Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s Candid Anti-Trump Book

This article originally appeared on this site.

Jeff Flake is a relatively anonymous Republican senator from Arizona who has just published a remarkably forceful book, titled—in a nod to Barry Goldwater—“Conscience of a Conservative.” The book attempts to reckon with what conservatism means in the age of Donald Trump, and its power comes from Flake’s probing of his party’s complicity in Trump’s ascendance. “These are the spasms of a dying party,” Flake writes, surveying the anger that has consumed conservatism in recent years.

One way to understand Flake’s experience is as a set of adventures amid these spasms. The senator recalls a right-wing blog once reporting that he had been “seen in the company of globalists in Paris, France.” (Flake: “Quel scandale!”) He describes watching, during last year’s Presidential election, as Trump turned to the likes of Michael Flynn (“a conspiracy theorist”) for foreign-policy advice, and remembers thinking that Trump’s ongoing “affection for authoritarians and strongmen” was “almost impossible to believe.” Mostly, though, Flake tries to make sense of how hollow Republicanism proved to be when Trump arrived. “Never has a party so quickly or so easily abandoned its principles as my party did during the 2016 campaign,” Flake writes. The Party did so, he suggests, “because it was quick and easy, and the real world is hard.” A wannabe authoritarian approached, and Republicans lurched mutely toward him, “like a tranquilized elephant.”

There is something convenient in the denunciations of Trump from the right—to claim that this floundering President is not a true conservative is a way of cleaving a set of political beliefs from their actual political expression. (The same form of piety appeared during the last few years of the George W. Bush Administration.) There is some of that in Flake’s book, but in the whole his account is more introspective and self-lacerating.

Flake held a seat in the House for more than a decade before being elected to the Senate, in 2012, and before being a lawmaker he served as the executive director of the Goldwater Institute, which advocates for limited government. In Washington, he is known for his often-stringent libertarianism. In his book, Flake describes a journal entry he wrote in 2001, during his first term in Congress. “My goodness,” he writes. “That young Congressman was obsessed with tax cuts!” He reserves a more serious self-critique for his vote against the Wall Street bailout, in 2008, which he opposed based on “ideological purity.” Flake, looking back, decides he made the wrong decision. “If it is in your capacity to prevent great harm and ameliorate suffering, what do you do?” Flake asks. “Do you spend the time, as the precious seconds tick away and the tsunami darkens the land, blithely observing, ‘I told you not to build there?’ ” The usual conservative critique is that the Republican Party has forgotten itself, that it needs an ideological cleansing. Flake is chasing a more complicated truth. Sometimes, he believes, purity has been the problem.

Flake began to write “Conscience of a Conservative” after a post-election trip to Mexico, where he’d had to reassure officials that the United States hadn’t changed. Back in the U.S., though, he started to wonder whether it had. What it means for America to seal itself up is a particularly tangible question in a border state such as Arizona, and throughout his book Flake makes an emotional case for immigration and against nativism and isolationism. He recalls working on his family’s Arizona ranch alongside immigrants: “In ranch country, you learn how indispensible they are to making things work in America.” He writes, too, of the two physicians who saved his father-in-law’s life after a heart attack, one of them from Palestine and the other from Afghanistan. He denounces President Trump’s executive order banning Muslims from several countries from entering the United States. “We are provoking civilizational struggle,” he writes. Then he recounts a speech he gave, while the travel-ban controversy was swirling, at a mosque in the Phoenix area. “I bet you never thought you would see a Mormon speaking in a mosque,” Flake told the crowd. “We all know how we are different, but let me tell you a few ways that we are similar.”

And yet while Flake has persuasive things to say about what his party should stand for, he has less to say about whom it should stand with. During the decade leading up to Trump’s candidacy, the Republican Party was led in Congress by ideologically committed, small-government conservatives (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell) and on the ballot by principled moderates (John McCain, Mitt Romney). But none had the claim on conservative voters that Trump does. Flake notices the historical echoes in the Party’s confrontation with Trump—he recalls how William F. Buckley cast the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement in the early nineteen-sixties. But the difference is that the Birchers were a small minority of the Republican base. The Trump loyalists seem a majority, or at least a plurality. The challenge for Republican politicians is not just whether they’ll stand for principle; it’s whether those principles will get them any votes.

It was striking, last week, to notice the age of the three Republicans whose no votes doomed their party’s effort to repeal Obamacare. John McCain, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski are all over sixty, and they each occupy fixed positions in American life: Collins and Murkowski as representatives of distinct legacies of moderate Republicanism, McCain as a crusading maverick. The health-care vote was not a pure up-or-down referendum on Trumpism; for Flake and other younger, libertarian-minded senators, the bills’ priorities matched their own. But it remains true that for all the denunciations of Trump, it isn’t yet clear how rising conservative politicians will map a future in opposition to Trump, and what form a Republican resistance to the drift of the Party might take.

Flake’s book is a start. So are the steady denunciations from Senator Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, and the broad condemnation of the President embedded in the nearly unanimous legislation passed last week to raise sanctions on the Russian regime and its partners and to limit the President’s authority to reverse them. There is a detectable moral resistance among Republicans, even if their political resistance remains rare. Perhaps part of what has liberated Flake is his vulnerability. He is up for reëlection in Arizona in 2018, and a poll released on Thursday put his approval rating there at eighteen per cent.

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