Ryan Costello came to Washington the old-fashioned way. Growing up in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a family of educators, he imagined government service to be like the Norman Rockwell painting of a farmer standing up at a town-hall meeting: a noble calling. By the time Costello turned twenty-one, in 1997, he wanted to be a congressman. He was elected the township supervisor of West Chester, Pennsylvania, while he was at Villanova law school; then he became the Chester County recorder of deeds, then a county commissioner, and then a commission chairman. This was the kind of solid ladder that an ambitious young Republican, in the tidy suburbs west of Philadelphia, climbed in order to reach for bigger things. In 2014, after the Republican incumbent in Pennsylvania’s Sixth Congressional District announced his retirement, Costello—at thirty-seven, the heir apparent—ran for his seat, and coasted to victory.
Costello is tall and slim, with a prominent nose and slick black hair, easygoing and conscientious. When he smiles, he looks about twenty-five years old. Upon entering Congress, he focussed not on publicizing himself but on mastering policy and raising money for colleagues. He played shortstop on the Republican congressional baseball team. He became a member of the Tuesday Group, fifty or so moderate Republicans who meet weekly, and later joined the Problem Solvers Caucus—a few dozen centrists, evenly drawn from both parties, who work together on legislation. Costello supported stronger background checks for gun purchases and voted against a Republican bill that would require states to recognize concealed-carry permits issued by any other state. He made environmental protection a top priority and, among other things, championed the Paris climate accord. He was rated the ninth most bipartisan member of Congress.
At the same time, he was a loyal part of the House Republican majority, in good standing with the Party’s leaders, especially the Speaker, Paul Ryan, whom he admired for his optimism and for his ability to express disagreement respectfully. Costello wasn’t a hard-core libertarian like Ryan, but he believed that prosperity and opportunity sprang from limited government. He spent his first term doing everything necessary to get a seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee. In time, he hoped to become a committee chairman.
During the 2016 campaign, he promised to support his party’s Presidential nominee. None of the candidates he endorsed—first Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, and finally John Kasich—could figure out how to defeat Donald Trump. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, Costello said that Trump’s comments were “atrocious, disrespectful towards women,” and “incredibly inappropriate for someone who wants to lead our country.” In November, he cast a reluctant vote for him anyway.
“And then Trump gets elected,” Costello said recently, at a coffee shop in West Chester. “And the norms of politics all just blow up, and you’re trying to figure out how to orient yourself when the rules don’t apply anymore, and you’re allowed to say and do things which used to be disqualifying.” At first, Costello expected the President to temper his behavior and allow the experienced professionals in the White House—like the chief of staff, Reince Priebus—to guide the Administration. Now that Costello was on the Energy and Commerce Committee, he wanted to work on helping government policy catch up with advances in renewable energy, technology, and health-care delivery. Instead, he found himself swamped with questions about Stormy Daniels and “very fine people on both sides.” He didn’t know how to navigate the Trump era, in which rage constantly emanated from both the left and the right. Being a moderate Republican put him squarely in everyone’s sights.
The protests began immediately. Two Saturdays after Trump’s Inauguration, Costello spent the day at home, playing with his young son, and it wasn’t until late that he heard about Trump’s ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. On Costello’s Facebook page, angry comments against the ban were piling up. He issued a split-the-difference statement that recommended both tighter screening and exceptions for green-card holders. He was a moderate on social issues having to do with race, gender, and religion—he voted to prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against gay people—but these weren’t the subjects that he wanted to focus on in Washington. Trump’s Muslim ban and the intense reaction to it caught him completely by surprise.
In the spring of 2017, hundreds of demonstrators besieged Costello’s West Chester office to protest the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare, an effort that he opposed; later that year, there were more protests over the tax bill, which he supported. (“This is going to kill his kids!” one demonstrator shouted about the tax bill; then, hearing her own words, she added, “The debt, the debt.”) Costello realized that moderates like him were being targeted by the progressive organization Indivisible and other groups that had risen up in opposition to Trump. “These groups don’t go to the red parts of Alabama or even Pennsylvania,” Costello told me. “They’re going to purple, and they’re going to beat up on people like me, ’cause we’re the vulnerable ones, and that’s how you take back the House.”
When he posted a statement on Facebook about cybersecurity provisions that he’d added to a bill on driverless cars, a constituent named Ernie Tokay, who identified himself as a Vietnam veteran, wrote, “Congressman. I know you believe it’s 1994 or something or you’re some kind of middle manager. But you don’t get credit for routine business when you and your party do nothing to stop your Russian agents at the head of your party.” Costello believed that the investigation, led by Robert Mueller, into Russian subversion of the 2016 elections should proceed without congressional interference. Tokay continued, “I expect you to defend the constitution as I did and you must sacrifice your career as a republican and go against your party if you want to be doing this job in 18 months.”
As Democrats berated him for complicity, Republicans attacked him for disloyalty. After Costello condemned Trump for his comments on the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville—in a Pennsylvania newspaper, he wrote of “how unbelievably poorly our President has failed”—a constituent at a town-hall meeting stood up and called him a coward for bashing a President from his own party. “What about the fact that I’m an elected member of Congress?” Costello replied. “I represent seven hundred and five thousand people. All of you sent me to Washington. Even if you don’t vote for me, I’m still there to represent you. I should get your input on how I’m going to vote, I should get your feedback, I should hear all sides of an issue. But once I vote, or when I’m asked for my opinion, I should give my honest opinion—and if you don’t like it that’s fine, you can criticize me for it, but I also shouldn’t not offer my honest opinion because I’m afraid that some political party or some person is not going to like what I have to say, right? You want me to be honest with you so that you can honestly evaluate me as your member of Congress.”
The Republican representative Charlie Dent, of Pennsylvania—Costello’s colleague in the Tuesday Group, and a friend of his—had refused to vote for Trump, and had been so outspoken in his criticism of the President that it became all he was known for. Costello said, “I don’t call myself an ‘anti-Trump Republican’—it’s not my thing. I’ll speak out about something if I disagree, but I don’t wish to be defined by that.” Questions about the President’s character, he felt, were distractions from the real business of governing. Costello denounced the separation of migrant families at the border—“The Administration owns this policy, and it is offensive that they are trying to shift blame to others”—but he also lamented that the controversy was overshadowing stories about strong economic growth. The most popular approach among Republicans was to ignore Trump’s behavior. Costello told me, “I did this at times, I’m going to be honest with you—‘O.K., he tweeted. That doesn’t have anything to do with how I voted, that doesn’t have anything to do with the business I spoke at today, or with the constituents I met. So why should I have to jump in that pond?’ ”
Yet Costello couldn’t let every Presidential grotesquerie pass by, even if his constituents cared far more about increasing medical-research funding than about Mika Brzezinski’s face-lift. There were certain depths of degradation to which the President of the United States should not be allowed to sink. Costello tried to choose his shots carefully, often going with his gut. Nothing disgusted him more than Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki in July, and a tweet, two weeks later, that insulted LeBron James’s intelligence. If the President wanted to go after Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, they were fair game, but Costello felt that James—who had just founded a public school in the inner city of Akron—was “an exceptional role model.” When Trump was reported to have derided, at a White House meeting, what he called “shithole countries,” Costello waited a day before responding. He told me that he first wanted to confirm the story with members of Congress who had been there. Meanwhile, a constituent named Shari Gehman Nyles wrote, on Costello’s Facebook page, “Your silence is noted. It’s going on 17+ hours since trump’s offensive, racist comments. Unless you break with your party/president you/GOP will be seen as fully complicit with everything trump says and does.” Six hours later, Costello posted a statement on Facebook. He proudly described missionary work that his in-laws had done in Haiti—one of the countries Trump had mocked—and asked the President to apologize for his “inappropriate, unfortunate, and offensive” remarks. To which Shannon Browne, another constituent, replied, “Are you going to act to formally censure the president for his comments? Or will this be forgotten about until the next horrific thing he says, tomorrow or Tuesday or whenever?”
Costello felt that, no matter what he did, it wasn’t enough for one side or the other—any nuance was taken for phonyness. He didn’t want to be a lonely voice like Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator, who last year published a book bemoaning the moral and intellectual state of the Republican Party, and almost immediately had to announce his retirement. Costello was at the beginning of a promising career in Congress, and he had no desire for political martyrdom. And yet, given the wholesale capitulation to Trump by Party officials in Washington and around the country, he was a popular guest on CNN and MSNBC, which were always in search of a rare independent-minded Republican. Fox News booked him, too. One day, he was invited to appear on Laura Ingraham’s show, and a producer mentioned that he would be asked about Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused of making sexual advances toward minors. Costello told the producer that he opposed Moore. The subject didn’t come up on the air, and it was the last time he appeared on the network. (A representative for Fox News said that Costello wasn’t blackballed.)
While we were talking in the West Chester coffee shop, Costello looked at a news alert on his phone: Trump had refused to allow the word “hero” in a press release on the death of John McCain. “I will give you a real-time challenge,” Costello said. “Did that actually happen?” The report, from the Washington Post, was based on anonymous sources, and no one at the White House had confirmed it. “If you’re asked, ‘How do you feel about the White House doing that?,’ you can either avoid it, because you don’t know for certain. You can just say, ‘I think Senator McCain is a hero,’ and walk to your next appointment. Or do you make a point of saying, ‘The way the President has spoken about McCain in the past has been deplorable, and I think his unwillingness to reflect upon what he means to our country and what he embodies is a real lost opportunity. I’m really bothered that he’s unwilling to, like, be the better man’?”
Costello would have given reporters the harsher quote—after confirming the facts. But, he noted, any delay would have exposed him to the charge of being “another Republican dodging the tough question.” Costello went on, “I know what the argument is, I know what the rebuttal is, I know what the counter-argument is! I can go eighteen levels deep on this.”
In February, the non-stop hostility led him to abandon his Facebook page. Children in his neighborhood came up and asked him, incredulously, “You work for Trump?” He tried to teach them about the separation of powers. The political danger came from the right, but the vitriol was more personal on the left. One man from West Chester, a banker, left a series of obscene voice mails: “Mr. Costello, impeach the motherfucker, or, if you don’t have the vertebrae to do that, resign”; “You fucking asshole! Pay for the tax cuts to corporations and to the one-per-cent wealthy, and cut my benefits that I paid into the system for out of my wages? You are inhumane, other than being a fucking idiot. . . . And if I go bankrupt you’re going down with me, and your family will go down with me, too.”
In June, 2017, Costello was supposed to attend a morning baseball practice before Congress’s annual charity game, but he just missed his ride. At the ballpark, a gunman opened fire from behind the third-base dugout, critically wounding the Majority Whip, Representative Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, and several others. The shooter, who was killed by police officers, was a Bernie Sanders supporter who had become enraged with Trump and wanted to target Republican politicians. If Costello had made the practice, he would have been standing in the line of fire, at shortstop. The incident shook him deeply. He had long ago stopped seeing politics as a Rockwell painting, but now the anger and the violence seemed inescapable—even on a baseball diamond.
“It’s fucked up,” Costello said. “I think the far left and the far right look at people like me, and they say we’re the problem. And I actually think, No, we’re the answer. But what you hear and what you get is just ugliness toward you.”
There was a limit to what Costello would say—or even think. Perhaps because the nastiness directed at him came mainly from the left, he didn’t acknowledge that the most dangerous commentary came from the right, and from the top. He never suggested that Trump’s routine attacks on decency—his depictions of immigrants and Muslims as sinister invaders; his mockery of everyone from disabled reporters to sexual-assault victims—added up to something more consequential than any piece of legislation. Costello was slow to admit that Trump threatened the country’s democratic institutions and corrupted its most basic values. He never implicated his own party in this corruption, either as passive supporters or as active participants. He insisted on viewing Trump as a short-term tactical problem. If the Democrats swung too far to the left, driving suburban voters back to moderate Republicans like him, the Party could return to its center-right traditions and leave behind the freak show of the Trump Presidency. Costello worried about the Republican Party’s shrinking base, not about the state of its soul. He never talked about the judgment of history.
This willfully narrow perspective made him typical of Republican politicians. At the moment, they are the only Americans in a position to check the President’s abuses of power, and the least likely Americans to do so. It’s tempting to analyze each officeholder’s approach to the Trump era as a matter of individual character. Paul Ryan stands behind the President and shrugs off the media’s questions with his good-natured grin. Mitch McConnell says nothing and accumulates power with his cobra stare. Ted Cruz veers from insulting Trump to hugging him. Bob Corker makes statesmanlike speeches on the Senate floor—David against President Goliath—and then votes against his principles. But degrees of dissent don’t amount to much amid the structural pressures of Congress.
I asked Costello whether the House leadership strong-armed members into voting with the President. It wasn’t that simple, he said, telling me the story of the attempt to repeal Obamacare. Costello had read the bill twice, and knew it cold, and wasn’t sure that he could support it; his main concern was that it would fail to limit premium increases for people with preëxisting conditions. In March, 2017, Costello was summoned, with a dozen other wavering Republicans, to the Oval Office. The President, ill-informed and unengaged, paid little attention when Costello talked about the danger that the bill posed to essential health benefits. (Two days later, at a second White House meeting, Trump warned Charlie Dent, who had declared his opposition to the bill, “If this goes down, I’m going to blame you. It’ll be your fault—you’re going to take down tax reform and you’ll destroy the Republican Party. I’ll just be cutting ribbons and going to parades.”) Back at the House, Scalise, the Republican Whip, implored Costello, “What do you need to see done? This is an important vote.” In the end, Costello was one of twenty House Republicans who voted against repeal. He received complaints from large donors, and other members of Energy and Commerce were upset with him, but no leaders threatened or punished him. He was given a pass—with the understanding that few passes were allowed.
Dent, who would have faced a difficult campaign this year, retired in May, during his seventh term. He told me, “There used to be an understanding that the members in the reliably safe districts were expected to put up the difficult votes all the time”—that is, cast votes that might not be popular with their conservative supporters. “The members in the marginal swing districts”—like Dent’s and Costello’s—“were given a pass from time to time, because they had to, in order to survive.” But in 2010 the Tea Party movement, and the growing extremism of the conservative base, began threatening centrist Republicans with primary challenges from the right. These days, the Republican leadership has to placate the three dozen members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, who vote as a bloc and are perpetually spoiling to overthrow the Speaker if he deviates from a highly partisan orthodoxy. It’s the moderates who have to fall on their swords.
During the government shutdown in the fall of 2013, Dent begged John Boehner, then the Speaker of the House, to allow a vote on whether to end the shutdown, which was hurting Dent in his district. Boehner asked him to tough it out—he didn’t want to force members from deep-red districts, who might get challenged from the right in their next primary, to face a vote. Dent, who had to worry about the general election as well as the primary, asked, “John, why are their races more important than mine?” Within two years, Boehner was gone anyway, the victim of a mutiny by the same ultra-conservative House members he’d protected during the shutdown.
The Tuesday Group is about the same size as the Freedom Caucus, but it is far less cohesive, which allows the Republican leadership to isolate each of its members. “People like me—you can pick us off one at a time,” Costello said. “We might all be centrists, but we’re centrists for different reasons. Some might be more pro-environment, some are more pro-labor.” The Freedom Caucus holds the real power in Congress. Voting discipline, once imposed by whips and committee chairmen, is now enforced by the most extreme conservatives in the House, and by the activist base and the right-wing media, which can intimidate members of Congress with primary challenges and orchestrated attacks. The deadliest threat of all comes from the President, who ended the career of Representative Mark Sanford, a critical-minded conservative from South Carolina, with a single contemptuous tweet a few hours before the polls closed on primary night in June: “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble.” I asked Dent why more Republican members of Congress hadn’t raised their voices against Trump. “I can answer in one word,” he said. “Fear.”
This atmosphere contributed to the early retirement of not only Flake but also Bob Corker and a host of House members. The exit sign liberated them to speak out more: Corker called Trump “an utterly untruthful President.” But this freedom rarely translated into action. Costello complained to me that Democrats expect Republicans to vote against policies they’ve always favored, such as tax cuts, just to prove their political courage. He had a point—but there are other ways to hold Trump accountable. No Republican in Congress has moved to censure the President, or subpoena his tax returns, or investigate his conflicts of interest.
A lone member of the House has little power, but in the Senate, which is almost evenly divided between the parties, the opposite is true. Norman Ornstein, the political scientist and congressional analyst, pointed out that individuals like Flake, Corker, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski hold immense clout. Just two senators could inform McConnell that they wouldn’t vote to confirm any judges until he brought to the Senate floor a bill shielding Mueller’s investigation from White House sabotage—and McConnell would have to bring the bill. Despite having this leverage, Ornstein said, “not one of them has used it for anything.” Even senators on their way out “don’t change their behavior at all.”
Ornstein often finds himself thinking about the last scene in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when James Stewart collapses on the floor of the Senate at the end of an exhausting filibuster against a corrupt senator. Claude Rains, the target of Stewart’s speech, suddenly cries out, “Every word that that boy said is the truth! . . . I am not fit for office! I am not fit for any place of honor or trust! Expel me, not that boy!”
“Will there be a Claude Rains?” Ornstein asked. “Not likely.”
If party discipline and political self-interest don’t fully explain the behavior of the congressional majority, something else must—tribal cohesion, fear of being shunned. Costello refused to quote Republican colleagues by name to me, or to say a bad word about any of them. Although he was appalled by right-wing attacks on the intelligence agencies and on the Mueller investigation, when I asked him about the chief conspiracy-monger—Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has lobbed wild accusations about an F.B.I. plot to destroy Trump—Costello said that he didn’t know enough about Nunes’s claims to assess their validity. He simply said, “I know Devin, I like Devin.” Meanwhile, he sharply criticized such Democrats as Senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand for “prejudging” the guilt of Brett Kavanaugh before Christine Blasey Ford had even testified.
A long time ago, there was a certain honor in taking a tough stand against your party. In the late seventies, when Senator Howard Baker, the Republican Minority Leader, supported the Panama Canal treaty and thereby doomed his Presidential hopes for 1980, even his bitterest opponents respected him. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was admired as a figure of intellectual integrity even though he defied Democratic orthodoxy by treating the rise of single parenthood in black families as a social ill.
Only a handful of congressional Republicans have dared to go as far as Costello has in criticizing Trump. Most don’t even seem troubled by the President. Senator Lindsey Graham, who once called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic” bigot, is now championing the President’s effort to deny citizenship to babies born to undocumented immigrants in the U.S. “Now Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you?” Lynyrd Skynyrd sang. “Tell the truth.”
Politicians operating under the constraints of ambition and ideology have limited room to take on their own party, short of committing some ritual act of career suicide. Writers and intellectuals have more latitude, especially when they don’t belong to institutions that require them to raise money from partisan donors. No group has been more scathing about Trump and the Republican Party than the conservative columnists known as Never Trumpers. They write with the fury of the betrayed and with a clarity that goes beyond issue debates to the heart of the matter: the corruption of democracy. Many of them have called for a crushing Republican defeat in the midterms as the beginning of any path back to decency. Some have stopped being Republicans, and a few—such as Max Boot, the author of the new book “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right”—are no longer really even conservatives.
George F. Will, Ronald Reagan’s favorite pundit, left the Party and became an unaffiliated Maryland voter on June 3, 2016, the day after Paul Ryan endorsed Trump. “Paul is a friend and a happy, cheerful, intelligent, non-angry guy,” Will said. “That was the evidence that Trump was going to be normalized.” Ryan’s conversion was a watershed for those Never Trumpers who had seen him as the principled, blue-eyed hope of the Party. “It’s so awful to watch him drawn into this,” Will said. “For example, they’d do some silly thing in Congress like produce a bill, and they’d go down to the White House and be in the Rose Garden, and Trump would say some nonsensical things and praise Paul, and Paul would be grinning. He didn’t have to do that. He could have kept a distance.”
Will despises Trump and his Republican enablers for not being truly conservative—for exploding deficits, imposing tariffs, and betraying the separation of powers. As a Madisonian, he recoils at the sight of the legislature acting like the President’s bench. “The first branch of government is first for a reason,” he said. As a mandarin, he was appalled when Trump declared that judges sign bills. This past June, Will wrote a column calling for the defeat of congressional Republicans in November. “When there’s no penalty for failure, failure proliferates,” he told me. “And, when there’s no penalty for recklessness, recklessness proliferates. Therefore, one of the many reasons that I don’t want Donald Trump impeached is I want the experience of him to be not only unpleasant but also protracted, so that the country, and particularly the Republican Party, says, ‘Let’s really not do this again.’ ”
Will takes an Olympian view of contemporary politics. From his remove, the issues that roil Americans today—immigration, abortion, police brutality, global warming—appear to be minor disputes whipped up by citizens addicted to a state of chronic political unhappiness. He believes that there is an inverse relation between intensity and substance. “Tribalism fills a void of actual politics,” he said. “I was born before the middle of a century in which we argued about whether Jews should be killed, whether there should be private property. We had big differences, and we fought ’em out in political parties and in the streets of Berlin and in marches on Rome. Politics was dangerous.” Naming two Midwestern senators of opposite parties, he asked, “What really separates John Thune from Amy Klobuchar? They have differences about how the government should be involved in health care.”
If you take a few steps toward ground level, the Republic starts to look a lot scarier. Thune and Klobuchar may have a technocratic disagreement over Obamacare, but the President is an ally of racists and authoritarians and thugs. The argument over the morality of killing Jews might have been settled, but they are still being killed—and anti-Semitic rhetoric has been embraced by some of Trump’s strongest supporters. I asked Will why the Republican Party had descended into a hateful form of populism. His answer, based on class—that conservatives had told themselves, “The left has academia, the left has the media, the left has entertainment . . . so we’ll be the base of the pyramid and we’ll define ourselves against the top”—didn’t seem adequate. The right has long considered itself a movement of ideas rather than of special interests, with its own thinkers and media figures, and for most of my adult life conservative leaders have dominated politics and business, where real power lies. Many of these people are now fellow-travellers of Trump.
Michael Gerson, President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter, is another Never Trumper who wants the Republicans to lose in the midterms. An evangelical who has worked for many years in the vineyards of Washington conservatism, he watched in dismay as other conservative Christians took Trump as a hero. Trump appealed to their sense of victimization by élites, Gerson told me, while encouraging their latent bigotries. Gerson’s Washington Post columns on the degradation of his party have the moral outrage of powerful sermons. In one, he declared, “With no exception I can think of, the results of becoming a darling of the king have been damaging to the church. Politicians always end up demanding something—a compromise of principle, a blessing of expediency or a pardon for wrong. Access and privilege in politics are not free. The point is demonstrated when a pastor praises a president during the same week that thousands of detained migrant children are moved, under cover of night, to a remote detention facility.”
Trump’s supporters in office show their loyalty by lying for him, Gerson told me, and they will bear an indelible stain. He added, “When I talk about that stain, I think, to be brutally honest, Paul Ryan has it, because of the compromises he made, and the silences.” But Gerson stops a few paces short of repudiating the Party. Like Costello, he describes its descent as a recent phenomenon that could soon be reversed. “When you’re in a political moment, it looks permanent, but it’s not permanent,” he said. “Things can change massively in a short period of time.” He wanted Republicans to lose the House but not the Senate—“because I’m a conservative, and I want judicial nominees to pass the Senate.” Gerson had worked closely with Brett Kavanaugh in the Bush White House, admired him greatly, and strongly supported his appointment to the Supreme Court—until Ford’s testimony, and the President’s subsequent mockery of her, forced him to reconsider. Gerson wrote of Trump, “It is impossible to take his side without the slime rubbing off.” Even the nomination process had become a Trumpian spectacle.
I wondered if the Party could truly be healed by outpatient laser surgery rather than by amputation. Wasn’t McConnell’s tactic of blocking Judge Merrick Garland from the Supreme Court the same calculation of power at any cost that led Paul Ryan to submit to Trump? It didn’t seem possible to cordon off the Senate, where the silence is almost as deafening as in the House, as a safe place for Republicans to regenerate a healthy party. “Parties do not change when they’re winning,” Gerson admitted.
Flake’s book “Conscience of a Conservative” goes further. It traces the Party’s corruption back to Newt Gingrich and his lieutenants, and then chronicles the dark rise of Trump. Flake sees the collapse in terms of failures of character on the part of Republican leaders: in the nineties, Gingrich brought the politics of total war to Washington, while Tom DeLay, of Texas, infected the Party with partisan corruption. Flake wants to rescue conservatism from Trumpism and purify it. He can’t grasp that the modern conservative movement always carried the seeds of its own destruction.
Its extremism goes straight back to Flake’s hero, Senator Barry Goldwater, who saw mainstream liberals as subversive socialists and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’-rights grounds. In that year’s Presidential election, Goldwater received potent support from the best-selling writers Phyllis Schlafly, whose book “A Choice Not an Echo” imagined cabals of liberal Republicans plotting against the Party’s base, and John Stormer, who, in “None Dare Call It Treason,” warned that pro-Communist élites were infesting American institutions. Reagan’s famous half-hour commercial for Goldwater described the welfare state as the path to totalitarianism. Apocalyptic thinking, conspiracy theories, and bigotry haunted the movement from the start.
The right came to political power under Richard Nixon and Reagan in part by using coded language to appeal to white prejudices. As President, Reagan subdued his own extremism, but, no matter how Republicans governed, every four years they found new ways—from the Southern strategy to welfare queens to Willie Horton—to divide the right kind of Americans from the wrong kind. When Reagan left office and the Cold War ended, conservatism lost its best spokesman and its organizing principle. The movement’s subsequent leaders—Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz—pursued power, celebrity, and their enemies on the left without a trace of Reagan’s optimistic gloss or William F. Buckley’s intellectual dash. They pushed conspiracy theories into the mainstream. They kept raising the bar of viciousness.
As Republican moderates disappeared, the Party moved farther rightward and farther downward. (George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was barely a detour.) The movement’s hostility to government encouraged a destructive approach to governing. Its attacks on institutions nourished violent resentments. Its electoral strategy relied on increasingly open bigotry. The agenda of power at any price gave conservatism a cynical, even nihilistic strain—Goldwater and Reagan were honest zealots by comparison—but the essential ingredients had been there all along. Max Boot, in his book, makes the point unflinchingly: “Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the whole history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, isolationism, and know-nothingism. Even those who were not guilty of these sins too often ignored them in the name of unity on the right.” Trump is the movement’s darkest realization, not its betrayal.
The Never Trumpers are a powerful voice in American politics—they have the authority of apostasy—but they’re shunned by conservative media and donors, and they have few friends in Congress. “There’s enough of us for a dinner party, not a political party,” Boot has said. The Never Trumpers are scarcely more welcomed by the left, which prefers arraigning them on old counts to recruiting them as allies. They’re stranded in the no man’s land of our polarized politics—the middle, where millions of voters have no voice on cable news. Many Never Trumpers, tired of being homeless, will eventually join the Democrats, migrating in the opposite direction of the neoconservatives of the seventies and eighties. Boot, for his part, has abandoned any hope of cleansing the Party from within. He wants it burned to the ground.
I asked Costello if the Never Trumpers’ jeremiads had swayed any congressional Republicans. He shrugged and said, “Most people are looking at that and calling them sellouts.”
In January, the Democratic majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state’s congressional map had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, who controlled two-thirds of the districts, in spite of the fact that they usually lost the statewide popular vote. Costello’s district, drawn with elaborate carve-outs of Democratic towns and neighborhoods, looked like a boomerang with jagged edges. The court gave the Republican legislature and the Democratic governor three weeks to agree on a replacement map; when, unsurprisingly, they couldn’t, the justices took on the task themselves, creating more compact districts that reflect jurisdictional lines and natural communities. Republicans will inevitably lose seats in Pennsylvania this month, and the most endangered one is Costello’s. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won his district by a one-per-cent margin; in the new district, her margin would have been nine per cent.
Costello knew that the old map was heavily gerrymandered, but the rushed process struck him as blatantly partisan. He was so angry that he urged the state legislature to impeach four Democratic justices. For a play-by-the-rules guy, this reaction was surprising—it resembled the scorched-earth politics he generally derides.
The legislature didn’t take up Costello’s proposal, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the decision. Costello, rather than face likely defeat, announced on March 25th that he would retire from Congress, at the age of forty-two, after just two terms.
Most of the protests at his office stopped. The abuse directed at his official Twitter account diminished. He had avoided using a personal Twitter account, for fear of saying something that would get him into trouble, but now he started one, and the experience was liberating. Tweeting allowed him to sound like himself—spontaneous, wry, occasionally indignant: “If ur more toward the middle (albeit middle right) trying to make sense of things, govern pragmatically but w principle, & reserve judgment until u hear all the facts and understand all the angles, many will say u lack courage & are a coward. So I got that goin for me.” If you color-coded Costello’s tweets by partisan orientation, there would be more red than blue, but not by a lot, and many tweets were just observations about the passing political scene, with an eye to the ridiculous. He continued to appear regularly on cable news, and his shots at the President became less qualified, more thoroughgoing. After Trump’s press conference with Putin, Costello spoke boldly on CNN: “You could say it’s embarrassing, but I don’t think it does sufficient justice. It undermines our moral authority.”
A few weeks ago, I spent a day with Costello on Capitol Hill. It happened to be the day of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That morning, Costello met with a group of American and foreign college students who were spending the semester in Washington. “If you’re in the hot ten per cent on the left or the hot ten per cent on the right, you have a national audience,” he told the students. “If you’re in the middle and can see both sides, you know what? You used to get called thoughtful—now you get called weak. And that’s messed up, man. We need people to think for themselves.” In the afternoon, he voted for a new tax-cut bill. He didn’t like it—he thought that it would hurt Republicans in swing districts—but he bowed to the Party leadership’s imperative to keep the base energized for the midterms.
As we spoke in his office, he kept glancing at his TV. He told me that the drama on the other side of the Capitol was “consuming” him. It disturbed him that many Americans, guided by their partisan stripe, had already decided between the two witnesses. “If the judge were a Democrat and the woman a Republican, how many would change their view?” he said. “That ought to worry all of us.” He also worried about his four-year-old son, whose life might be ruined by a false accusation, or even a true one, and about his one-year-old daughter, who might one day be a disbelieved victim. It all went much deeper than party politics, he said.
Senator Lindsey Graham came on the screen, and Costello unmuted the sound. Graham was telling the cameras, “All I can say is that we’re forty-something days away from the election. Their goal—not Ms. Ford’s goal—is to lay this past the midterms so they can win the Senate—”
“Correct,” Costello said.
“—and never allow Trump to fill this seat.”
It jolted me a little to hear Costello echoing Graham. A minute before, he’d been anguishing about his children and candidly analyzing his own bias as a man. But there was no more time to dwell on human complexities. Ford had just testified, Kavanaugh was about to appear, and the tribes were already gathering in their camps. He had to find somewhere to stand.
Costello felt that the sober old way of building a political career—local office, national office, committee assignments, policy expertise, significant legislation—was obsolete. Under Trump, a member of Congress acquired power by saying things that grabbed people’s attention. “Shock value really sells, and I think defending the President at all costs—you can fast-track yourself on the Republican side if you do that,” he said. “On the Democratic side, if you can say things that are mean and funny at the same time, you can get yourself on a fast track really quick, in terms of building a national profile.” In the House, Republicans like Matt Gaetz, who defended Trump’s “shithole” remark by claiming that “everywhere you look in Haiti it’s sheet metal and garbage,” and Democrats like Ted Lieu, who insinuated on Twitter that a Republican operative who had committed suicide might have been murdered to thwart the Mueller investigation, were following the same sensationalistic script. A colleague from either party who was friendly and reasonable in private could go on cable TV or Twitter and sound rabid.
Costello didn’t seem like a natural politician for the new era, but he was trying to adapt. He would remain on Twitter and keep showing up on news programs, he said, because “without moderate Republican voices, I believe, there’s the possibility we entirely lose the next generation of Republicans.” He didn’t yet know exactly what he would do next—perhaps join a think tank or an advocacy group and work on climate change—but he did know that he wanted to bring his party back toward the center. Costello would be unlikely to join the Democratic Party—it wanted too much government control over the economy. He hoped to help build a Republican Party “that has an immigration policy that’s pro-growth; that has a humane perspective on immigration and on low-income children and workers; that recognizes technology can be part of the solution, though you can’t allow Big Tech to run rampant; that has a conservation and environmental agenda; and that looks at community safety beyond the lens of law and order.” Despite his frustrations in Washington, he had loved being a member of Congress, the give-and-take of town halls, the intricacies of public policy. It was hard to imagine that he’d never run for anything again. Doing the people’s business was still a noble calling.
Gerson compares this period to the McCarthy and civil-rights eras: people in public life, he said, will be forever judged by their conduct in response to Trump. Flake expects few of his Republican colleagues in Congress to emerge unscathed. The “unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication,” he writes in his book, “and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.” The silence began as the calculated reserve of politicians who believed that they could use the President for their own ends. It later became the habitual muteness of the acquiescent.
And silence requires no effort at all once the reasons to speak up—truth, independence of mind, common decency—no longer mean anything. Then instilling fear isn’t even necessary. In “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s novel about the Moscow trials of the nineteen-thirties, the old Bolsheviks who confess to imaginary crimes against the Party do so not because of torture. “The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party,” Koestler wrote. “They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them.” ♦
