Who Really Inhabits This Narrow Sliver?

There might be more of us than we think.

It’s lonely where we stand. Signals that we’re irrelevant come from all corners. We’ve coined terms for our place within the landscape. Jonah Goldberg calls us The Remnant, and has named his Dispatch podcast thusly. I’ve heard it referred to as the wilderness. My own articulation is the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. That suggests steep falloffs on either side.

So who is really standing on it, and not just some piece of semi-solid ground nearby that seems similar?

I see a lot of social media observations along the lines of how Republicans would be blowing the doors off the Harris-Walz ticket if they’d nominated DeSantis or Haley. 

Okay. 

Haley was a credible center-right governor, and, for my money, she was an excellent UN ambassador, consistently standing up for Israel and the overall alliance that the US leads.

But her pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago weeks after January 6, and now her expressed willingness to be of service to the Trump-Vance campaign, after having been called “birdbrain” during her own primary run, is a deal breaker. She contributes to a pattern initiated by Ted Cruz, who, in the spring of 2016, waxed indignant about the Very Stable Genius’s insult of his wife and slander of his father. Any politician willing to overlook such humiliation in the name of dragging the Republican brand over the finish line demonstrates judgment too faulty for Terrain voters.

DeSantis? I don’t begrudge his wading into the culture wars, but he did so in the most boneheaded way possible. His decision to address Moms for Liberty - a group whose initial motivation was laudable, but has rendered itself questionable, with sex tapes and assault allegations surrounding its leadership - at an event co-moderated by Kevin Roberts, head of the once-indispensable-but-now-disgraced Heritage Foundation is the most recent example. His campaigning for Kari Lake is an earlier example. And while Anthony Fauci has been proven to have gone overboard with a top-down approach to COVID, DeSantis saying he’d like to “grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac” further coarsened our national discourse.

This is not to dismiss his impressive resume: Juris Doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School, legal advisor to SEAL Team One, seat in the US House. He’s clearly a sharp guy.

And there’s even a place for combativeness. Buckley and even the affable Ronald Reagan could be scrappy. But therein lies an important point. Polemic combat, for a conservative, ought to suggest a hint of willingness to extend grace. Is not a society in which all are pleased to live in a Madisonian republic our aim? Stomping our opponents into the dust not only works counter to that, it’s not possible to do permanently.

As gets noted frequently here at The Freemen News-letter, and appropriately so, Principles First and The Bulwark don’t stand on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. That camp uses the inversion of the Flight 93 binary-choice argument Trumpists employed in 2016 and 2020 to impart a sense of urgency about the state of our country. We didn’t buy it from them, and we shouldn’t buy it from these entities, or even those such as Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, whose bona fides we know to be impeccable, but have reached a different conclusion about how to proceed. 

The we-can-survive-four-years-of-bad-policy argument is specious. It’s sometimes augmented by the mention of a good chance that Republicans could take the Senate, thereby serving as a foil to progressive machinations. 

But consider the indications we’ve already gotten as to Harris’s intention to do as much though the executive branch as possible - continuing a trend that has been accelerating through several presidencies - to complete the program of militant identity politics, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution.

So here we stand. Yes, it’s lonely.

But I daresay we’re seeing evidence that there are more of us than we’re told there are. Both of these tickets are extremely unpopular. Americans are generally concerned about the raw nature of not only our political discourse, but of our interactions generally. How long has the term “road rage” been part of our lexicon? Why is the Columbia University campus not safe for Jews? How did The Chicks, whose career derailed after dissing the US president on foreign soil in 2003, while the nation was at war, or John Legend, who had the temerity to rework the delightful Christmas season pop song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to express solidarity with feminists (“your body, your choice”), become darlings of the Democrats? How did Kid Rock, Amber Rose and Hulk Hogan become darlings of the Republicans?

One more important point: Pointing out our rightful citizenship on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain is not cause for puffing ourselves up. Conservatism has rightly been described as having a tragic element. It acknowledges that we are fallen creatures. Hence this necessity to extend grace. It’s also a Madisonian point. He designed our Constitutional order with the understanding that factions would arise if the federal government weren’t designed to hold them at bay.

So there’s reason for pessimism. We don’t have the resources to convince a critical mass of voters to stay home in November, meaning that one ticket of the other will prevail. 

But there’s also a ray of sunlight shining on our little piece of the planet. We are not wrong. Our vision is a prescription for a workable America. We haven’t wavered in embracing it.

And consequently, we sleep pretty well at night.

Barney Quick is an Adjunct Professor teaching Jazz and Rock & Roll History at Indiana University Columbus. He received his Bachelor’s degree in English and Literature from Wabash College and his Master’s degree in History from Butler University. @Penandguitar