Principles Really are Worth the Cost, but More of Us Have to Start Acting Like It
In a harsh public letter, top Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes announced they would no longer continue with the network in light of its ongoing promotion and support of Tucker Carlson’s Patriot Purge miniseries, describing it as “a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery and damning omissions.” The letter goes on to describe how Goldberg and Hayes had hoped to see a return to form for the news organization following Trump’s departure in office, but that they now must recognize that the ship, as they put it, has hit the iceberg.
More than anything else, the letter feels to me like that Mitchell and Webb sketch where two SS officers suddenly look around and ask themselves “…are we the baddies?” It’s come slowly, and in dribs and drabs, but I must confess to taking some heart at watching prominent conservative personalities start to recognize they’ve been onboard with a fascist movement for five years. Not enough of them, not by a country mile, but it’s a helpful counteragent to the general sense of doom we’ve all grown troublingly used to.
I am not a conservative, not by a long shot, at least not by the American political scale; my European friends might have cause to disagree. But despite my own political predilections, I always used to have a healthy respect for my counterparts on the right. I’m lucky enough, I suppose, to remember a time when conservatism was about, well, conservation. He may have done it for nakedly political reasons, but Nixon established the EPA, and Republicans were on board with combating climate change throughout the Reagan era. It wasn’t an ideological position but a cold reckoning with reality. And above all, what conservatism at its best was always about was just that: reality. I once thought of the country as having two poles: a progressive pole that pushed hard against the status quo, and a conservative pole that forced advancement to move methodically and carefully. I thought of this syzygy as the heart of American dynamism, that we destroyed and preserved simultaneously, tore down even as we built, always a little better than before. Conservatism, in my experience once upon a time, asked us only to consider what we were throwing away before we did so, a reasonable demand in the face of a global history replete with revolutions that went too far. And so, I have tried to be patient with those trying to see in their movement the vision of the good they were still fighting for.
It’s tempting to talk about Goldberg and Hayes’ decision as too little too late, that they’ve spent five years legitimizing the authoritarian and antidemocratic wing of the GOP simply by refusing to disavow it, and I think there’s quite a lot to be said there. Goldberg in particular stands out in that regard; the author of a book called Liberal Fascism should have been far more attuned to authoritarian currents. They took the same tack many did: let’s be patient, let’s see how this shakes out, maybe there will be a course correction when Trump is out of office. As if this was an aberration, and not the course our political system was already hurtling toward.
I’m not a political analyst or politician, a scholar of constitutional law or any of the social sciences. All I am is someone who knows how to use his voice, a confessed expert in communications. I can speak volumes about the consequences of the decision both to remain with the network for so long and the power of walking away.
I’ve always been a firm believer in stepping away from anything that compromises your principles — from a public relations, business, and personal standpoint. Even if that means making less money, saying no to new clients, or cutting ties with old ones. It’s something I talk about frequently. Staying true to your values matters, and integrity is everything. The cost of compromising that is just too great. But I do see that there is an argument to be made for staying. Jaclyn Moore, co-showrunner for Netflix’s Dear White People, walked away in protest of the service’s support for Dave Chappelle following the controversy over an extended transphobic rant in his most recent special. But the special hasn’t gone anywhere, and Netflix hasn’t paid a price. Moore kept her principles; Netflix kept their money. A reasonable observer might ask what it was worth to walk away, sacrificing yourself to abstraction while bearing the entire penalty for the company’s sin. You absolve yourself, but the problem continues. It’s not difficult to understand why someone like Goldberg or Hayes wouldn’t be willing to throw themselves on the pyre.
I can’t help but wonder, though.
It’s easy to look at this individual decision as the choice of pragmatism over principle; sometimes needs must, and, the thinking goes, I can effect change more effectively from a position of influence rather than exile. And it’s easier still to see what’s happened to those on the right who did walk away: in the irrelevance of one-time intellectual titans of movement conservatism like George F. Will and Bill Kristol, or of former Tea Party firebrands like Joe Walsh, or the political defenestration of Liz Cheney, a steadfast defender of the president until he crossed an uncrossable line. The Weekly Standard, once the ivory tower of right-wing thought, is simply gone, destroyed by the Trump consensus for refusing to bend to it. What has opposing Trump ever gotten anyone in the GOP?
Those individual decisions, however, happened in a chorus of countless more performing the same political calculus: just stick it out, and then we can fix it. But the calculus doesn’t matter; the message does. And for five years, mainstream conservative voices have time and again refused to state clearly and in a meaningfully unified voice their opposition to autocracy or their concerns about the fitness for office of a reality star that a quarter of the country still considers the rightful president. Perhaps something could have been said sooner to forestall this long crisis.
I just keep thinking of Jaclyn Moore, whose principles got her exactly nothing; who made waves for a few days there but must still endure the hardship of the wilderness. That’s what happens when you make the call alone. The cowardice of others only isolates and ruins those with integrity; that same cowardice only makes it harder and harder for others to step up. That’s how we got here: countless people refusing to voice their objections, refusing to fight. That’s the message we’ve been sent over and over: principles aren’t worth the cost.
We need a new message.
