Why true conservatives must mount a third-party presidential campaign

A third-party candidate will have a clarifying effect.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 5 May 2016

Donald Trump is the Republican Party's presumptive nominee for president of the United States.

That is probably the weirdest sentence I've ever typed.

This is a problem for my fellow conservatives. It's not just that Trump is not a conservative. It's that his candidacy is a deliberate insult to everything conservatives are supposed to believe. Besides the fact that, as Ted Cruz noted accurately enough, Trump is psychologically unfit for the office of president, Trump's candidacy has essentially been an exercise in dynamiting everything conservatives have been trying to build for the past 30 years. Free trade. Planned Parenthood. Entitlements. The quaint notion of limited government. Or principle. Or virtue. Or restraint. Or reasonableness.

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Conservatives are looking at the ruins of our movement. Which begs the question: What now? Do we support Kang or Kodos?

The answer is neither. True conservatives cannot support Donald Trump. Nor can they support Hillary Clinton.

Instead, conservatives should rally behind a totally doomed third-party effort to represent true conservative values.

This effort would be doomed from the start. So why should conservatives go through with it?

Well, the first, and sufficient, reason is honor. Conservatives cannot be complicit, even through inaction, with either a Trump or a Clinton presidency. What is more, they need to state forthrightly and loudly to the country that Trump does not represent them, and that they believe in principle over party.

But there are also political reasons.

Conservatives must try to rescue down-ballot races: governorships, Senate seats, House seats, and so on. As it is, a Trump candidacy will mean that millions of conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, will simply stay home in disgust in November, which would doom countless valuable Republican candidates to turnout-related defeats in down-ballot races. A third-party presidential candidate would give conservative voters a reason to turn out — and in the process, save what can be saved.

A conservative third-party presidential bid would also have a clarifying effect. The tragedy and farce of L'Affaire Trump has, at least, been a revelator of people's character. (Yes, Chris Christie, I'm looking at you.) As Trump is enthroned as the nominee, countless Republicans who detest Trump and what he represents will fall in line and support him, or at least pretend to support him, because they have no principle. A third-party conservative candidate would allow no one to hide or claim a grey area. Are you a conservative, or a Vichy Republican? Just like the Free French in London in those darkest days of 1940, the conservative campaign would self-select for the principled and audacious — exactly the kind of people we will need to rebuild the conservative movement and, eventually, the Republican Party, from the ground up. Even if the campaign is doomed, from its ashes will arise the future of the conservative movement.

And finally, a third-party bid would allow conservatives to replace fiction with reality. The fiction was that conservatives represented the majority of the Republican Party, and had control of it. That fiction has now been exposed for what it was, and we conservatives have to live with that. But while it's true that we're not the majority of the Republican Party, it's also true that the GOP cannot win without us. The future of the GOP will be fought the Chicago Way. Other groups within the GOP will try to keep conservatives pliant and subservient now that our relative weakness has been exposed. But we can still have tremendous influence if we're willing to use it, and that means making a show of force.

In other words, for both honor and political expediency, it's time for conservatives to rally around a third-party conservative candidate. Let's go.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is a writer and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His writing has appeared at Forbes, The Atlantic, First Things, Commentary Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Federalist, Quartz, and other places. He lives in Paris with his beloved wife and daughter.