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David French
By David French
Opinion Columnist
I’ve been wrong about many things, but here are two of the bigger whiffs of my professional life.
I thought Donald Trump wouldn’t find any meaningful support in the Republican Party. I watched his strange campaign announcement, complete with a partially paid crowd and a wild, rambling speech and thought, “This man is going nowhere.”
And I thought evangelical conservatives would be the firewall against his ascendancy, not his most loyal constituency and the fuel for the fire of his political comeback after Jan. 6. I never imagined the Christian devotion to Trump that we see today.
I’d been an evangelical my entire life and a Republican since my teenage years. I thought I knew my own community. Then, suddenly, I didn’t. I was shocked and more than a little embarrassed, but also curious. Ever since that moment, I’ve been haunted by two questions: What did I miss? Why did I miss it?
When you’re paid to write your opinions, it can be hard to admit when you’re wrong. You can feel as if your credibility depends on your prescience, when it more accurately depends on your honesty. No one reasonably expects you to know everything, but they’re entitled to the truth — even when that truth reflects poorly on your judgment.
I could write a book about the lessons I’ve learned, but this is a column, so I’ll be brief. Here are four things I wish my 2024 self could travel back and say to 2015 me, a much more naïve writer for National Review.
Community is more powerful than ideology. If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only.
In fact, that’s a prime reason so many conservative writers dismissed the Trump phenomenon out of hand. We were all familiar with the unyielding ideological litmus test. Many of us remembered the slings and arrows directed at anyone who stepped out of line. The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined........