Unless you actually have a life, you may be aware of a “struggle” going on now for the “soul”, loosely speaking, of the Republican Party. In one corner you have Brink “Mr. Nice Guy” Lindsey, arguing in National Affairs for “Republicanism for Republicans” and in the other Tucker “Bow Tie/Blue Collar” Carlson, who moans that “We Are Ruled By Mercenaries Who Feel No Long-Term Obligation To The People They Rule”.
I think I’ve read some articles by Mr. Lindsey that I’ve liked, but his latest is not his greatest, as long as it is insipid and as insipid as it is long, basically a plea to return to the days of moderate Republicanism, of well-born Republicanism, the sort that used to prevail along the East Coast, the yachting clubs in particular, back in the days when there actually were Republicans in that part of the country—“Bar Harbor Republicans”, I believe they were called.
My question for Mr. Lindsey is this. Have you looked at the Republican Party recently? Have you noticed that not one Republican senator, not one, has dared to join the Democrats on a single issue, the government shutdown in particular, since the demise of Paul Ryan’s wretched assault on the Affordable Care Act in the first days of the Trump Administration?1 Once-legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell, of whom Mr. Lindsey has quite possibly never heard, once said of boxing, “You can’t clean up boxing. You can’t clean up mud.” The same is true of the Republican Party.
Mr. Carlson’s case is a bit different, because he likes mud. Mr. Carlson has discovered that rich people are bad people. My question for him is, where were you when Donald Trump was running up trillion-dollar deficits so he could give tax cuts to billionaires? Didn’t Donald Trump run for president promising to stick it to those bastards at Goldman-Sachs? And then didn’t he turn over the keys to the U. S. Treasury to, you know, Goldman-Sachs? Trump is simply the apotheosis of the Tea Party, which railed against the “big shots” until they took office, at which time they became completely obsequious to Wall Street’s rule. Mr. Carlson’s vaporing, which has some definite “blood and soil” undertones, as well as his explicit lack of respect for rich people, entirely verbal though it was, has led to some hand-wringing on the part of right-thinking, hand-wringing right-wingers like David French and Ben Shapiro, both at the National Review, though, again, I think the errand boys of the rich, like Mr. French and Mr. Shapiro, are more distressed than the rich themselves, who are still savoring their tax cuts.
There are some semi-Republicans whom I semi-respect, some of the time, like Mr. French, yet even the best of them tend to instinctively cling to the “take him seriously, not literally” meme when attempting to come to grips with Herr Donald’s latest effusion, an approach they never seem to advocate for comprehending Maxine Waters. For coming to grips honestly with the debacle of Donald Trump means coming to grips with the ongoing debacle the Republican Party has been ever since the end of the Cold War, when the party lost both its purpose and its “soul”. Ever since Robert Dole surrendered control of the party to Newt Gingrich after the 1994 election, the party has been, really, out of control, priding itself on its unscrupulousness as an end in itself, something I have written about any number of times. To reject Donald Trump, Republicans must reject their former selves.
Afterwords
The Weekly Standard, whose demise I did not much mourn, has more or less been reborn as an explicitly anti-Trump site, the “Bulwark”, whose motto is “Conservatism Conserved”. The site’s ragging on Trump himself is excellent, but when it comes to self analysis, the efforts—one of them, at least—fall short. Mona Charon, in her article, “The Tired Argument That Never Trumpers Are to Blame for Trump“, inadvertently explains why NeverTrumpers are responsible for Trump (in part). For example, she congratulates NeverTrumper Sen. Jeff Flake on his “admirable honesty” for admitting, a mere decade after the fact, that he voted against TARP to maintain his libertarian, anti-big government credentials while secretly hoping it would pass. Yes, that was brave, wasn’t it? Telling his constituents that big government was “bad” even though he knew it was necessary, lying to them so that they wouldn’t vote against him, riding the “Tea Party” wave even though he knew its policies would have been disastrous if they had actually been put into practice at the time of the stock market’s collapse in 2007.
Similarly, she praises Charlie Sykes, editor in chief of the Bulwark, for admitting in his book How the Right Lost Its Mind, which I reviewed unfavorably here, that good Republicans like himself “ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers, and other conspiracy theorists” in the party. What Sykes meant was that he and his friends ignored the fact that “the birthers, the racists, the truthers, and other conspiracy theorists” were the party and had been for years, and that, furthermore, all the fancy Republicans, like William F. Buckley, and William Kristol, and George F. Will, had been feeding and fueling their resentments, fantasies, and fears for decades, all to maintain their hold on power, culminating, of course, in multiple wars abroad, all of them utterly disastrous and utterly unnecessary, wars that have made the U.S., the Middle East, and Europe all less safe than they had been before. And about this they all continue to lie.
1. Three Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Cory Gardner, want Congress to fund the government while continuing to negotiate over funding for a border "wall". The rest are silent.
