative blogger Matt Walsh hadn’t ignited a Twitter firestorm over its contents. “This is a great move and conservatives who act perplexed at the suggestion that government might have a role in restricting hardcore porn obviously do not understand their own ideology,” he tweeted provocatively (or at least people professed to be provoked). “This is, at the very least, an idea worth discussing.”
A Festivus-like airing of grievances has gripped the Right ever since Trump declared his improbable presidential candidacy going on five years ago. Still, it was surprising to watch conservatives spend the Christmas season debating pornography. Sohrab Ahmari, the pugnacious writer at the center of much of this ferment, naturally got in on the action. Writing in the New York Post, Ahmari chided the “dismaying reaction” to the letter the congressmen sent Barr “from many on the right, where access to porn has bizarrely emerged as a touchstone of ‘conservative’ orthodoxy.”
“Online porn isn’t that bad, the Twitter libertarians insist,” Ahmari continued. “Plus, there is no way to restrict access to online porn, and even if there were, such regulation would sound the death knell for our ancient liberties.” The Federalist’s Ben Domenech lambasted fellow social conservatives’ “apparent impression that porn is a relatively monolithic American industry that can be easily regulated” and asked, “Are the conservatives who think they can ban porn online purposefully ignoring the massive expansion of government this would require, or are they too stupid to realize it?” (This brings to mind an old joke in which one man asks another, “Are you ignorant or merely apathetic?” The second man replies, “I don’t know and I don’t care!”)
“While there certainly are reasonable concerns over pornography and other vices, social conservatives should be careful what they wish for,” Young Voices’ Casey Given warned in the Washington Examiner. “Giving the government the power to impose blanket bans on things you don’t like will almost inevitably backfire when the other party takes power.” Banning pornography, he argued, “is a policy proposal straight out of the 1980s.” If a memo has gone out saying that policy proposals straight out of the 1980s are suddenly a bad thing within the modern American conservative movement, I have certainly missed it. (For whatever it is worth, the recipient of the GOP anti-pornography letter, Attorney General Barr, is for good or ill certainly a creature of the 1980s Right.)
I claim no special insights into pornography or what an ideal regulatory regime for it would look like, though I strongly suspect it would lie somewhere between a total ban and the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Luckily, the intraconservative debate on this issue is only secondarily about the availability of porn. It is fundamentally about the proper role of government. “At some point conservatives decided that government should not be used to advance the common good,” the Daily Wire’s Walsh argued in his opening Twitter salvos against his libertarian brethren. “And at that point conservatism became limp, shallow, and ineffectual. It also divorced itself from its own intellectual history. And that in a nutshell is why the Left always wins.”
♦♦♦
Of all the debates roiling the Right at present—pro-Trump versus anti-Trump, higher immigration rates versus lower, more hawkish on foreign policy or less, nationalist or not, libertarians against everybody else—this renegotiation of the social conservatives’ place in the GOP coalition and broader conservative movement is among the most important. This is true even though this dispute is frequently conflated with the others: the new, more ambitious social conservatism is associated with Trump, the libertine defender of religious liberties; anyone on the Right who pushes back against the notion that conservatism, even in an American context, is wholly synonymous with classical liberalism is necessarily seen as a nationalist.
There is considerable overlap, of course. What the religious conservatives rebelling against former National Review senior editor Frank Meyer’s fusionism (which in effect defines conservatism as an attempt to reconcile economic libertarianism with social traditionalism) have in common with national conservatives and MAGA economic populists is a willingness to use the government to protect and advance their interests. All political coalitions do this, of course, even those which claim to be motivated entirely by abstract ideological principles. But these factions, ascendant under Trump (whose view of government is closer to Richard Nixon’s than Ronald Reagan’s, deregulation, tax cuts and episodic criminal justice reform notwithstanding), feel especially constrained by and vulnerable under the standard Republican playbook. They would at a minimum like to add some new chapters, at a maximum rewrite it entirely.
But social conservatives have always been an important part of the Republican electoral coalition, even before that term or the “Religious Right” were in use. They formed a large part of Nixon’s “Silent Majority” and George W. Bush’s “values voters,” virtually the whole of Reagan’s “Moral Majority,” the actual name of the elder Jerry Falwell’s now defunct political organization. White evangelicals alone supply at least a third of the votes accruing to Republican presidential candidates. Add traditionalist Catholics and other culturally conservative fellow travelers and it is difficult mathematically to envision how Republicans can win many elections without them.
Social conservatives have long been viewed—and have generally viewed themselves—as junior partners to economic conservatives inside the Republican Party. They get their voters to the polls to protest abortion and gay marriage. The elected Republicans then promptly cut taxes while Supreme Court precedents declaring abortion a constitutional right remain inviolate and new ones similarly enshrining gay marriage are added, even as conservative judges proliferate. The marriage issue was thought to be central to Bush’s reelection in 2004. By 2016, a slightly higher percentage of evangelicals ended up casting their ballots for Trump, who supports—or at least does not oppose—gay marriage. It is almost universally seen as a settled issue—and not settled in the social conservatives’ favor.
Similarly, however much fusionism in theory was supposed to be equally committed to tradition and free markets, liberty and virtue, in practice it was seen primarily as a defense of free markets and constitutionally limited government. A manifesto published by First Things in March entitled “Against the Dead Consensus” (signed by TAC senior editor Rod Dreher and contributing editor Patrick Deneen, among others) laid out the charges. “Yes, the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values,” the signatories wrote. “But it failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”
The definition of liberty embraced by the “dead consensus” isn’t minimal government per se, but a “public philosophy [that] now puts great stock in ‘the right to define one’s own concept of . . . the mystery of human life,’ as Justice Anthony Kennedy, the libertarian conservative par excellence, wrote while upholding the constitutional ‘right’ to abortion,” the old-school fusionism skeptics wrote. This goes a long way toward explaining why there is so much conservative criticism of libertarianism even as libertarians themselves don’t see any evidence of their own influence over bipartisan gargantuan government or frequently cite Planned Parenthood v. Casey as an influential text alongside The Road to Serfdom. Responding to a conservative critic of the manifesto, Ben Sixsmith dismissed the “liberalism of John Stuart Mill refracted through the conservatism of Frank Meyer, in a compromise that made sense in 1960 but is unworkable today.”
After the heady years of the Reagan boom, economic conservatism morphed from a source of middle-class tax relief—one of the reasons “tax cuts for the rich” was a less effective political charge then than now—into something not libertarian enough for actual libertarians and too libertarian for everyone else. If Paul Ryan’s ascension to the House speakership seemed to be the culmination of this strain of Republicanism, Trump appeared to augur its reversal: despite, or perhaps because of, his checkered past and unlikely pedigree, he was more orthodox on social issues than economic ones. Even the exceptions proved the rule. Where the Bush 2004 campaign relied on state defense-of-marriage ballot initiatives only to spend “political capital” on a failed bid to create “personal accounts” for Social Security once safely reelected, Trump abandoned even the pretense of opposing same-sex marriage—and also any Ryan-style entitlement reforms.
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It’s a standard trope of anti-Trump polemics on the Right as well as the Left that evangelicals hypocritically discarded their values in pursuit of political power by handing a thrice-married, twice-divorced, often profane reality TV star the presidency. The reality is more complicated, however. The organized Religious Right initially supported Ted Cruz over Trump. Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and other candidates also had strong pockets of social conservative support. In Iowa, Cruz beat Trump 34 percent to 22 percent among evangelicals. Rubio took another 21 percent, Carson 12 percent.
Trump had to identify and raise the profiles of his own religious boosters, in much the same way cable news networks had to find new pro-Trump pundits when a high percentage of their usual Republican stable turned out to be Never Trump. Robert Jeffries was no Ralph Reed; Jerry Falwell Jr. lacked his father’s political influence and did not succeed him as pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church (though his perch at Liberty University would prove important). In the primaries, Trump’s evangelical vote share tended to decline as those voters’ church attendance increased. His initial coalition included relative social liberals and self-described born-again Christians who went to church less frequently than some of the more conservative candidates’ supporters. Mormons never warmed to Trump.
As Trump careened toward the Republican nomination, he cultivated the constituencies that commanded votes. This included evangelicals and conservative Catholics as well as gun owners (the National Rifle Association, unlike some Religious Right groups, was actually an early adopter on Trump). Trump made promises to social conservatives on abortion, religious liberty, judicial appointments, and other issues of importance to them. He has largely kept those commitments. His general election opponent was Hillary Clinton, bête noire of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” for at least a quarter century. When social conservatives tried in the 1990s to make the argument that personal character mattered even more than policy, the voters resolved that question against them and in favor of Hillary’s husband three times—twice in national elections, once more in the fight over impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Bill and Hillary Clinton never shared much of the religious conservatives’ policy agenda either, of course, though the former did sign into law the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act back when that was the popular position. Post-“Me Too,” some feminists now regret accepting the former president’s personal transgressions for the sake of policy goals and thwarting political opponents. Perhaps social conservatives will later harbor similar regrets about Trump, especially since many of them believe effects on the faith have eternal consequences beyond this life. The politicization of American evangelicalism, which certainly predated Trump, is driving some young believers away.
Yet the stakes for religious conservatives in these political battles is higher than who gets to be an assistant secretary in the Department of Education. The Democratic Party is drifting toward an understanding of religious liberty that protects private thoughts and personal worship practices—and little else. As former First Lady Michelle Obama said, “Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well.” It is nevertheless increasingly difficult for religious hospitals and charities to help the wider community and interact with the government while remaining faithful to their beliefs. If you don’t wish to pay for contraception, participate in abortions, or promote alternatives to the traditional family, you may as well go out of business.
The groups ensnared by this newly crimped understanding of religious liberty are not overtly political organizations. They included Catholic Charities, the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Salvation Army. The three largest denominations in the United States—the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Methodist Church—do not recognize same-sex marriage. During his short-lived presidential candidacy, former representative Beto O’Rourke suggested such churches be stripped of their tax-exempt status. “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us,” O’Rourke said. “And so as president, we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”
O’Rourke is an also-ran, but few top-tier Democratic presidential candidates could resist the logic of his position, even if they may ultimately still flinch from it for electoral reasons. The intersection of sexual orientation and antidiscrimination law raises difficult questions for religious liberty. If opposing same-sex marriage is morally or legally akin to racial discrimination, then it is hard to see how religious schools, charities, and other institutions can indefinitely avoid legal sanction. And gay marriage long ago ceased to be the most radical concept the sexual revolution asked traditional religious believers to publicly embrace. Even Chick-fil-A, a successful fast food chain that largely prevailed in the marketplace over the slew of liberal elected officials who have tried to keep its restaurants out of their cities, crumbled under pressure. What hope then is there for religious bakers and wedding photographers? There is also steady liberal resistance to affording orthodox Christians the same Religious Freedom Restoration Act-type protections they have long endorsed for religious and cultural minorities.
The ability to raise your child according to your faith and to live out what you believe your religion calls you to do is not a small thing, and it too has eternal implications. “If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms,” writes New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. “Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.”
♦♦♦
The intentions of the Religious Right in America have long varied. Some have simply wanted to defend faith, home, and family from the encroachments of the state. Grover Norquist has described conservative Christians as essentially a “parents rights” movement that is part of the “Leave Us Alone” coalition. But others have wanted to defend their version of public morality or even uphold a general Christian consensus in the United States, with varying degrees of tolerance for other faiths and nonbelievers.
As the Christian Coalition gained a foothold in state Republican organizations throughout the 1990s, the more libertarian conception of the Religious Right gradually won out. This trend was accelerated by a series of political defeats that left them with few other options. “Today’s talk of tolerance and acceptance of gay marriage will soon give way to intolerance and rejection of those who hold a traditional view of marriage,” Tim Carney wrote in the Washington Examiner back in 2013, before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision was even handed down. “The next offensive in this culture war will involve wielding government to force individuals to accept the new definition of marriage, falsely invoking analogies to civil rights.”
Many LGBT Americans who only recently saw conservative Christians resisting the legal recognition of their unions are, perhaps understandably, unmoved by these new pleas for tolerance. When states like Indiana under Mike Pence’s governorship moved to pass laws granting protections to businesses whose owners adhere to the old definition of marriage, corporate boycotts ensued. The legislation and other policies like it were widely regarded as license for mass discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, essentially a Jim Crow policy that would bar gay people from pizza parlors and public acommodations. Pence crumbled under pressure and Republicans have subsequently struggled to find their footing on this issue.
Episodes such as this have not only convinced many social conservatives that the free market is an unreliable ally and that big business is often a culture war adversary. These incidents have also caused many traditionalists to see the limits of a libertarian strategy for defending their rights and their place in the public square. Ultimately, viewpoint neutrality—and the occasional successful lawsuit by a Christian florist or baker—only goes so far. Without some affirmative defense of Christian beliefs and their historic role in American culture, secularizing elites will eventually succeed in marginalizing social conservatism.
That is not to say that the new social conservatism is entirely about living out some theological mandate. Many of them are still motivated by worldly problems: the decline of the family, an epidemic of opioid deaths, rising social alienation and unhappiness. They have shifted from attempting to block cultural innovations like gay marriage (though many remain quietly opposed) to making it easier for people who so desire to have families and children. Steve Sailer urged in these pages that Republicans pursue a policy agenda of “affordable family formation” all the way back in Bush’s second term. Some Republicans, including ambitious ones like Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, are starting to take up this mantle.
“A state that encourages marriage, for example, and insists that husbands and wives must have good reasons to seek divorce, need not be an austere, totalitarian one,” writes Ben Sixsmith. “This is, in fact, how the United States governed such matters through the 1950s. And in the hyper-commodified twenty-first century, a state that fails to encourage marriage is misgoverning.” Yet today even many conservatives in effect see the United States of the 1950s as a theocracy or, as one put it, “a Christian version of Saudi Arabia.” This too convinces many traditionalists that the old fusionism has failed and its early conservative critics like L. Brent Bozell may have had a point.
In the same essay, Sixsmith argued Meyer’s fusionism “made only superficial sense” and it was time for something else. “In the twenty-first-century West, we are afflicted with a mediocre libertinism, which is as unstable as it is unsatisfactory,” he continued. “We need a new conservative fusion, one that prioritizes social connection instead of atomization.”
Conservatives have contemplated a new fusionism before. Writing in the older, differently motivated First Things, Joseph Bottum argued for a union between social conservatism and foreign-policy activism with “Islamofascism” replacing communism as an ideological opponent. “The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics,” he wrote. “The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics.” In 1991, Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming called for a new fusionism between libertarians and traditionalists that essentially excised the hawks following the end of the Cold War, bringing together the likes of TAC founding editor Patrick Buchanan and radical free-market economist Murray Rothbard.
What would a fusionism in which social conservatives ceased to be the junior partner look like? The pornography debate is instructive. One set of conservatives argued that anti-porn crusaders wanted the government to replace parents, and some traditionalists promptly fell into this trap. But what if the community, or even the government, can do something at the margins to make it easier for parents to keep their kids off Pornhub? A more liberatarian fusionism might reject it out of hand; a more traditionalist fusionism would not.
It won’t be an easy balance to achieve, especially since some traditionalists seem poised to go too far in the opposite, statist direction. State power can be wielded effectively to uphold a moral consensus against a dissenting minority. It is less clear it can effectively recreate that consensus in the face of a dissenting majority. Both libertarians and social conservatives may find that some of what the GOP has left undone on their policy fronts is simply politically unattainable. But politics, as this new intraconservative debate proves, isn’t static. Even conservatives change.
W. James Antle III is editor of The American Conservative.


theamericanconservative--2020-01-15--Pompeo and Esper Can’t Agree on What ‘Imminent’ Means

Luckily they have Lindsey Graham , who thinks asking questions about any of it is 'empowering the enemy . '
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaves the stage to US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper .
( Photo by Nicholas Kamm / AFP ) ( Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images ) As the debate over presidential war powers intensifies in Congress , a coterie of key Trump officials hit the Sunday talk shows last weekend to ratchet up the rhetoric on the “ imminence ” of the attack Iranian General Qassem Soleimani had allegedly planned .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intelligence briefing provided to House and Senate officials laying out the justification for Soleimani ’ s killing was blasted by members on both sides of the aisle as “ insulting , ” “ demeaning , ” “ dismissive ” of Congress , and “ disdainful.
” “ It was this attitude that we don ’ t have to tell Congress , we don ’ t have to include Congress , ” said Senator Tim Kaine , Democrat of Virginia .
He added that after various scenarios were presented by senators , the administration @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever come to Congress ” no matter what the circumstances .
The president can not take military action against another nation without Congress ’ s approval , unless it is to defend against an imminent threat to U.S. territories , possessions , or citizens. The U.S. is not officially at war with Iran .
Yet the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of openly ordering the killing of an Iranian senior state official of a country , without an authorization of military force against that country and without briefing Congress .
On Friday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because there was “ a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qasem Soleimaini , we don ’ t know precisely when and we don ’ t precisely where.
” Members of Congress and the media seized upon the quote , charging that it does not sound like the definition of “ imminent.
” President Trump himself seemed to grasp the importance of stressing that the attack was “ imminent ” when he added details Friday on Fox News , asserting that Soleimani was plotting attacks on four U.S. embassies .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ four embassies , ” Trump said .
“ Could have been military bases , could have been a lot of other things too .
But it was imminent.
” “ We did it because they were looking to blow up our embassy , ” Trump added .
“ He was looking very seriously at our embassies , and not just the embassy in Baghdad .
I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies.
” But members of Congress say they were not told that four embassies had been targeted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sunday whether that claim was true , one by one they were left sputtering .
Pentagon Chief Mark Esper conceded he “ didn ’ t see ” intelligence indicating that on CBS ’ s Face the Nation .
“ I didn ’ t see one with regard to four embassies , ” Esper said .
“ What I ’ m saying is I share the president ’ s view.
” “ What the president said was he believed there probably and could ’ ve been attacks against additional embassies .
I shared that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Security adviser Robert O ’ Brien seemed to imply that members of Congress were at fault for not extracting that information from their intelligence briefing .
“ It does seem to be a contradiction .
[ Trump is ] telling Laura Ingraham [ about imminent attacks ] , but in a 75-minute classified briefing , your top national security people never mentioned this to members of Congress .
Why not ?
” Chris Wallace asked O ’ Brien on Fox News Sunday .
“ I wasn ’ t at the briefing , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I don ’ t know how the Q & A went back and forth .
Sometimes it depends on the questions that were asked or how they were phrased.
” On Meet the Press , O ’ Brien asserted that “ exquisite ” intelligence he was privy to showed that “ the threat was imminent.
” When pressed by Chuck Todd about what the U.S. did to protect the other three embassies under alleged imminent threat , O ’ Brien declined to give details .
“ Is ‘ imminent ’ months , not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” asked Todd .
“ I think imminent , generally , means soon , quickly , you know , in process .
So you know , I think those threats were imminent .
And I don ’ t want to get into the definition further than that , ” said O ’ Brien .
Pompeo ’ s claim that an attack could be “ imminent ” even though the U.S. did not “ know where or when ” it would come is “ pretty inconsistent , ” Senator Rand Paul , Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Press .
“ To me there ’ s a bigger question too .
…This is what really infuriated me about the briefing… [ Trump officials ] maintain both in private and in public that a vote by Congress in 2003 or 2002 to go after Saddam Hussein was a vote that now allows them to still be in Iraq and do whatever they want , including killing a foreign general from Iran , ” said Paul .
“ And I don ’ t think that ’ s what Congress meant in 2002 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debate about whether we should still be in Iraq or in Afghanistan .
There needs to be authorization from Congress.
” Paul argued that presidents from both parties have , for decades , usurped Congress ’ s war powers , and that it is time for Congress to claw them back .
Said Paul , the founders “ wanted to make it difficult to go to war , and I think we ’ ve been drifting away from that for a long time , but that ’ s why I ’ m willing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distrust President Trump—actually think he has shown remarkable restraint—but I ’ m willing to stand up even against a president of my party because we need to stand up and take back the power.
” While the debate over war powers continues , Trump supporters have counter-attacked by questioning the patriotism of those who don ’ t fall in line with their narrative .
Former White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee-Sanders “ can ’ t think of anything dumber ” than Congress deciding matters of war and peace .
Nikki Haley accused Democrats of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Doug Collins said Democrats are “ in love with terrorists.
” And Lindsey Graham said senators like Lee and Paul are “ empowering the enemy ” by trying to rein in Trump ’ s war powers .
On Monday , Trump added on Twitter : “ The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was ‘ imminent ’ or not , & was my team in agreement .
The answer to both is a strong YES.
, but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his horrible past !
” If Trump ’ s team was really in agreement , they sure had a good way of hiding it .

As the debate over presidential war powers intensifies in Congress, a coterie of key Trump officials hit the Sunday talk shows last weekend to ratchet up the rhetoric on the “imminence” of the attack Iranian General Qassem Soleimani had allegedly planned.
The debate took on added significance after an intelligence briefing provided to House and Senate officials laying out the justification for Soleimani’s killing was blasted by members on both sides of the aisle as “insulting,” “demeaning,” “dismissive” of Congress, and “disdainful.”
“It was this attitude that we don’t have to tell Congress, we don’t have to include Congress,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia. He added that after various scenarios were presented by senators, the administration refused to provide any “commitment to ever come to Congress” no matter what the circumstances.
The president cannot take military action against another nation without Congress’s approval, unless it is to defend against an imminent threat to U.S. territories, possessions, or citizens.
The U.S. is not officially at war with Iran. Yet the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of openly ordering the killing of an Iranian senior state official of a country, without an authorization of military force against that country and without briefing Congress.
On Friday, Pompeo said the attacks were justified because there was “a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qasem Soleimaini, we don’t know precisely when and we don’t precisely where.”
Members of Congress and the media seized upon the quote, charging that it does not sound like the definition of “imminent.”
President Trump himself seemed to grasp the importance of stressing that the attack was “imminent” when he added details Friday on Fox News, asserting that Soleimani was plotting attacks on four U.S. embassies.
“I think it would have been four embassies,” Trump said. “Could have been military bases, could have been a lot of other things too. But it was imminent.”
“We did it because they were looking to blow up our embassy,” Trump added. “He was looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad. I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies.”
But members of Congress say they were not told that four embassies had been targeted. And when Trump officials were asked Sunday whether that claim was true, one by one they were left sputtering.
Pentagon Chief Mark Esper conceded he “didn’t see” intelligence indicating that on CBS’s Face the Nation.
“I didn’t see one with regard to four embassies,” Esper said. “What I’m saying is I share the president’s view.”
“What the president said was he believed there probably and could’ve been attacks against additional embassies. I shared that view,” said Esper.
National Security adviser Robert O’Brien seemed to imply that members of Congress were at fault for not extracting that information from their intelligence briefing.
“It does seem to be a contradiction. [Trump is] telling Laura Ingraham [about imminent attacks], but in a 75-minute classified briefing, your top national security people never mentioned this to members of Congress. Why not?” Chris Wallace asked O’Brien on Fox News Sunday.
“I wasn’t at the briefing,” O’Brien answered, “and I don’t know how the Q&A went back and forth. Sometimes it depends on the questions that were asked or how they were phrased.”
On Meet the Press, O’Brien asserted that “exquisite” intelligence he was privy to showed that “the threat was imminent.”
When pressed by Chuck Todd about what the U.S. did to protect the other three embassies under alleged imminent threat, O’Brien declined to give details.
“Is ‘imminent’ months, not weeks? Are people misinterpreting that word?” asked Todd.
“I think imminent, generally, means soon, quickly, you know, in process. So you know, I think those threats were imminent. And I don’t want to get into the definition further than that,” said O’Brien.
Pompeo’s claim that an attack could be “imminent” even though the U.S. did not “know where or when” it would come is “pretty inconsistent,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, replied Sunday on Meet the Press.
“To me there’s a bigger question too. …This is what really infuriated me about the briefing…[Trump officials] maintain both in private and in public that a vote by Congress in 2003 or 2002 to go after Saddam Hussein was a vote that now allows them to still be in Iraq and do whatever they want, including killing a foreign general from Iran,” said Paul. “And I don’t think that’s what Congress meant in 2002. …We really need to have a debate about whether we should still be in Iraq or in Afghanistan. There needs to be authorization from Congress.”
Paul argued that presidents from both parties have, for decades, usurped Congress’s war powers, and that it is time for Congress to claw them back.
Said Paul, the founders “wanted to make it difficult to go to war, and I think we’ve been drifting away from that for a long time, but that’s why I’m willing to stand up, not because I distrust President Trump—actually think he has shown remarkable restraint—but I’m willing to stand up even against a president of my party because we need to stand up and take back the power.”
While the debate over war powers continues, Trump supporters have counter-attacked by questioning the patriotism of those who don’t fall in line with their narrative.
Former White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee-Sanders “can’t think of anything dumber” than Congress deciding matters of war and peace. Nikki Haley accused Democrats of “mourning” General Soleimani. Congressman Doug Collins said Democrats are “in love with terrorists.” And Lindsey Graham said senators like Lee and Paul are “empowering the enemy” by trying to rein in Trump’s war powers.
On Monday, Trump added on Twitter: “The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was ‘imminent’ or not, & was my team in agreement. The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!” If Trump’s team was really in agreement, they sure had a good way of hiding it.


theamericanconservative--2020-01-16--When Elites Forget How to Talk About Politics

You don ’ t expect to find peace the first time you go to Arizona .
What you expect is more like something out of an old Western : dusty deserts , towns with “ Gulch ” in the name , impassable canyons , tumbleweeds bouncing past ox skulls , rattlesnakes , horseshoes , adversity .
And there ’ s some of that , to be sure : the tall Saguaro cacti , in the shadows of the rising sun , can look like invading soldiers coming down off the mountains .
But then you realize the air is clear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small city—the best kind—where the University of Arizona has pollinated independent bookstores and craft bars .
You go to Phoenix and tease out the charming drags from the sprawl , the boulevards whose rows of palm trees soaked in sunshine feel like a more manageable LA .
You go to these places and , away from the East ’ s deep freeze and din , you breathe .
Arizona is a red state that , in the public imagination at least , probably runs closer to crimson .
It ’ s home to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Arpaio , and there ’ s a certain frontier libertarian streak in place .
No one is going to stop you from hiking up a craggy mountain in the 115 degree heat with nothing in your backpack but a half-full Capri Sun and three cashew shells ; just don ’ t expect it to be cheap when they have to come rescue you .
The speed limit on some highways is 75 .
The beer is good and many bars allow smoking .
And most striking of all , at least to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is correspondingly laid back .
The locals fret about illegal immigration—the border town of Nogales , they point out , is safer than its counterpart on the Mexican side—but also note the concerns of the Tohono O ’ odham Indian nation , whose land would be cut in two by Trump ’ s border wall .
This is Trump country , no question about it , but people aren ’ t obsessed with him .
They gripe about his Twitter account , same as everyone else .
There ’ s a danger to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m engaged in here .
You run the risk of serving up a false synecdoche , pretending a six-day jaunt can give you the full measure of a place .
And certainly not everyone in Arizona is detached from politics ; plenty , I ’ m sure , are quite attached .
But in general it ’ s struck me over the years how much easier it is to talk about politics once you get outside the Washington Beltway .
One of the great ironies of our time is that places like Arizona @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the very people who are supposed to chatter about this stuff for a living .
In D.C. , we love to dread the Thanksgiving trip home , the relatives around the table who can ’ t say “ pass the stuffing ” without spouting their ignorant opinions .
But the truth is exactly the opposite .
It ’ s we who sound like bumptious fanatics , not them .
Only in Washington could anyone take seriously a show like Morning Joe , which can ’ t report the lotto numbers without blaming them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anyone turn down sex because they found out their date was on the other side of the political spectrum .
We chide the rest of the country for their lack of liberality , yet many of us are intolerably close-minded .
Most people treat politics as just another subject for discussion , wedged in between the AFC North standings and the latest on Aunt Marjorie ’ s divorce .
They do this even when elections have very real consequences—I ’ ll never forget sitting in a western Pennsylvania bar and listening to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me how the EPA had ruined his livelihood .
We ’ re far more privileged than that , yet we think nothing of spending all day on social media thrashing some third-rate cable news host because he said something we didn ’ t like .
( That ’ s another thing you notice in Arizona—people aren ’ t constantly staring at their smartphones . )
How did it get this way ?
Several reasons .
The first is simply that D.C. is a company town .
Most Washingtonians have political jobs , so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the same as those math teachers who hang needy charts on their walls listing the professions that require their disciplines .
We get animated , develop strong opinions , act like the stakes are high .
Special fault , I think , is due to the political center , ostensibly the home of Washington ’ s grownups .
Centrists like to posture as non-ideological , but they ’ re some of the biggest fanatics on the planet , and they cling to their beliefs with all the ardor of an ayatollah .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ shibboleths—on foreign policy intervention , sprawling trade deals , an energetic administrative state—has sent them into apocalyptic fits .
That sets a bilious tone for the rest of us and feeds the president ’ s own mean temper .
Another reason Washington discourse is broken is that the media , not the government , has become the city ’ s most ubiquitous entity .
There it is , blinking out of every bar TV , following us home on Twitter and Facebook .
Yes , you can still attain prestige as a senator @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be made in lobbying .
But cable news and its many adjuncts provide something more important : fame , exposure , the very currencies of modern life .
There have actually been congressmen who have become so bored with their lawmaking duties that they ’ ve left Capitol Hill to be TV contributors .
More common is the young legislator who acts like a camera-ready pundit , delivering floor speeches consisting of strung-together soundbites , then dashing away for an Fox News interview in the Capitol hallway .
With the media shaping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the media , Washington ’ s entire dialectic has been dragged down , a CNN-shaped millstone around its neck .
This is not how our elites are supposed to behave .
The Founding Fathers were far more worried about the passions of the average person .
This led most of them to disdain democracy , meaning direct democracy , the noisy kind that had governed Athens 2,500 years earlier .
James Madison famously declared in Federalist No .
55 , “ Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates , every Athenian assembly would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ let their passions steer them towards ruin , most notably during the Peloponnesian War , when demagogues whipped them into undertaking a suicidal invasion of Syracuse .
The founders were determined not to repeat those mistakes .
Yet today it isn ’ t the demos that ’ s clamoring for woolly-headed wars ; it ’ s that piece of think tank furniture John Bolton .
And while hotheaded mobs frequently break out , they ’ re mostly confined to Twitter , whose blue checkmarks may be the greatest monikers of privilege in America @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a necessary check on the people .
They intended the more aristocratic Senate to be a cooling saucer , as George Washington put it , where the blazing whims of the House could be tempered before they became law .
Yet today the opposite has become true .
It ’ s our elites who need checking , while your average Arizonan or Kentuckian isn ’ t nearly so swivel-eyed .
There ’ s plenty to dislike about the populist movements currently sweeping the West , but less than airhorn nationalism , they seem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , an attempt to restore some of the common sense that our political class is supposed to practice .
No , wars can ’ t go on forever .
No , we can ’ t take in everyone from Latin America .
Ask Trump ’ s voters why they backed him , and their most common answer is simply that they didn ’ t like his opponent .
Ask Washington ’ s royalty , and you get crackpot Russian conspiracy theories and musings about apocryphal pee tapes .
It isn ’ t that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Polls on everything from impeachment to tax cuts to Trump ’ s approval rating show they can be , and that party identification matters more than it used to .
It ’ s that they don ’ t care nearly as much as we do .
That grants them a detachment , a healthy distance , an ability to pull the camera up and comment on the passing scene , unavailable to those who spend all their time marinating in the news cycle ’ s trivialities .
Consider that the press has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weeks , yet a Morning Consult poll finds that more than a third of Democratic primary voters either don ’ t have an opinion on him or don ’ t know who he is .
Those opinions will develop , of course ; it ’ s just too early .
First there ’ s the NFL playoffs to worry about .
And for once , my Patriots aren ’ t in them .
This passion gap , between those who insist that federal politics is a matter of salvation and those who don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ under the current administration .
Trump is brilliant at this : he floods the zone with constant insults and outrages , sending Washington ’ s calliope machine into a state of malfunction , while elsewhere people only notice the big things , the major speeches and the I-words , impeachment and Iran .
There ’ s real virtue to this .
It keeps you levelheaded , keeps politics in its proper place .
It ’ s why these days you ’ re more likely to find the cooling saucer on a tabletop in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Capitol dome .

You don’t expect to find peace the first time you go to Arizona. What you expect is more like something out of an old Western: dusty deserts, towns with “Gulch” in the name, impassable canyons, tumbleweeds bouncing past ox skulls, rattlesnakes, horseshoes, adversity. And there’s some of that, to be sure: the tall Saguaro cacti, in the shadows of the rising sun, can look like invading soldiers coming down off the mountains. But then you realize the air is clear. You go to Tucson, a small city—the best kind—where the University of Arizona has pollinated independent bookstores and craft bars. You go to Phoenix and tease out the charming drags from the sprawl, the boulevards whose rows of palm trees soaked in sunshine feel like a more manageable LA. You go to these places and, away from the East’s deep freeze and din, you breathe.
Arizona is a red state that, in the public imagination at least, probably runs closer to crimson. It’s home to former governor Jan Brewer and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and there’s a certain frontier libertarian streak in place. No one is going to stop you from hiking up a craggy mountain in the 115 degree heat with nothing in your backpack but a half-full Capri Sun and three cashew shells; just don’t expect it to be cheap when they have to come rescue you. The speed limit on some highways is 75. The beer is good and many bars allow smoking. And most striking of all, at least to a Washingtonian like myself, the political conversation is correspondingly laid back. The locals fret about illegal immigration—the border town of Nogales, they point out, is safer than its counterpart on the Mexican side—but also note the concerns of the Tohono O’odham Indian nation, whose land would be cut in two by Trump’s border wall. This is Trump country, no question about it, but people aren’t obsessed with him. They gripe about his Twitter account, same as everyone else.
There’s a danger to the kind of travel writing I’m engaged in here. You run the risk of serving up a false synecdoche, pretending a six-day jaunt can give you the full measure of a place. And certainly not everyone in Arizona is detached from politics; plenty, I’m sure, are quite attached. But in general it’s struck me over the years how much easier it is to talk about politics once you get outside the Washington Beltway. One of the great ironies of our time is that places like Arizona have become better at political discourse than the very people who are supposed to chatter about this stuff for a living. In D.C., we love to dread the Thanksgiving trip home, the relatives around the table who can’t say “pass the stuffing” without spouting their ignorant opinions. But the truth is exactly the opposite. It’s we who sound like bumptious fanatics, not them.
Only in Washington could anyone take seriously a show like Morning Joe, which can’t report the lotto numbers without blaming them on Trump. Only in Washington would anyone turn down sex because they found out their date was on the other side of the political spectrum. We chide the rest of the country for their lack of liberality, yet many of us are intolerably close-minded. Most people treat politics as just another subject for discussion, wedged in between the AFC North standings and the latest on Aunt Marjorie’s divorce. They do this even when elections have very real consequences—I’ll never forget sitting in a western Pennsylvania bar and listening to a man remain perfectly amiable as he told me how the EPA had ruined his livelihood. We’re far more privileged than that, yet we think nothing of spending all day on social media thrashing some third-rate cable news host because he said something we didn’t like. (That’s another thing you notice in Arizona—people aren’t constantly staring at their smartphones.)
How did it get this way? Several reasons. The first is simply that D.C. is a company town. Most Washingtonians have political jobs, so they want to feel like politics matters, the same as those math teachers who hang needy charts on their walls listing the professions that require their disciplines. We get animated, develop strong opinions, act like the stakes are high. Special fault, I think, is due to the political center, ostensibly the home of Washington’s grownups. Centrists like to posture as non-ideological, but they’re some of the biggest fanatics on the planet, and they cling to their beliefs with all the ardor of an ayatollah. The fact that Trump has questioned their shibboleths—on foreign policy intervention, sprawling trade deals, an energetic administrative state—has sent them into apocalyptic fits. That sets a bilious tone for the rest of us and feeds the president’s own mean temper.
Another reason Washington discourse is broken is that the media, not the government, has become the city’s most ubiquitous entity. There it is, blinking out of every bar TV, following us home on Twitter and Facebook. Yes, you can still attain prestige as a senator, and there are still big bucks to be made in lobbying. But cable news and its many adjuncts provide something more important: fame, exposure, the very currencies of modern life. There have actually been congressmen who have become so bored with their lawmaking duties that they’ve left Capitol Hill to be TV contributors. More common is the young legislator who acts like a camera-ready pundit, delivering floor speeches consisting of strung-together soundbites, then dashing away for an Fox News interview in the Capitol hallway. With the media shaping the government, and confrontational maximalism shaping the media, Washington’s entire dialectic has been dragged down, a CNN-shaped millstone around its neck.
This is not how our elites are supposed to behave. The Founding Fathers were far more worried about the passions of the average person. This led most of them to disdain democracy, meaning direct democracy, the noisy kind that had governed Athens 2,500 years earlier. James Madison famously declared in Federalist No. 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Athenians let their passions steer them towards ruin, most notably during the Peloponnesian War, when demagogues whipped them into undertaking a suicidal invasion of Syracuse. The founders were determined not to repeat those mistakes. Yet today it isn’t the demos that’s clamoring for woolly-headed wars; it’s that piece of think tank furniture John Bolton. And while hotheaded mobs frequently break out, they’re mostly confined to Twitter, whose blue checkmarks may be the greatest monikers of privilege in America today.
The Founders saw elites as a necessary check on the people. They intended the more aristocratic Senate to be a cooling saucer, as George Washington put it, where the blazing whims of the House could be tempered before they became law. Yet today the opposite has become true. It’s our elites who need checking, while your average Arizonan or Kentuckian isn’t nearly so swivel-eyed. There’s plenty to dislike about the populist movements currently sweeping the West, but less than airhorn nationalism, they seem to be a reaction against elite extremism, an attempt to restore some of the common sense that our political class is supposed to practice. No, wars can’t go on forever. No, we can’t take in everyone from Latin America. Ask Trump’s voters why they backed him, and their most common answer is simply that they didn’t like his opponent. Ask Washington’s royalty, and you get crackpot Russian conspiracy theories and musings about apocryphal pee tapes.
It isn’t that the public can’t be partisan. Polls on everything from impeachment to tax cuts to Trump’s approval rating show they can be, and that party identification matters more than it used to. It’s that they don’t care nearly as much as we do. That grants them a detachment, a healthy distance, an ability to pull the camera up and comment on the passing scene, unavailable to those who spend all their time marinating in the news cycle’s trivialities. Consider that the press has been chattering hyperactively about Pete Buttigieg for weeks, yet a Morning Consult poll finds that more than a third of Democratic primary voters either don’t have an opinion on him or don’t know who he is. Those opinions will develop, of course; it’s just too early. First there’s the NFL playoffs to worry about. And for once, my Patriots aren’t in them.
This passion gap, between those who insist that federal politics is a matter of salvation and those who don’t, has grown especially wide under the current administration. Trump is brilliant at this: he floods the zone with constant insults and outrages, sending Washington’s calliope machine into a state of malfunction, while elsewhere people only notice the big things, the major speeches and the I-words, impeachment and Iran. There’s real virtue to this. It keeps you levelheaded, keeps politics in its proper place. It’s why these days you’re more likely to find the cooling saucer on a tabletop in an Arizona saloon than anywhere near the Capitol dome.


theamericanconservative--2020-01-16--Stephen Miller’s White House Fiefdom

Stephen Miller’s White House Fiefdom

Stephen Miller is one of the most influential and complicated figures to occupy a corner of the West Wing .
The media has manufactured an image of him as a sinister white nationalist and a puppeteer inside the White House , carefully pushing policies to hurt anyone with a skin tone darker than eggshell white .
Voters who have supported Donald Trump since the Republican primaries , however , think of Miller as the last best hope for the MAGA agenda .
Judging by his actions , Miller is far more nuanced than his public image as either a villain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the only two issues that matter—policy and personnel—Miller has been both an immigration hardliner advancing the president ’ s early agenda as well as a roadblock for ideological allies who have applied for jobs inside the administration .
When it comes to policy , Miller is a fairly consistent voice for restricting immigration , yet what many have described as his desire to undercut fellow immigration hawks has limited his success .
By not fighting to fill the administration and the bureaucracy with likeminded allies , Miller has allowed career officials to only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ changes he has fought to implement .
Some of those accomplishments include the travel ban , refugee reduction , and the public charge rule .
Implementing that agenda hasn ’ t been smooth sailing , in part because of Miller ’ s desire to go it alone .
The travel ban , known by mainstream media outlets as the “ Muslim ban , ” was issued very quickly after Trump was sworn into the presidency .
Miller ’ s insistence on haphazardly rushing through the executive order and keeping out key administration officials @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The result was disastrous , protests broke out at airports across the country , and various agencies were left scrambling to deal .
Ultimately the executive order was forced to undergo two revisions but was ultimately held up by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii .
Miller has spent much of the last three years focused on these types of executive orders and rules changes , trying to ensure that they make it through the bureaucratic maze .
It was Miller who ordered that several departments prioritize the public charge , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ green cards if they used one or more public benefits for more than 12 months out of a period of three years .
These executive orders and rule changes have been one of the few areas where Trump can say to his base that he is trying to keep his promises on immigration , and Miller deserves much of that credit .
While he has been successful at pushing forward executive orders and rule changes , the signature legislative policy he planned on championing in Trump ’ s first term stalled out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dreamers—a subset of illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors—amnesty in exchange for a reduction to legal immigration and a border wall won little fanfare among conservatives or liberals .
Most famously , Breitbart editor Matt Boyle had a combative conversation with Miller in his office in late 2017 over the proposal , according to various media outlets .
The plan was viewed as a betrayal to Trump ’ s base , while never earning enough support from more immigration-dovish Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake .
Miller @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victory wasn ’ t in what he got Congress to pass , but what bills he has managed to kill .
This includes a bipartisan DACA compromise authored by Senators Graham and Dick Durbin .
According to a report from Business Insider , Miller invited congressional Republicans who are immigration hawks into the meeting where Graham and Durbin were going to sell their immigration policy to the president , successfully sabotaging their plan .
These fights over amnesty and executive orders regarding immigration have helped create the media narrative that it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Being the big bad immigration hawk in the White House is an image Miller has helped cultivate with the press , working them with the help of several White House allies .
Yet it hasn ’ t been lost on some prominent Trump supporters that Miller is one of very few immigration hawks in a senior White House job .
Personnel has been an area of continued frustration for Trump and his supporters .
Part of the reason Miller is an immigration outlier in the Trump Administration is by his own design .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ during an interview with PBS ’ s Frontline , “ ( Miller ) is very smart , but he ’ s never taken to heart the important Reagan slogan , there ’ s no end to what can be accomplished if you don ’ t care who gets the credit.
” From the time Miller walked into the White House , he began isolating fellow immigration hawks both in and outside of the administration .
He acted as a gatekeeper to the president , and many fellow restrictionists found themselves without a channel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ managed to get jobs inside the administration were slowly picked off by former Republican National Committee and Bush officials who received prominent positions thanks to former personnel director Johnny DeStefano .
Even those who campaigned for Trump and had long relationships with Miller were left out in the cold .
Several prominent immigration hardliners who spoke on condition of anonymity stated how their contact with Miller over the last three years has been sparse to non-existent .
The White House did not respond to a request for comment .
Aside from isolating immigration @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his way to block some ideological allies who ’ ve applied for jobs inside the White House .
Former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach was a repeated target .
When the administration began forming , Trump offered the position of DHS Secretary to Kobach , the only statewide elected official from Kansas to endorse Trump in 2016 and arguably the most well-known immigration hawk in the country .
The offer was quickly rescinded after several advisers , including then White House chief of staff Reince Priebus told Trump that Kobach would have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Whether that was true was a debatable point , but few near the president pressured him to take on the fight to confirm Kobach .
Miller not only did nothing to pressure Trump to bring along Kobach , but he also called well-known conservative pundits and said Kobach wasn ’ t hired because he was challenging to work with and a “ prima donna.
” In 2019 , Kobach was again being considered for a White House position , this time as immigration czar , a position that had a lofty title but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Miller , Trump , and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney , Kobach presented a list of demands for the position including staff , the role of administration spokesperson on immigration , the use of a jet , and the eventual nomination as DHS secretary .
Within a week of presenting the list , Miller ’ s allies leaked it to The New York Times , publicly embarrassing Kobach .
Trump ended up picking Miller ’ s personal choice of Ken Cuccinelli for the position .
Ultimately , Cuccinelli would never take the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acting USCIS director after former head Lee Francis Cissna was forced out with Miller ’ s help .
Like Kobach , Cissna was well respected among immigration restrictionist groups but found himself on Miller ’ s enemies list .
The cause of the rift appears to be an administration phone call where Cissna told Miller to stop berating staffers .
Cissna became Miller ’ s main target after this phone conversation , though some White House officials stated the call was just the last in a series of events where Cissna questioned Miller @ @ @ @ @ @ @ act the senior Trump adviser doesn ’ t tolerate .
In the months following this phone call , Miller and his allies described Cissna to media outlets as an opponent to Trump ’ s immigration agenda .
When I reported that the Angel Moms were seeking a meeting with Trump over wall funding and were being kept from meeting with the president , Miller ’ s allies in the administration called conservative writers and editors insisting that Cissna was responsible .
White House speechwriter Darren Beattie was another early Trump supporter who found @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when CNN reported that Beattie spoke at an event also attended by Peter Brimelow .
Even though Beattie was not speaking on a subject like race or even immigration , and had public defenders like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter , he was still fired .
Yet Miller has advocated on behalf of personnel whose records on immigration are very different than his own .
After Kirstjen Nielsen left the position of DHS secretary , Miller campaigned for Kevin McAleenan to replace her .
Staffers warned Miller that McAleenan had a reputation of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promises .
By the time Nielsen left , DHS , like many other departments , was crawling with staffers who openly despised the president and his policies .
Miller shrugged off any concerns about McAleenan and insisted he had “ a good working relationship with him.
” During McAleenan ’ s short time as acting DHS secretary , he leaked ICE raids to The Washington Post and asked White House lawyers to raise concerns about Trump ’ s “ Remain in Mexico ” policy for asylum-seekers .
After McAleenan ’ s stint ended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cheap labor lobbyist and Nielsen ’ s former chief of staff Chad Wolf to replace him .
This was such a heavy lift that Miller personally reached out to skeptics who preferred Cuccinelli .
Miller remains the public face of the Trump immigration agenda .
But in Washington , it is often said that personnel is policy .
On that front , his impact has been much more mixed .
Ryan Girdusky is a writer based out of New York City .
Read more of his work at RyanGirdusky.com .

Stephen Miller is one of the most influential and complicated figures to occupy a corner of the West Wing. The media has manufactured an image of him as a sinister white nationalist and a puppeteer inside the White House, carefully pushing policies to hurt anyone with a skin tone darker than eggshell white. Voters who have supported Donald Trump since the Republican primaries, however, think of Miller as the last best hope for the MAGA agenda.
Judging by his actions, Miller is far more nuanced than his public image as either a villain or savior. When it comes to the only two issues that matter—policy and personnel—Miller has been both an immigration hardliner advancing the president’s early agenda as well as a roadblock for ideological allies who have applied for jobs inside the administration.
When it comes to policy, Miller is a fairly consistent voice for restricting immigration, yet what many have described as his desire to undercut fellow immigration hawks has limited his success. By not fighting to fill the administration and the bureaucracy with likeminded allies, Miller has allowed career officials to only casually enforce the executive orders and rules changes he has fought to implement. Some of those accomplishments include the travel ban, refugee reduction, and the public charge rule.
Implementing that agenda hasn’t been smooth sailing, in part because of Miller’s desire to go it alone. The travel ban, known by mainstream media outlets as the “Muslim ban,” was issued very quickly after Trump was sworn into the presidency. Miller’s insistence on haphazardly rushing through the executive order and keeping out key administration officials caused it to be executed terribly. The result was disastrous, protests broke out at airports across the country, and various agencies were left scrambling to deal. Ultimately the executive order was forced to undergo two revisions but was ultimately held up by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii.
Miller has spent much of the last three years focused on these types of executive orders and rules changes, trying to ensure that they make it through the bureaucratic maze. It was Miller who ordered that several departments prioritize the public charge, a rule change that bars immigrants from obtaining green cards if they used one or more public benefits for more than 12 months out of a period of three years. These executive orders and rule changes have been one of the few areas where Trump can say to his base that he is trying to keep his promises on immigration, and Miller deserves much of that credit.
While he has been successful at pushing forward executive orders and rule changes, the signature legislative policy he planned on championing in Trump’s first term stalled out of the gate. His plan to offer Dreamers—a subset of illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors—amnesty in exchange for a reduction to legal immigration and a border wall won little fanfare among conservatives or liberals. Most famously, Breitbart editor Matt Boyle had a combative conversation with Miller in his office in late 2017 over the proposal, according to various media outlets. The plan was viewed as a betrayal to Trump’s base, while never earning enough support from more immigration-dovish Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake.
Miller’s claim to a major legislative victory wasn’t in what he got Congress to pass, but what bills he has managed to kill. This includes a bipartisan DACA compromise authored by Senators Graham and Dick Durbin. According to a report from Business Insider, Miller invited congressional Republicans who are immigration hawks into the meeting where Graham and Durbin were going to sell their immigration policy to the president, successfully sabotaging their plan.
These fights over amnesty and executive orders regarding immigration have helped create the media narrative that it’s him against the entire D.C. establishment. Being the big bad immigration hawk in the White House is an image Miller has helped cultivate with the press, working them with the help of several White House allies.
Yet it hasn’t been lost on some prominent Trump supporters that Miller is one of very few immigration hawks in a senior White House job. Personnel has been an area of continued frustration for Trump and his supporters. Part of the reason Miller is an immigration outlier in the Trump Administration is by his own design.
Nationally syndicated conservative columnist Ann Coulter said during an interview with PBS’s Frontline, “(Miller) is very smart, but he’s never taken to heart the important Reagan slogan, there’s no end to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
♦♦♦
From the time Miller walked into the White House, he began isolating fellow immigration hawks both in and outside of the administration. He acted as a gatekeeper to the president, and many fellow restrictionists found themselves without a channel to address their concerns. Those who managed to get jobs inside the administration were slowly picked off by former Republican National Committee and Bush officials who received prominent positions thanks to former personnel director Johnny DeStefano.
Even those who campaigned for Trump and had long relationships with Miller were left out in the cold. Several prominent immigration hardliners who spoke on condition of anonymity stated how their contact with Miller over the last three years has been sparse to non-existent. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Aside from isolating immigration hardliners, Miller has gone out of his way to block some ideological allies who’ve applied for jobs inside the White House.
Former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach was a repeated target. When the administration began forming, Trump offered the position of DHS Secretary to Kobach, the only statewide elected official from Kansas to endorse Trump in 2016 and arguably the most well-known immigration hawk in the country. The offer was quickly rescinded after several advisers, including then White House chief of staff Reince Priebus told Trump that Kobach would have a difficult time obtaining Senate confirmation.
Whether that was true was a debatable point, but few near the president pressured him to take on the fight to confirm Kobach. Miller not only did nothing to pressure Trump to bring along Kobach, but he also called well-known conservative pundits and said Kobach wasn’t hired because he was challenging to work with and a “prima donna.”
In 2019, Kobach was again being considered for a White House position, this time as immigration czar, a position that had a lofty title but little authority. During a meeting with Miller, Trump, and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Kobach presented a list of demands for the position including staff, the role of administration spokesperson on immigration, the use of a jet, and the eventual nomination as DHS secretary. Within a week of presenting the list, Miller’s allies leaked it to The New York Times, publicly embarrassing Kobach. Trump ended up picking Miller’s personal choice of Ken Cuccinelli for the position. Ultimately, Cuccinelli would never take the job but instead filled the role of acting USCIS director after former head Lee Francis Cissna was forced out with Miller’s help.
Like Kobach, Cissna was well respected among immigration restrictionist groups but found himself on Miller’s enemies list. The cause of the rift appears to be an administration phone call where Cissna told Miller to stop berating staffers. Cissna became Miller’s main target after this phone conversation, though some White House officials stated the call was just the last in a series of events where Cissna questioned Miller in front of other people, an act the senior Trump adviser doesn’t tolerate. In the months following this phone call, Miller and his allies described Cissna to media outlets as an opponent to Trump’s immigration agenda. When I reported that the Angel Moms were seeking a meeting with Trump over wall funding and were being kept from meeting with the president, Miller’s allies in the administration called conservative writers and editors insisting that Cissna was responsible.
White House speechwriter Darren Beattie was another early Trump supporter who found himself on Miller’s wrong side when CNN reported that Beattie spoke at an event also attended by Peter Brimelow. Even though Beattie was not speaking on a subject like race or even immigration, and had public defenders like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, he was still fired.
Yet Miller has advocated on behalf of personnel whose records on immigration are very different than his own. After Kirstjen Nielsen left the position of DHS secretary, Miller campaigned for Kevin McAleenan to replace her. Staffers warned Miller that McAleenan had a reputation of opposing both President Trump and his immigration promises. By the time Nielsen left, DHS, like many other departments, was crawling with staffers who openly despised the president and his policies.
Miller shrugged off any concerns about McAleenan and insisted he had “a good working relationship with him.” During McAleenan’s short time as acting DHS secretary, he leaked ICE raids to The Washington Post and asked White House lawyers to raise concerns about Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers.
After McAleenan’s stint ended in October 2019, Miller pushed for cheap labor lobbyist and Nielsen’s former chief of staff Chad Wolf to replace him. This was such a heavy lift that Miller personally reached out to skeptics who preferred Cuccinelli.
Miller remains the public face of the Trump immigration agenda. But in Washington, it is often said that personnel is policy. On that front, his impact has been much more mixed.
Ryan Girdusky is a writer based out of New York City. Read more of his work at RyanGirdusky.com.