Andrew Walker: Coalitions and character

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The recent texting scandal among young Republicans and their embrace of antisemites is a warning that conservatism is at risk. WORLD Opinions managing editor Andrew Walker says it’s time to ask who’s actually a conservative, and what moral boundaries remain.

ANDREW WALKER: Some on the Right insist conservatives always lose because we’re not united like the Left. We impose purity tests, while progressives form a single power bloc. Hence the rallying cry: “No Enemies to the Right” (NETTR).

The slogan traces to the political theology of Carl Schmitt, who reduced politics to a friend–enemy distinction. Schmitt saw politics as the act of identifying those who threaten one’s way of life and rallying with those who share a common foe.

Today, “No Enemies to the Right” captures a mood. It says if we really want to win, stop clearing our throats and stop policing our side. It’s war, after all—and in wartime, niceties must yield to victory.

That mindset is a mistake. It’s incompatible with the Bible’s moral realism and corrosive to the conservative soul. I also don’t think it’s a sound political strategy. The NETTR principle will only serve to sully the conservative conscience and divide the coalition by perpetually re-negotiating the boundaries of who is in and who is out. Imitating the left’s willingness to invite radicals into its coalition partly explains why progressivism is suffering historic levels of unpopularity.

Conservatives must care about the moral and intellectual character of our coalition. We do not care because we crave the left’s approval for chasing liberal plaudits is a fool’s errand. We also shouldn’t care because we enjoy tone-policing. We care because the health of our movement depends on the moral quality of those who represent it. Conservatism, at its best, rests on two pillars: truth and virtue. Truth gives order its compass. Virtue gives self-government its guardians. A people fit for liberty must also be a people of character.

A movement that embraces “by any means necessary” may win a battle but will lose its soul. Such tactics define progressivism; they must never define conservatism. The trouble with No Enemies to the Right is that it lacks a limiting principle. Once adopted, nothing is off the table—neither in who we include nor in what we justify.

This is the opposite of Christian ethics, which rejects unprincipled pragmatism in favor of principled outcomes—even when those outcomes are difficult. Thank God that Scripture is our North Star, not the shifting winds of fallen man.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. We don’t always need to publicly denounce every misstep or person. Private, relational correction is proper. But we must be vigilant about who’s on the team. There must be a moral line somewhere. We cannot police the behavior of every member of our coalition, but we must uphold moral expectations and ensure that certain ideas are unacceptable. Anything less and we’ve become the moral revolutionaries we believed ourselves incapable of becoming.

This is where the “Christian” in Christian conservative takes priority. Before we are Christian conservatives, we must be conservative Christians. We take Scripture seriously—so seriously that we see it as the inerrant, authoritative, all-sufficient guide for everything, including the morality that governs our political life.

It doesn’t bow to worldly categories of gender, race, class, or party. It speaks over them all. Sola Scriptura means precisely this: Scripture alone is supreme. Not our identities, not our experiences, not our political loyalties. God’s Word judges all human words—and never the other way around.

When we let cultural identity or political tribe dictate our theology—when we decide what to affirm or avoid based on allegiance—we’ve already abandoned Sola Scriptura. We have enthroned culture and politics where Christ should reign.

The left remains an existential threat—but so does a right that abandons its moral guardrails. Together, they’ll burn civilization down in a blaze of mutually assured destruction.

I’m Andrew Walker.

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