In a recent—well, “tirade” is probably too strong a word, but “riff” is a bit cute—in a recent post on “conscience Republican” Ross Douthat’s semi-snarky take on Republican with a different conscience Stuart Stevens’ mea culpa It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, I noted that Stu, unintentionally, I’m sure, got Ross’s goat from the get-go by assuming that nobody, but nobody actually believes in all that transubstantiationist jive, Ross being a serious body and blood of Christ guy from the, well, from the get-go. As Stuart said, to Ross’s immense irritation,
Being against ‘out-of-control federal spending,’ a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ.
But, after making fun of Ross, I have to admit that I did him wrong in my piece, claiming that when Stevens, more than a bit hypocritically, declared that “What does a center-right party in America stand for? Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution.”, he was talking about the Reagan era, and that Ross was more or less deliberately misunderstanding him by taking Stevens to mean “this is what the party believed in 2012”, when Stevens’ man Romney was running for president. Well, I was wrong, and Stevens was the major hypocrite for pretending that Romney in 2012 stood for these things, or that the Republican Party ever did, even in the Reagan era, as I pointed out in my original piece.
Never Trumpers like Stu have tried to build Romney up as the “Anti-Trump”, a sort of “Saint Mitt”, who is all the things Donnie ain’t. Well, I hate to refresh their memory, but in 2012, Romney was the guy who said he wanted to make illegal immigrants “self deport”, who unendingly attacked Obama for going on an “apology” tour in the Middle East and who eagerly sought the blessings of birther man Donald Trump, appearing at a fundraiser hosted by Trump and saying “it means a great deal to me to have the endorsement of Mr. Trump”.
Politico Reporter Mike Grunwald, who has known Stu for quite a while, takes advantage of their past association just a bit in an interesting interview, asking questions that Stu doesn’t necessarily want to answer, for example forcing Stu to claim that when Mitt said he would make illegal immigrants “self-deport” he meant he would make life in their home countries so desirable that they would go back to enjoy the good life, something that somehow failed to make Mike gag, but had me on the floor. Admit it, anti-Trumpers! No one can deny that the Mittman has grown a pair! Recently! Very, very recently!
Mike does make Stu admit that the Republicans have never cared about the deficit—so much for “fiscal sanity”—and I also must give Mike a definite shout-out for taking a serious poke at über schmuck Paul Ryan, to wit:
Paul Ryan is the ultimate example of that [Republican dishonesty]. He’s been for every tax cut, more defense spending, he’s never taken a vote to reduce the deficit—and he was Romney’s running mate.
It’s also nice to hear a Republican say, out loud, as Stu does, that “Iraq was a disaster”, yet it’s “interesting” that, otherwise, neither Mike nor Stu has a single word to say about foreign affairs, even though the Iraq disaster was easily the biggest reason for Republican electoral disasters in 2010 and 2012, just as the Libyan disaster was the biggest reason for Hillary’s defeat in 2016. Somehow, it seems that politicos don’t do foreign affairs, even when they decide elections. Strange!
Stu is honest enough not to have much “vision” of what a reborn, non-Trump Republican Party could or would be, except for wishing vaguely/pathetically that blue-state Republican governors like Larry Hogan (Maryland) and Charlie Baker (Massachusetts) could go national, ignoring the fact that these guys get elected by having policy views identical to the Democratic Party but without all the ties to the traditional Democratic special interest groups and would, and do, have zero appeal to the Republican base, which is basically a seething mass of xenophobia and racism, as evidenced by the current Republican Convention, whose message can be conveniently summarized as “The N*ggers are coming! The N*ggers are coming!”
That nasty Republican base is one stumbling block for Ross Douthat’s “vision” of “good Trumpism”, described in his latest column, the other being that his ideas themselves—“a policy agenda that’s populist in the best sense—it would defend and rebuild the decaying America that exists outside the coastal metropoles, tech hubs and university towns”—are stupid, trite, and unworkable, Ross not understanding that the decaying fly-overs are decaying because there’s no reason for them to prosper, and that “a self-conscious industrial policy to bring back the capacities and jobs that America has lost to Asia” would be both self-defeating and grotesquely costly—Trump’s tariffs on steel cost American taxpayers about $900,000 per job, jobs that, in addition only pay well because they’re union, not because they’re “industrial”. I guess transubstantiationists don’t do economics.
When it comes to foreign affairs, on the plus side, Ross does want to get out of the Middle East and Afghanistan. On the minus, he wants to organize a global pissing match to “contain” China, because the U.S. just can’t survive without a real Cold War.
Bottom line: For the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party will be the party of good intentions, and the Republican Party will be the party of hate. Not a pleasant choice certainly, but at least not a hard one either.
