Jeff Bezos and the Conservative Movement

Jeff Bezos is winding down as CEO of Amazon. He turned an operation in his garage into one of the most valuable companies on planet earth. My family gets so much from Amazon each week that the UPS man has been known to stop at our house out of habit with nothing to actually give us.

Bezos will transition to Executive Chairman of the Board, which is an emerging trend in succession plans for companies. (H/t to Daring Fireball for that link)

Companies transitioning from a long-term Chief Executive Officer and involved in CEO succession planning, especially for a company founder or head of a family-owned company, are looking to retain and capitalize on the outgoing CEO’s institutional knowledge while ensuring a smooth transition to the new leader. In response to this need, some creative companies are transitioning their outgoing Chief Executive Officer to the position of Executive Chairman of the Board. The Executive Chairman position allows the organization to leverage the former CEO’s personal client relationships and institutional knowledge while allowing him to retain employee rights and benefits, assist in the transition process, and gradually phase out of CEO responsibilities.

While all of this is going on, a lot of people are linking to this piece by Matthew Walther at The Week in which he says, “Like many observers, including an enormous number of the president's loudest detractors, I believe that Trump brought the conservative movement to an end.”

I actually don’t think that is the case, but I do think Trump has forced some necessary retooling of a movement that, for forty years, has surfed on top the decaying remains of Ronaldus Maximus. It is somewhat hilarious to watch a bunch of conservatives rush to proclaim Donald Trump the greatest president when the man, frankly, left us with no coherent ideas on which to surf — just a nebulous shell called Trumpism from which multiple entities, individuals, and groups will attempt to inhabit and claim some of Trump’s personal appeal — and neither the House or Senate that he had when he arrived on the scene.

Trumpism won’t be successful in so much as Trumpism is about Donald Trump, a mortal being who will die. His cult of personality will then divide and scatter between factions. Some will go with an anti-immigration candidate. Some will go isolationist. Some will go with the guy who is the biggest, grandest bully to replace him. Some candidates will try to inhabit the total package. Some supporters will begin internal purity purges. Time and again we have seen those trying to behave like Trump come off as too manufactured or too crazy. For all his faults, Donald Trump was authentically Trump and Trumpism was tied to him.

Much of the conservative movement will gravitate to bits and pieces of his ideas and some new groups will emerge, some more successful than others. Many will, given those involved, ground themselves in ideas and ideals to give themselves staying power.

That gets me back to Jeff Bezos.

Think of a conservative organization. Think of any conservative organization. Now ask yourself one simple question: what happens to it when the head of it dies?

That is the problem with the movement. It is not so much out of ideas, but it is badly in need of some exlax to get the bowels of the movement unclogged and flush away some of the leadership. Let’s be honest. Some of the conservative movement moved to a full embrace of Trump because of donor agitation and demands. But some of the movement moved to him because it was one last hurrah against what they perceived as a second Reaganite movement against a GOP that had aligned John Anderson, Howard Baker, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole against Reagan. This time it was the Bushes, the squishes, and the DC elite.

Like Reagan, Trump beat the establishment and some of the Reagan warriors loved it and loved Trump because of it. They moved their organizations to Trump and got captured in his orbit, for better or worse.

So what happens when they die?

A lot of institutional memory is going to disappear. A lot of donor money will have been wasted. A lot of young conservatives are going to have to land somewhere. Like Bezos with Amazon, the conservative movement leaders need to think about an exit strategy that allows their institutions to survive after their departure instead of clinging to power with no transition plans until they die.

I don’t think the conservative movement is dead. I do think it is finally time for the old guard to start putting their retirement plans and transitions in order — follow Bezos and make it about the survival of the institution and business and not the ego of the man or his access to power.

The conservative movement does need a swift kick in the ass. They’ve largely won on tax cuts, judges, and life. Now, what about technology? There’s a real and healthy fight within the movement over Section 230 of the Communications Act. What about woke culture and cancel culture and progressivism? What about marijuana legalization? What about intersectionalism and critical theory and indoctrination of our youth? What about getting conservative back on campuses instead of ceding the ground and abandoning the academic institutions of America? What about putting Main Street ahead of Wall Street?

A healthy conservatism is going to be one that embeds a lot of people in existing cultural institutions instead of abandoning ship and trying to build half-assed competition. Many conservatives have internalized that progressive cultural ascendency means the right will be assigned to a cultural ghetto. Perhaps, but that is no reason to give up the fight and the attempted incursion.

One of the worst things to come out of the Trump era is the increasing embrace of the theory that the left cheated their way to victory in 2020 and will now never leave. It is premised on lies and defeatist in result — just look at the Georgia Senate runoffs. We know today that 750,000 total voters stayed home and more than half were Republican.

Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later, according to a new analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of recently released voting records.

More than half of the no-shows were white, and many lived in rural areas, constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates.

The defeatist attitude defeated the GOP in the Senate. Republicans did it to themselves because they embraced a self-destructive lie. Many of them are still dogmatically convinced there is no way they could have won a runoff where one Democrat won by just 52,000 votes and 400,000 Republicans sat it out and never even tried.

Conservative institutions are going to need to be based in reality and unafraid to speak up. They’re going to need to get away from the tables of power and stop being held hostage by their donors. Right now, frankly, a lot of the right will speak up, but too many yell in off-putting ways and spew alternative realities derived down rabbit holes filled with bat poop levels of crazy.

Too many younger conservatives have decided they are for what the left is against. It is predictable and depressing to know, intuitively, which blue checkmarks on Twitter will defend Marjorie Taylor Greene solely because of who is attacking her. David Duke undoubtedly arrived too early in the twentieth century. Today, he’d get certain blue check marked conservatives supporting him solely because the GOP establishment and left would, rightly, denounce him.

There is a bit of intellectual dumbassery the leaders of the conservative movement are going to have to turn their backs on in order to move forward.

Bring back the happy warriors, return to reality, commit to cleaning up your own side, and make conservatism great again by grounding it in ideas, not people.

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PS — I have long maintained that Bill Clinton was the most destructive force the conservative movement had ever seen. By blowing up the Democratic Party in 1994 and shifting so much of his party to the GOP, the conservative movement lost the need to reach out across the aisle and build bipartisan ideas with conservative Democrats. Having lost the need to reach across the aisle, the conservative movement lost the skill to reach across the aisle. One thing Donald Trump has done, conversely, is show there really are black and Hispanic voters who like some of his ideas. They may not become Republican, but they are conservative and conservatives need to rebuild the skill of working across the aisle with intellectual fellow travelers who have a different letter next to their name. Donald Trump actually provided an issues based path to start doing that again and much of it within the cultural landscape wherein conservatism thrives.