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Bill Kristol Looks Past November to Rebuild Conservatism

Screen Shot 2016 08 29 At 9.45.36 AM

Bill Kristol can speak tongue-in-cheek about what he’ll do between now and November’s elections, however, he’s also looking to the future.

“I’m going to cry a lot, drink a lot, lament a lot,” he joked in an interview.

“I think there are some important arguments to be made, and for a conservative like me, there’s an argument to be made that Donald Trump is not the future of conservatism,” Kristol said in a more serious vein. “He’s not the recent history of conservatism actually. And there are other people worth supporting in the Senate, in the House, and at the governor’s level.”

“But above all,” Kristol added, “I think the idea of making it clear that conservatism may have had a bad year in the sense that Trump hijacked the Republican Party and sells himself as a conservative but that’s not what the conservatism I care about is about.”

Although still a political lifetime away, current national polling suggests Trump will lose to Hillary Clinton in November. As one of the most public faces of the NeverTrump movement, Kristol said he thinks conservatism can reinvent itself after the election, though he says it’s clearly a big task and a question.

“It’s happened before, both parties have nominated bad candidates and recovered,” he said. “But I do think it’s going to have to be an explicit and self-conscious recovery. I don’t think you can say, ‘Oh, well, Trump that was kinda unfortunate.’”

Kristol says there needs to be “a repudiation” of Trump.

The Republican Party, he said, needs to reassert itself as “either a Reagan conservative movement or a Republican Party as a Reagan, Bush, McCain-type party.”

At the very least, Kristol is optimistic about some of the up-and-comers in the GOP. “A lot of younger people here now, and they’re impressive young people,” he said. “If you look at the people elected in 2014 to the Senate to the House, they’re impressive, they’re diverse, they’re creative, they’re imaginative. It’s a forward-looking conservatism and then all of a sudden you have freakish phenomenon of Donald Trump being the retrograde nominee in 2016. Hopefully we can get beyond that, but it will take a lot of work after November 8.”

While various pundits have outlined possible scenarios for the GOP after November, Kristol stresses that the recovery must be through a big-tent approach.

One way to frame the path forward is whether the GOP will be the party of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and take more of a grassroots populist approach, or the party of Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and adopt a more a technocratic and analytical approach.

“It would be the party of both, both are in the U.S Senate,” Kristol said. “And all major parties are huge amalgamations of different people, different interest groups, and sentiments. When you have 65 million people voting in party they’re all going to be on one path or another.”

“I’m conservative,” Kristol said. “I probably agree with Ted Cruz 90 to 95 percent on issues, but I think Ben Sasse going forward has a sense that you can’t keep repeating things, even good correct things, [from] the ’80s, ’90s or the last decade. And I think Sasse more than anyone else in this Congress has at least a sense of conservatism moving forward, building on the achievements of the past, taking a fresh look at institutions, processes, and how to empower citizens and restore a sense of self-government in the country, so I’m a Ben Sasse fan.”

Inside the voting booth in November, Kristol says he’s not going to vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton, and that he would like to vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin. For now, Kristol said he does think that the Republican Party will survive Trump.

“But look if it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” he said. “Parties come and go ultimately. They usually stay in America, they’ve stayed a long time recently, but the ideas the cause is more important than any party. And if Trump were to win for example he would then control the Republican Party and people would look at alternatives.”

Cross-posted from Opportunity Lives.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Polyherald

    August 29, 2016 at 10:19 pm

    No one will support a movement created by people like Kristol. Acting like a legitimate grassroots movement, as a astroturfing swaglord,

    Who does this guy think he is anyway?

    • Jeremy Rhymes

      September 3, 2016 at 4:11 am

      Agreed. You have to be sincere, and bring solutions to what has been negatively impacting Americans on the ground, in their homes.

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