Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel

I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American Conservative, or (for NR refugees) the Dispatch and the Bulwark, though the libertarian gang at Reason can (occasionally) write “conservative” too. I hadn’t been able to do this in “real time” since the election because I’ve been struggling both to finish my mini-magnum opus on the literary short-comings of one of my favorite authors, William Faulkner and to shepherd my latest book, Alternative Worlds Elvis and Others, through publication for the all-important Christmas season, which, of course, complicates things all on its own. But now I’m back and, basically, all but overwhelmed by my topic.

There was a time—shortly after the election, really—when “reformicons” like Ross Douthat could sigh a sigh of relief—“we’re past the tweets, eh? What a blessing!”—and look forward to better times—Trumpism without the Trump! As Ross wrote, semi-exultantly,

In those trends [the increase in Trump’s support among certain ethnic groups in 2016], you can see the foundation of a possible after-Trump conservative majority that is multiethnic and middle class and populist, an expansive coalition rather than a white and aging rump.

Well, you could, if you squinted real hard, and forgot that the popular aspects of Trump’s package were economic growth largely achieved though “wild” spending, including massive subsidization of rural America, plus “hate the foreigner” posturing regarding both tariffs and immigration, which often “make sense” to low-income voters but are, unfortunately, both net economic losers over time.

And you could, Ross acknowledged, if only Trump didn’t insist on making a nuisance of himself over the next four years, thus stifling the “natural” emergence of a Douthatified GOP in 2020. But that was before il Duce made in crystal clear that he won in 2020, by a crushing landslide and that anyone who says otherwise is an active participant in the greatest crime in human history.

And so it has gone for the past eight weeks, Trump growing more and more hysterical, and “respectable”—that is to say, lickspittle—Republicans growing more and more pathetic in their struggle to humor the monster—because, clearly, Trump won’t take “no” for an answer. In fact, he won’t take anything less than “Ja wohl, Mein Führer!” for an answer.

“The Electoral College has spoken,” intoned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on December 14, girding up his loins like a lickspittle and uttering a sentence that, in all probability, has never been intoned in a presidential election in which one candidate won a majority of both popular and electoral votes. A week later, Attorney General William Barr, who lied his ample ass off (metaphorically, of course) on Trump’s behalf from his first day in office, declared that he can’t seize voting machines and that he won’t be appointing a special counsel to investigate charges of “voter fraud” or to handle the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden. Barr made the statements during a press conference he called to announce charges in what the Washington Post called a “decades-old terrorism case.” Since Barr retired a mere two days later, the odds are very good, in my opinion, that he called the conference with the intent of sticking his finger in Trump’s eye, in compensation for all the times Trump had stuck his cock amidst Barr’s trembling lips, both fore and aft, to Billy’s immense delight. In fact, Billy enjoyed sucking Trump’s cock so much, he couldn’t resist one final toot on his way out the door, hailing the president’s all but superhuman accomplishments in his absurd resignation letter, surely one of the most cringe-inducing documents in American history.

But with Donnie to follow Billy out the door, with, probably, not too much screaming (probably) or, you know, martial law, what next for “conservatives”? What next, indeed?

Well, so far as I can see, nothing but disaster, as far as the eye can see, because the vast majority of conservatives, even anti-Trump conservatives, have never come to grips with the fact that Trump is simply the culmination of pre-existing trends in the Republican Party that stretch back to George H. W. Bush’s “stunning” loss to Bill Clinton back in 1992, when the Republicans’ beloved “mortal lock” on the presidency suddenly thawed and resolved itself into a dew, leading the party to realize, if only subconsciously, that, with the Cold War at an end, there was “no there there”—the Republican Party no longer had any reason to exist.

It was Ronald Reagan who made the Republican Party the White Man’s Party, but Ronnie’s personal popularity was such that he didn’t have to get down and dirty to win, though at the state level, Republicans weren’t always so picky. But Al Gore’s victory in the popular vote in 2000, and his possible win in Florida, quickly snuffed out by an enraged Gang of Five on the Supreme Court, who subsequently found their way to authorize virtually every voter suppression scheme Republican state legislators could come up with, was the final blow to Republican “innocence”. I have high praise for Richard North Patterson, who, writing for the Bulwark, has the nerve to do what very few conservatives have the nerve to do, look squarely at the Republican Party’s decades-long crusade against the voting rights of blacks and other “suspect” minorities.

It is, um, “wonderful” to see “responsible” anti-Trump conservatives like Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg engage in “Democrats do it too” posturing, quoting statements by frustrated Democrats in 2000, 2004, and 2016 that “defy” election results without noting that Al Gore had a plurality of almost half a million votes in 2000, that Hillary Clinton had a plurality of almost three million in 2016, and that in 2020 Joe Biden, who, let’s be frank, often is kinda sleepy, had a majority of over seven million. The popular vote? What’s that? It’s the Electoral College that counts! Everyone knows that!

Conservatives know that they have essentially no chance of winning the popular vote in a presidential election and so they have most conveniently discovered a “wisdom” in the Electoral College that, of course, is simply not there. The federal/state relationships enshrined in the Constitution are not grounded in any concepts of “natural law” (which does not exist in the first place) or Montesquieu’s notions of the “separation of powers”, but simple horse-trading, horse-trading that worked, well, “okay”, except in 1860, when it didn’t, but today, with the massive expansion of the coastal populations, and the massive “sorting” of Americans according to economic interests and cultural attitudes, it’s an invitation to disaster.

Moderate anti-Trump conservatives, still hoping to take back the party, “explain” that the Electoral College saves us from the “tyranny of the majority”. Because the tyranny of the minority is so much better? No, because Republicans haven’t a prayer of winning a majority in a presidential election. And, anyway, those liberals in California and New York really shouldn’t count, because there are so many of them. We already know what you think, so shut up already!

Conservatives don’t want to admit how flawed their past history is, how the sainted William F. Buckley was brutally contemptuous of efforts to register “culturally inferior” blacks to vote in the South as late as the mid-sixties, how Ronald Reagan exploited racist fears all through the eighties,¹ and how Paul Ryan’s supposed budget “wonkery” was a mere disguise for cutting rich people’s taxes and poor people’s “welfare” and the budget deficit be damned. And now they defend the “natural” gerrymandering of both Congress and the electoral vote as the only way they can maintain a hold on power. After all, if the shoe were on the other foot, if the constitutional gerrymander favored the Democrats, they’d be defending it, wouldn’t they? Well, many of them surely would, and they would be total hypocrites, as Republicans are today, not hypothetically, but in reality. Conservatives are supposed to believe that one can only conserve by changing, but here they take refuge in the conveniently infinite wisdom of the framers, who fortunately foresaw every eventuality, to the very ends of time, so that any change will necessarily be a change for the worse. We will be lucky if the Supreme Court does not become significantly more aggressive in “defending” the Constitution in the future.

Trump, of course, has added a final, and potentially fatal turn of the screw by insisting that Republican failures at the polls are the result of outright fraud, that Republicans are really winning by “landslide” margins, but millions of Republican votes are, by some arcane, undetectable process, being converted into Democratic votes. Unsurprisingly, Tucker Carlson has converted the endless stream of non-sequiturs that constitutes the essence of Trump-speak into a seamless lie: the election was rigged by—you guessed it!—the media! Those bastards!

As Max Boot has pointed out, we were much luckier in 2020 than we realized. Suppose Biden’s electoral margin depended not on four states but one? What kind of pressure could Donald Trump bring on a single Republican governor, a single Republican legislature, to “save” America? We will go into the next election in 2024 with a large majority of the Republican Party convinced that Donald Trump was cheated of victory in 2020, because mere facts mean nothing. You believe the votes were counted fairly in 2020? Then you must be part of the conspiracy too!

The Democratic Party is the party of morally lazy, morally hazy, if you want to get along, go along compromise. The Republican Party is the party of fear and hatred. There is a difference.

Afterwords
It is, well, amusing—because I take my laughs where I can get them—to watch the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy and Reason’s Jacob Sullum earnestly explain, over and over again, at great length, to their publication’s readership, that Trump’s claims of rampant fraud are, you know, total crap. If either has changed the view of a single reader, I’d be surprised. McCarthy in particular, who both opposed Trump’s impeachment and advocated Obama’s, ought to have some creditability, but arguing with a Trumpian is like reasoning with a bobcat, a rabid one who has neither slept nor eaten for several days. Nice effort, guys! I know your fingers must be tired!

1. To save you the trouble of searching for an obscure footnote to an earlier piece, I’ll reprint and expand an earlier “take” on Ronnie and race: To say that Reagan hated black people is to say too much. But he did despise the American civil rights movement, which he explicitly regarded as a communist plot, and he was contemptuous of the poor. Success was the reward of virtue; poverty was the punishment of weakness. He denounced Brown v. Board of Education, opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and ran for governor in California in 1966 promising to “restore” Californians’ “right” not to sell their homes to blacks (no information on whether it was also okay to discriminate against Catholics and Jews). In 1980 Reagan gave a speech before an evangelical conference in Dallas, saying nothing about abortion but promising to reverse the Carter administration’s policy of denying non-profit status to segregated “church schools” in the south, set up to circumvent integration. In his campaign for the presidency in 1980, Reagan famously pictured welfare recipients not merely as lazy but active criminals, literally riding around in Cadillacs. Bruce Bartlett, in his book, Wrong on Race, which attempts to “prove” that it is the Democrats rather than the Republicans who are “wrong on race”, acknowledges uncomfortably that Reagan, though “of course” no racist, had no blacks on his staff. Bartlett’s portrait of Reagan as committed to “colorblind” society is thoroughly unconvincing. Reagan disputed all efforts by the federal government to disassemble segregation but once in office furiously assaulted affirmative action as “racist”. Racism was bad except when it helped white people.