What does it mean to be a 'conservative' these days?

A conversation with Steve Hayes.

I have known Steve Hayes for the better part of the last two decades. And admired him for just as long.

Steve is, in case you don’t know him, a long-time conservative writer and thinker. He spent years at the Weekly Standard before founding The Dispatch in 2019. He has also written the definitive biography of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

In recent weeks, Steve has been a part of a running debate on X about what conservatives who will not vote for Donald Trump should do — in both their writing and thinking about this election.

I reached out to Steve to dig deeper into his view that being a Never Trump Republican does not have to mean being a pro-Kamala Harris Republican.

Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.

This is a free post. It is part of the smart analysis I aim to bring you from ALL sides of the political spectrum. I think I am doing something rare in modern political journalism: Doing my best to see all perspectives and angles. And taking on politicians and their ideas without fear or favor. I sincerely hope you consider investing in me today. It’s $6 a month or $60 for the year.

Chris: Do you consider yourself to be a “Never Trumper”? Why or why not? And, relatedly, what does that term mean to you?

Steve: Sure, I consider myself a “Never Trumper.” My explanation is pretty simple. When the term first appeared in 2016, it referred to a group of conservatives who vowed they would never vote for Trump. I’ll never support Donald Trump, under any circumstances.

But while I consider myself a Never Trumper, I don’t often use it to describe myself. When I hear the term now, I think of a relatively small group of political activists working to defeat Trump – people who are out raising money, building coalitions, making ads, organizing, getting voters to the polls, etc. Groups like The Lincoln Project and the Republican Accountability Project, among others. 

That’s not my lane. With the exception of a one-week internship at the 1996 Republican Convention and two months on a California ballot initiative (Proposition 209, also in 1996), I have stayed far away from electoral politics. I was registered Republican for a while, mostly to vote in primaries. But I’m not a party guy. I’m a journalist, not a political activist. 

I think the case for opposing Trump has, unfortunately, gotten much stronger since I first made it in 2015, particularly after he lost in 2020 and sought to remain in power anyway. The conspiracies, the fake electors, the threats to elected officials like Brad Raffensperger and Mike Pence, the instigation of violence on January 6th — it’s insane. And it’s all disqualifying. He’s a unique threat to the constitutional order, a greater threat than Joe Biden was and that Kamala Harris would be. And I worry a lot about Trump-inspired — maybe Trump-endorsed — violence if he were to lose again in November. 

Chris: Is there a Republican Party — or a conservative movement -- outside of Trump/Trumpism? If so, who best represents it and what does it believe?

Steve: It’s an important question and your premise makes the key distinction. There’s not really a Republican Party outside of Trump. The GOP today is much more a personality cult that sometimes performs party functions than it is a serious political party.

Loyalty to Trump, the man, matters far more than promoting ideas long associated with Republicans. And the Republican Party isn’t devoted in any serious or consistent way to the kind of small government conservatism that shaped the party from the Reagan era through the Tea Party.

As Trump rose to power, he killed the GOP as a small government party. We had Mick Mulvaney on The Dispatch Podcast a while back — founding member of the House Freedom Caucus and later Budget Director and interim chief of staff in the Trump White House — and he pointed out that Trump, with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, spent at a faster rate during the first two years of his presidency than Barack Obama did in the final two years of his. And that’s before the subsequent explosion in spending during Covid. 

Look at the 2020 GOP platform — or non-platform. The party passed a resolution that said, in effect, Republicans support Donald Trump and his America-first policies and reject Obama-Biden policies. His daughter-in-law runs the party today. Most GOP officials at the state level are Trump-first Republicans. The party pays his legal bills.

Last week, the official GOP twitter handle tweeted a picture featuring Trump and JD Vance, along with RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, under the banner “Unite America.” I’m not sure a single one of them was a Republican fifteen years ago and no one in the group devotes any real time to policies designed to reduce the size and scope of government.

What they have in common is that they love Trump (including Trump) — and Republicans are delusional if they think that unites America. Trump is running as a pro-choice, pro-Obamacare, neo-isolationist who promises to grow entitlement spending and has pledged repeatedly to use the government to exact revenge on his political enemies. There’s not much for movement conservatives in today’s Republican Party.

There are still lots of elected Republicans, in Washington and around the country, who are closer to Reagan Republicans than Trump Republicans. You still see occasional flashes of this reality on occasion. But most of those elected Republicans are too afraid of Trump — and their voters — to speak out. 

There is still a conservative movement outside of Trump, but it’s much smaller than it used to be and many of its leaders and institutions have abandoned conservatism in favor of the Trumpy populism now dominant in the GOP.

There are many examples but perhaps none so vivid as the Heritage Foundation. Founded in the early 1970s, Heritage was a pipeline of small-government policies for the Reagan Administration and, in many ways, at the intellectual center of the conservative movement through the Obama administration. I had my first job in Washington at Heritage in 1993, editing Heritage Members News and doing some writing for Heritage’s founder and president, Ed Feulner. Heritage was anchored by conservative principles — free markets, limited government, strong national defense, opportunity, traditional values. It’s possible I was just young and naive (okay, I was definitely young and naive), but from where I sat it sure seemed like no amount of outside influence — top-down from elected Republicans or bottom-up from its supporters — could get Heritage to compromise those principles. A big part of my job was answering mail from members and donors — yes, this was well before email – addressing their concerns and sometimes answering detailed policy questions they had about the institution. For letters that were not easily answered with standard language — there were “form” letters covering regular topics including tariffs, immigration, welfare, school choice, etc — I would conduct in-person interviews to give detailed, updated responses. I was sometimes struck by the tone and tenor of the letters we sent — defiant and unapologetic on core principles. 

I was at Heritage in the aftermath of a pre-Trump populist…ripple (it definitely wasn’t a wave). It was shortly after Pat Buchanan’s insurgent primary challenge to George H.W. Bush and immigration had become a hot-button issue among grassroots conservatives. Heritage, which had been a leading voice of pro-immigration advocates, got tons of mail — tons and tons of mail —n on the issue. I don’t remember keeping an actual tally, but my recollection is that letters ran 10-to-1 in favor of more restrictionist policies than the ones Heritage proposed, including many from donors threatening to withhold future financial support. The letter these correspondents received was almost confrontational in its intransigence. Basically: We believe what we believe and if you don’t like it, don’t send us your money. I loved it, not just because the letter defended views that I held but also because there was something that made me proud to work for a place so devoted to its core principles that it was willing to lose money to defend them. 

The Heritage Foundation today is…quite different. While there are still some sharp scholars on the roster, it’s largely devoted to boosting Donald Trump and whatever flavor of populism is exciting small-dollar donors these days. The new president, Kevin Roberts, claims that Heritage is the place for a robust debate about conservatism and between conservatives of different stripes, but he spends much of his time lashing out at the kinds of movement conservatives who spent decades building Heritage into the powerhouse it once was. 

There is definitely still a conservative intellectual movement. It’s smaller and less influential than it used to be — at the moment. The American Enterprise Institute is probably the most important institution of the conservative movement today, a focal point of the thoughtful and intellectually honest work that has proven so important to successful ideological movements in recent history. But there are great people doing that kind of work in many other institutions, too, both in Washington and beyond. The Ethics and Public Policy Center does very good work on law and culture issues. The Hudson Institute, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Federalist Society, Cato Institute, Stand Together, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Niskanen Center, R Street Institute and others. And there are some terrific writers and thinkers at places like National Review, Commentary, Discourse Magazine, National Affairs, The New Atlantis, Reason and elsewhere. 

Chris: You’ve been critical of conservatives who insist that the only way to fight a threat like Trump is to support Harris. Explain your thinking.

Steve: Let me tweak your premise and narrow it in a small but important way — to me, anyhow. I don’t have a problem with conservatives who support Kamala Harris to defeat Donald Trump.

The person who makes this argument most effectively, in my view, is Nick Catoggio, my colleague at The Dispatch. I think he’s the most astute observer of this populist moment in our politics and I’m very glad to have him as a colleague. David French, another onetime Dispatch colleague, now at The New York Times, has made a slightly different argument that leads to the same conclusion. And if by “support” you mean “vote for,” I did that in 2020, when I voted for Joe Biden despite the many policy differences I have with him and my strong conviction that he’d be a crummy president. 

I’ve been critical of conservatives, particularly conservative journalists, who lionize Trump’s opponents — whether Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris — in their efforts to defeat him. One of the main objectives Jonah Goldberg and I had when we launched The Dispatch nearly five years ago was to provide reporting and analysis from the center-right that resisted the temptation of partisanship in this moment of ever-increasing polarization. We believed then — and believe today — that one of the reasons distrust of the media is at an all-time high is the increasingly partisan proclivities of journalists. Here’s how we put it in October 2019: 

Many news outlets do the work once properly carried out by the parties: opposition research, ideological messaging, and even political organizing. As a result, much of what passes for political journalism is really party work by proxy. 

This is true across the ideological spectrum, but it is most worrisome on the right. The conservative movement was not intended to be a handmaiden to a single political party. What is good for the Republican Party may be good for the conservative cause, and vice versa. But that is not axiomatically so.

I suspect that many people who read that then — or read it now — think first of Fox News, where Jonah and I worked as contributors for more than a decade. Fox has earned that reputation. The loudest voices there — people like Sean Hannity and Mollie Hemingway and Laura Ingraham (and many, many others) — spend much of their time boosting Donald Trump and Trump-first Republicans or amplifying crazy conspiracies about Trump’s opponents. They’re more political enforcers than they are journalists, devoted more to winning political battles and pleasing their audiences than advancing the truth. 

This partisan boosterism happens in mainstream news outlets and on the center-left, too, of course, and anti-Trump conservatives shilling for Harris (or Biden before her, or Hillary before him) are exacerbating this trust problem.

In March, Joe Scarborough uncorked a rant in defense of Joe Biden, excoriating anyone who’d suggest Biden’s cognitive decline meant he was unfit to serve as president for another four years. Scarborough: “I've said it for years now: he's cogent. But I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been intellectually, analytically…This is -- and, and, I don't -- you know what? I don't really care. Start your tape right now, because I'm about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I've known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. If it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it.”

It wasn’t the truth. There were legitimate questions about Biden’s mental acuity. We were asking them, in a respectful but aggressive way, in our work at The Dispatch. We’d seen so many Biden mental lapses and intellectual hiccups by that point that majorities of Democrat voters thought he shouldn’t be the nominee.

I don’t know what compelled Scarborough to launch such a tirade — Joe Biden is famously a “Morning Joe” viewer, he was thought to be the inevitable Democratic nominee — but it was self-discrediting. And he certainly wasn’t alone. And there is a corner of the anti-Trump right for whom this knee-jerk boosterism of Trump opponents is the modus operandi and maybe the business model. It’s not easy for me to reconcile enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris with my conservatism. Qualified support? I can get that. Reluctant backing? Sure. There’s a difference between, say, welcoming a Harris convention speech that included some olive branches to conservatives, on the one hand, and calling it the most pro-America speech of the last decade. Or making the argument that Joe Biden is somehow a conservative-friendly president. It wasn’t and he’s not.       

It’s strange, in my view, for longtime conservatives to suddenly abandon long-held positions in order to support someone who holds positions at odds with those long-held views. It’s also unnecessary, as Nick Catoggio’s work demonstrates. 

So, if you’re a conservative who believes the best way to end the threat Trump presents is by actively supporting or just voting for Kamala Harris, go for it. Just be honest about the tradeoffs.  

Chris: What’s your advice for a conservative who can’t support Trump but also can’t vote for Harris. Not vote? Write in someone? Choose between two bad options?

Steve: I understand the dilemma. I vote in Maryland so my presidential vote doesn’t matter. I can imagine someone in a swing state being more persuaded by the “binary choice” arguments than someone in deep blue California or deep red Alabama. But at the same time, I can see why an anti-Trump conservative who is a devout Christian and faithful pro-lifer would never vote for Harris/Walz, with rhetoric and policy proposals that sometimes seem to convey genuine enthusiasm for abortion. 

In 2016, I wrote in Senator Mike Lee. I did a long interview with him and found his continued public skepticism of Trump both persuasive and admirable. He’s now come to embrace Trump and, obviously, I haven’t. (I interviewed him in July at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, where we explored his journey from anti-Trump stalwart to pro-Trump enthusiast.) 

And in 2020, as I mentioned, I voted for Biden. I don’t think Biden has been a good president and not just for the policy reservations I had when I voted for him.  

In 2016, I read a terrific essay by Matthew Franck that really helped shape my thinking on my vote. We invited him to update it for 2024 and he made a compelling case for “choosing not to choose.” And then Nick Catoggio offered a very smart counterargument. 

Chris: Finish this sentence: “Being a conservative at this moment in the Republican Party means ________________.”  Now, explain.

Steve: “Being a conservative at this moment in the Republican Party means being loyal to a party that doesn’t deserve loyalty — and isn’t particularly conservative, either.”

As noted, I’m not a Republican or a political activist, but if I were a political activist I don’t think I’d spend much time trying to reform a party that’s so badly broken.