Anyone so bored and so feckless as to search for all the things I’ve said about Kevin D. Williamson would think that I do little with my time other than construct labored invective at Kevie D.’s expense, including such tasteless jibes as “Hey, Kevin D. Williamson! You’re a total idiot!” and “Kevin D. Williamson, last seen frothing, and lying, wildly”.
Well, Kevie, quite sportingly, has decided to return good for evil, turning in a stunningly intelligent piece, “No, Weld can’t beat Trump. But he’s the only way real conservatives can dissent.” in today’s Washington Post, which you should read, and which I might summarize, perhaps a bit too pithily for Kevin's taste, thusly: while the damage Trump can do the country is perhaps limited (so far), the damage he is doing to the Republican Party is not.
Kevin was recently thrust into the news in one of those now-standard brew-ha-has1 so prevalent in our times—a “conservative” writer is hired by a “liberal” publication, to the rage and horror of the Twitterati, or at least one portion of it, and the hire is then ignominiously retracted, stimulating a redoubled orgy of tongue-clucking on all sides, rather as if one had heaved a succession of rocks into a rookery of grackles, if such things exist. I didn’t feel very sorry for Kevie at the time, snickering that, with his shaven head and bristling black beard, he resembled more a bouncer at the Ramrod than a right-wing savant, and, to the extent that I followed it, his subsequent career at the National Review seemed largely confined to tediously overworked sneers at various manifestations of liberal “folly”.
Well, that was then. I don’t know if it was consideration of the multitudinous instances of Trumpian boorishness—and, yes, lawlessness—contained in the Mueller Report or just a sudden outburst of common sense and good taste, but Williamson has come through with a strikingly thoughtful takedown of Trump, directed at “conservatives”, though one can doubt how many will bother to read it. Williamson goes a little far, in my opinion, in “agreeing” that Trump’s policies aren’t that far out of the Republican mainstream, but argues effectively that Trump’s style is the substance, the substance of moral corruption:
But Trumpism does not consist of policy positions, all of those — including “Build the Wall!” — being infinitely negotiable. The Twitter rage is not an adjunct, it is the crux. Trumpism, rather, is a form of Kulturkampf. And it is a more serious thing than it might seem at first: With Trumpism, Republicans have abandoned the notion of one-nation politics and committed themselves to a cold civil war with as much ferocity as any would-be Saul Alinsky.
President Abraham Lincoln, who dealt with more grief and consequence in a day than President Trump has in his life, insisted, in his first inaugural address: “We must not be enemies.” For Trump, at one point or another, everyone is the enemy: the press, the Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the “haters and losers,” the ghost of Merv Griffin. Forgoing that sort of thing is, or ought to be, part of the legacy of the “Party of Lincoln,” too.
For a party that once held itself out as Virtue, Inc., these are strange days. In the last few days, Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani has proffered a string of arguments suggesting that the president of the United States shouldn’t even be judged on moral grounds. That so many Republicans are treating special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as a vindication, rather than a sobering account of Trump’s moral failings, indicates that the great majority of them are prepared to stand by their man.
So, thank you, Kevin D. Williamson, for those wise words.
Afterwords
Much of Williamson’s column is taken up with the merits (and demerits) of William Weld, once governor of Massachusetts, presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 2016, and now challenging Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. I (obviously) have neglected Mr. Weld pretty extensively, though I had planned to vote for him in 2016, switching to Hillary at the last moment, fearing (correctly) that she would lose, and wanting to swell her vote total by one, a sporting gesture on my part, I must say, because I’m not fond of poor Hillary at all, and, since I live in Washington, DC, there was no way my vote could affect the electoral outcome of the election in any way.
1. Word will accept this spelling, though it’s scarcely kosher, one might say, for, according to Dictionary.com, the derivation of “brouhaha” is as follows: “1885–90; “brouhaha” <French, orig. brou, ha, ha! exclamation used by characters representing the devil in the 16th-cent. drama; perhaps < Hebrew, distortion of the recited phrase bārūkh habbā (beshēm ădhōnai) “blessed is he who comes (in the name of the Lord)” (Ps. 118:26).” I did not see that coming. Also, since I don’t know Hebrew, I don’t understand the parenthetical beshēm ădhōnai.
