Riding the Tiger

An interesting review of a sociological study, Never Trump, in an interesting place.

 “To buy into Trump,” he says, “you have to believe that the essence of what the Republican Party stood for—personal responsibility, embracing of legal immigration, character counts, strong on Russia—you have to believe that all of that was just a marketing slogan and it didn’t mean anything—any more than ‘We say, “Chevrolet’s the heartbeat of America.”’”

Is it too cynical of me to say those were just marketing slogans, and the "essence" of the Republican Party since Goldwater fell to LBJ has been "Blow you, Jack!  I got mine!"

Saldin and Teles highlight how shocking 2016 was for conservative elites. As traditional candidates like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush competed for high-information voters, Trump swept up low-information voters, securing the nomination over “Against Trump” finger-wagging. This isn’t just a problem for moderate Republicans and aging neocons, Saldin and Teles warn. A body of literature suggests that by restraining and marginalizing extremists on their own side, right-wing elites are essential to sustaining democracies.

The only shocking part to the "party elites" should have been that the proletariat had taken their propaganda seriously.  I mean, I like some of what Rick Wilson has to say, but the guy worked for Dick Cheney!  Did he really think what Cheney championed wouldn't be read as racist, xenophobic, and so anti-government Trump has proceeded to disassemble government from the inside?  That was as plain as sunrise.  Of course, even Cheney's daughter seems somewhat surprised at what has been wrought, but what's the old adage?  Oh, yeah:  "Be careful what you wish for.  You might get it."

In that, the GOP has been remarkably successful.  And now the Lincoln Project wants to take on Mitch McConnell?

Which of these Trump enablers should we focus on next?

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 20, 2020

Where have they been for the last 30 years?  What have they been paying attention to?  That Obama was a Democrat?  That he was black?  That Clinton didn't want to talk about having an affair with an office staff member?

Many of the organizational efforts described in Never Trump are symbolic: letters, meetings, hashtags. Throughout, the Republican elites seem shellshocked, waiting for the world to return to its regular axis. Attempts to stymie Trump politically came largely, though fruitlessly, from party operatives.

Gee, it's like they never really had any power.  Maybe they just thought they were in control, huh?  Did they even realize they were riding a tiger?  Do they realize now the tiger has eaten them?  And the problem with the day of reckoning is always, that you find yourself before the seat of judgment.  It indeed a day of darkness, not light:

As evident from Michael Anton’s infamous “Flight 93” article, apocalyptic thinking came to define Trump’s active supporters among conservatives. But apocalypticism, and its driving forces polarization and negative partisanship, have been central to the movement conservative project since its inception. The foundational conservative thinker James Burnham pathologized liberalism as a syndrome of Western suicide; National Review’s longtime publisher William Rusher actively worked to redefine the GOP on ideologically polarized lines; Barry Goldwater rallied conservatives against John F. Kennedy by warning “we are facing Democrat candidates and a Democrat platform that signify a new type of New Deal, far more menacing than anything we have seen in the past.”

Animosity towards the "other," in other words, is basic to the conservative project.  And you don't get to decide who that "other" is.  Animosity is a shotgun, not a rifle.  It sprays everywhere.

The conservative movement’s vaunted history of policing its ideological borders is much more complicated than the way many conservative writers and thinkers remember it. Take perhaps the most famous example, William F. Buckley’s kicking of the John Birch Society out of the movement. In fact, while Buckley was distressed by the Birchers, he vacillated and only took decisive action after the 1964 LBJ landslide—five years after first registering his discomfort with the organization while at the same time carrying water for the Southern Strategy. Before the John Birch Society, Buckley took up anti-anti-Joseph McCarthy positions and dallied in responding to the anti-Semitic American Mercury.

Buckley was a racist; he just wasn't as racist as the KKK.  Back in the day, we would say he was "prejudiced," but not "racist."  It's a difference without a distinction.

Contemporary Never Trumpers are only just beginning to reflect on the extent to which they participated in the demonization of liberals, worked within a party that invited proto-Trump Pat Buchanan to address its convention in 1992, and justified, ignored, or spit-shined the arguments of many who flocked to Trump—or, like Michelle Malkin, even worse extremes. As Saldin and Teles put it, “the enthusiastic response that Trump’s cruelty, racism, and misogyny generated in a large part of the party base lent support to charges that those inclinations were in fact baked into the party’s DNA.” They note that “many Never Trumpers had minimized” these characteristics of the conservative movement, “or insisted [they] were outdated or flat-out wrong.”

Maybe I should have said Trump is their "road to Damascus" moment; but I don't think it is.  So long as they blame Trump, they needn't take responsibility themselves.  Interesting how Trump's extreme example should, could be making us all examine our own responsibility and denial of same.  Interesting how it never quite works that way.  Self-examination is hard!  Too hard, in fact.

For example, David Brooks complains about conservative media personalities Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham and their breakthrough at the Dartmouth Review, a student newspaper. “Even in those days,” Brooks tells the authors, “they were much more confrontational, much more anti-left, much more shock the bourgeoisie, and that turns out to have been a significant difference.” Yet both were mentored by National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart, in whose living room the paper was founded and whose sensibility they inherited. And both were once taken seriously as intellectuals. D’Souza’s movement pedigree is outstanding. After Dartmouth, he worked in the Reagan administration, held a fellowship at the Hoover Institution, and was contributing editor to Policy Review when it was published by the Heritage Foundation. Even now, he is still on National Review’s masthead. In other words, conservative intellectuals and institutions have been too willing to work with and defend questionable actors until they become a public relations liability—and in some cases after. (For its part, the Weekly Standard criticized D’Souza as early as 1995, in its second issue, but went on to publish him six times between 1997 and 2002; in later years, though, it was frequently critical of D’Souza, through to its final issues.)

Tl:dr:  William Buckley didn't really mind the Birchers until the extremism of Goldwater was snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.  History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

But as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1950, “a responsible liberal . . . would rather have a healthy and intelligent conservative party, which might even win an election now and then, than a dull and hopeless conservative party, threatening at any moment to break into pieces and leave its members prey for fascist-minded demagogues.” “There is no guarantee,” he also remarked, “that any new party which rises in its place will have a basic respect for constitutional processes and public order.” In this case, the demagogues eviscerated the elites.

I agree with Schlesinger's sentiment, but I don't think the demagogues eviscerated the elites.  I think the demagogues proved democracy is what the Greeks feared it would be, and that the elites never really had any power in the first place.  Especially since this analysis resolutely refuses to call Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Mark Levin (which it name-checks) "elites."  I don't honestly see why they aren't, in this scenario.

But it’s unclear what exactly Never Trump is. Like the Whigs of old, it has formed first in opposition to a larger-than-life figure and fading older allegiances. Is it a commitment to small-L American liberalism and constitutional arrangements? Or an ideological critique of Trumpism? An antipathy to the man? A commitment to small government and free market nostrums? The personal nature of Never Trump means all of the above apply to individuals.

Without a serious reckoning with conservatism’s sins and blind spots, the great temptation of Never Trump will be to reconcile with Trump’s enablers when the Democrats inevitably retake the White House. It is by no means guaranteed, but it is quite plausible there will be a rapprochement on the right united in opposition to Joe Biden or whoever is the next Democrat to sit in the Oval Office, especially once Trump leaves the political scene. A sincere reflection on the dark sides of conservatism—including those that some Never Trumpers failed to counter, or even facilitated—is necessary to salvage the American right from Trump so it can perform the vital democratic task of keeping the monsters at bay.

If the GOP is only about Trump, what does it do when he leaves the stage, probably tossed out unceremoniously in January, 2021?  Is there a GOP to salvage?  And "serious reckoning"?  Without a public Truth and Reconciliation Committee, how does that happen?  And what real good did that do South Africa?  Did they become the city on the hill to which all nations are drawn to learn from their example?  "A sincere reflection on the dark side" of conservatism, liberalism, capitalism, American social order is distinctly and definitely needed; but the closest we got to it was listening to a Baptist preacher named King.  And we shot him, before we turned our back on him because of the War.

What should happen is dramatic change, a revolution in thought, even.  But be careful what you wish for....