AMHERST — A few weeks ago, a New York Times columnist began to outline his thoughts on the historic 2016 presidential election for a talk at Amherst College. But he didn’t think he’d be discussing Donald Trump as the president-elect.
“Like most people, all my predictions have been wrong,” Ross Douthat, 36, told about 100 people who attended his Wednesday talk, “American Conservatism and Donald Trump.” “I can’t make any more predictions.”
Unlike many of the events at local campuses and communities since Election Day that focused on what went wrong from a liberal perspective, Douthat’s talk focused on the evolution of conservatism, Trump’s campaign and how a Trump administration could affect politics at Amherst College.
Douthat began by noting that conservatism is theoretically dedicated to conserving.
“The nature of conservatism is going to vary dramatically from cultures, contexts, natures, times, eras,” said Douthat, an author whose recent book is titled “Bad Religion: How We Become a Nation of Heretics.” “And it’s certainly going to vary from country to country. British conservatism is going to be a different beast than German conservatism.”
Douthat said there are distinctive qualities about American culture that conservatives think are good things and worth preserving. He said some in the right-wing party seek to conserve an America that is a commercial republic — dynamic, entrepreneurial, highly capitalist — true to the American Colonial society. The party also holds a general suspicion of state power and centralized authority.
Trump ran his campaign based off these theoretical visions of conservatism, but also spoke of areas that he believed conservative ideology wasn’t successfully addressing.
“(The campaign) spoke to the issues on the ground,” Douthat said. “Wage stagnation, job loss, disappointment with the effects of trade deals, globalization and so on.”
When thinking of possible governing scenarios and Trump’s ability to lead the country, Douthat suggested imagining Trump as operating on two axes: One axis is ideological, ranging from conventional Republicanism to so-called Trumpism, which Douthat described as being populist, mercantilist, skeptical of free trade and skeptical of mass immigration. The other axis ranges from authoritarianism to incompetence.
How conservatism reacts to him, Douthat said, is going depend on where he ends up falling on those axes.
“The more authoritarian he becomes, the more conservatism’s future and its very soul depends on finding ways how to oppose him through congressional action,” Douthat said.
As for the incompetent side, he said that is harder to predict. If Trump is too incompetent to be any kind of successful authoritarian, Douthat described the extreme scenario as a “lurch from one disaster to another where we are crossing our fingers and hoping that we don’t have a nuclear war.”
Benjamin Fiedler, 22, a senior at Amherst College and reader of Douthat’s columns, took notes of the talk.
“I was interested in what he had to say about the election and the future of the U.S. under Trump,” Fielder said.
Although Alex Weinman, 15, was not able to vote this election, he attended the event on Wednesday to become more educated in politics.
As a student at Deerfield Academy, Weinman said the majority of speakers visiting his school have been from the Democratic Party. To gather news for the election, Weinman said he looks at left-wing and right-wing news outlets.
“I try to get all sides,” he said.
Caitlin Ashworth can be reached at cashworth@gazettenet.com.