Conservative Values are Being Destroyed, and It's An Inside Job
The Republican Party of Donald Trump and Elon Musk no longer seems to care about basic conservative values. What is America losing in the process?
President George H.W. Bush met his wife, Barbara, at a Christmas dance in 1941, the same year that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese military and America joined the world’s bloodiest conflict, World War II.
In her memoir, published in 1994, Barbara would later write about what she told her mother of seeing her husband for the first time: “On this night I told her I’d met the nicest, cutest boy, named Poppy Bush.”
This storybook romance blossomed into a long marriage that lasted more than seven decades until Barbara’s passing. It was storybook, in part, because the story is so rare these days. Bush herself once remarked, “I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.”
If there’s one place this idyllic romance is particularly uncommon, it’s at the echelons of Republican Party politics.
President Donald Trump is, without a doubt, a serial adulterer — carrying on a tradition of other Republican leaders like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who cheated on his wife at around the same time he was blasting former Democratic President Bill Clinton for cheating on his.
But Trump’s lieutenant, the billionaire mogul Elon Musk, makes him look like a choir boy in comparison. Musk has as many as 13 children (that we know of) with a wide range of women, none of whom he is currently married to.
Some of the mothers of his children have to publicly beg him on the Internet to pay attention to their kids’ needs. One of the women who allegedly had a child with Musk is the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has ironically written for the ultra-conservative Christian satire website The Babylon Bee. Musk apparently has no intention of marrying her or giving his child a normal life with a nuclear family.
Unfortunately, this is a trend throughout the modern conservative movement. Adultery, divorces, and unstable families are everywhere. As the GOP wages war on transgenderism, it is not doing a whole lot to prove to people that it has much commitment to traditional gender roles and family arrangements itself.
None of this is to say that the only function of people in government is to live pristine private lives. Public policy and competence in governance is still very important. A Democrat friend of mine used to say that Bill Clinton screwed an intern and George W. Bush screwed the country. Policy does matter — it impacts the lives of millions upon millions of people.
But the conservative movement has always had at its core a commitment to shaping the values of the broader public and preserving institutions like the American family, the church, and community cohesion.
Social conservatives have spent years stressing the value of getting married before having children, for instance. A long-running theme in conservative criticism of minorities is that fatherlessness is too rampant among African Americans. The Bushes, for all their flaws, were quick to reach to the Bible for lessons on how to live. Trump and Musk, on the other hand, only seem capable of doing so under duress (Musk is openly a disbeliever, Trump at least tries to fit in occasionally.)
The piety of the conservative movement of yesteryear seems to have ironically been replaced by liberalism. Many of the conservative movement’s most influential leaders now take pride in how unmoored they are from the watchful eye of any authority at all, let alone God.
We see this in Musk, for instance, deciding to call the commander of the International Space Station “retarded” or the Trump administration posting a gleeful ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) video featuring migrants being shackled before they’re marched off to a deportation flight.
It’s not that a conservative can’t have a disagreement over space flight logistics or be in favor of doing more to prevent or deter illegal immigration. But the way the leaders of the GOP are now talking about these things is leaning into pure liberalism — they’re taking joy in how much they can trigger a response in other people with invocations of cruelty or immaturity without any concern for propriety or tradition. It’s unmoored individualism: we’ll do what we want, and if you disagree, screw you.
That’s how you get, for instance, South Carolina Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace Bible-posting on social media at the same time she brags about having extramarital relations at a prayer breakfast. Because in this libertine conservative movement, Christianity is emptied of any content whatsoever. We’re all sinners — so just do whatever you want. Christianity is turned into an entertainment product or cultural clothing, which I sometimes call Six Flags Over Jesus, not a philosophy by which you live your life.
It’s not clear to me what the downstream consequences of this are. Many people, for good reason, don’t look to politicians as role models. Maybe it doesn’t matter that Trump or Musk or Mace or Gingrich have a thin commitment to Christian principles or traditional values. People can just go to church and get those values elsewhere. Many conservatives I know in real life still adhere to conservative Christian values, even if the leaders of the Republican Party don’t.
But politics has always had a moral component, too. When Abraham Lincoln set down the Emancipation Proclamation or Franklin Roosevelt rallied the country against corporate greed or Ronald Reagan told the Russians to tear down the Berlin Wall they were doing more than making policy or administering the government. They were also shaping people’s values and changing the norms that powered American life.
The conservative movement today lacks leaders who preach Christian humility and charity. It is functionally run by Gordon Gekko-style characters who occasionally tip their hats to some social conservative priority to keep them in the tent (although it seems like the national Republican Party has more or less given up on banning abortion and is trying to satisfy this camp with gender wars instead.) There’s a reason Musk is barging into government offices and then just firing people left and right without considering his decisions carefully. He doesn’t see the infinite value of every human being that every religious scripture honored by everyone from Buddhists to Baptists tells us exists. Federal employees are just widgets to move around.
For some libertarian-leaning Republicans who’ve always been uneasy with the Christian right and traditional values who just want lower taxes and less government spending, this might be a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. But for Republicans who do think that conservative values are worth protecting and promoting, is there any hope?
As I was writing, I was reminded of a passage from Vice President JD Vance’s famed memoir, Hilbilly Elegy.
In the passage, Vance talks about how the first time in his life he was able to be part of a stable and well-adjusted family was when he married his wife Usha:
The first time I visited her family for Thanksgiving, I was amazed at the lack of drama. Usha’s mother didn’t complain about her father behind his back. There were no suggestions that good family friends were liars or backstabbers, no angry exchanges between a man’s wife and the same man’s sister. Usha’s parents seemed to genuinely like her grandmother and spoke of their siblings with love. When I asked her father about a relatively estranged family member, I expected to hear a rant about character flaws. What I heard instead was sympathy and a little sadness but primarily a life lesson: “I still call him regularly and check up on him. You can’t just case aside family members because they seem uninterested in you. You’ve got to make the effort, because they’re family.”
These are the values that American conservatives used to prioritize in their leaders — they’re now expressed most beautifully by the vice president’s immigrant in-laws.
Yes, character isn’t everything. The policies our leaders implement are very important. But if your movement is premised on the idea that you need to shape the values and culture of the broader public, then the current conservative movement is a spectacular failure — as religion declines, fatherlessness remains a plague, and legalized gambling is becoming a national pastime.
The title of the famous conservative philosopher Richard Weaver’s book was Ideas Have Consequences. The consequences of the ideas being promoted by current “conservative” leaders are anything but. Adultery, cruelty, immaturity, and lasciviousness are increasingly replacing faithfulness, compassion, duty, and piety.
This new set of values are the values of men who worship not God but themselves. When President Trump is selling branded Bibles or promoting cryptocurrency, he is sending the message that the superficial pleasures of material goods should be your highest calling in life.
Weaver reminded us about the perils of this path. He believed that men and women needed to put faith and humility at the cornerstone of their lives.
“The road away from idolatry remains the same as before; it lies in respect for the struggling dignity of man and for his orientation toward something higher than himself which he has not created,” he wisely counseled us.
The current orientation of the Republican Party, driven by the antagonism and Manichean nature of Elon Musk’s social media platform, is drifting further and further away from conservative tradition. In order to rescue conservative values, conservatives have to insist on a return to the ideals that animated their forefathers, not surrender them before the idolatry of Trump or Musk.
As someone who was raised as a staunch Christian conservative but is now a center-left liberal, it's been truly confounding to see conservatism lose its character. All the things that I appreciate in the conservatism of my family and upbringing, and that I still try to exemplify, have been drained from conservatism on the public stage. It's weird and sad.
The issue about Elon’s pro nautalism is an example of a rich man’s eccentricity is a poor man’s pathology. If some blue collar worker from Ohio has 13 kids with 4 women, he would be deemed a deadbeat dad. But Elon does it and he is lauded.
I know this sounds kind of leftwing but this is my most leftwing opinion. And I also know that he can support his kids financially. I think wealth can insulate you from a lot of the social effects of your deviancy but this is still not healthy.