Conservatives Can Either Hang Together, Or Hang Separately

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

You don’t go into battle with your forces divided, not if you expect to win. That’s something those still constructing the intellectual underpinnings of the upcoming midterms would do well to remember.

Successful movements thrive on division, like iron sharpens iron, as long as everything comes together at the end. When it doesn’t, you get an election like 1992 in which George H. W. Bush, having violated his singular promise to oppose the Democrats in their efforts to raise taxes, split the movement that put him in office and allowed a transmogrified liberal to win the White House. (RELATED: Meet The MAHA Candidates Heading Into The Midterms)

They’d do best not to make that mistake again. Avoiding it will require a level of mature thinking that many contemporary conservative leaders and their followers have yet to demonstrate they can engage in. There’s still time to implement the changes necessary, but it’s running out.

Conservatives have known from the beginning that Donald J. Trump’s presidency, like Richard Nixon’s, would be transactional rather than ideological. Decisions would be made according to what was best at the time rather than according to what people in the Reagan years would call “first principles.”

Republican candidate Richard Nixon makes the victory sign in New York City during his last campaign meeting for the presidency of the United States on November, 1968. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

That’s proven a challenge as Trump has moved........

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