Tough to be a man! Or a woman! Or even just a little kid. But stuff happens, as Donnie Rumsfeld liked to say, and this is some of the stuff that’s happening.
First up is the good news: Paul Krugman is cool! I’ve frequently though not necessarily bitched about the way the Krugman too often, in his column, writes basically the same knee-jerk column, viz., Trump is a jerk. Well, that’s always true, but it’s not exactly Nobel-worthy. Paul’s free email newsletter, #ImnotFriedman, on the other hand, is usually better, and a couple of days ago Paul caught the sweet spot with this reminiscence:
Back in the day, when I served on a committee evaluating student research proposals, I (jokingly) suggested automatic rejection of any student declaring themselves “passionate” about whatever the topic was.
Sure, it would have been better if Paul hadn’t been joking, but you get the picture: if you have to tell us you’re “passionate”, you probably ain’t.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for the unalloyed thumb’s up category, so let’s get to the rest, though I guess Ross Douthat’s latest conniption is a source at least of merriment if not of joy, because the Rossman is seriously ticked at former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, which I have read and which I enjoyed more than Ross. What unsurprisingly enraged poor Ross is the following quip on Stewie’s part:
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.
If ever a quip were designed to raise Ross’s dander, well, it’s the one you just read, because Ross is, I may say, a rabid transubstantiationalist! And don’t you forget it!
It’s my impression—though, of course, I may be wrong—that Stewie’s neo-Voltairian snicker1 soured Ross on the whole anti-Trump “Lincoln Project”. Nothing but a bunch of fancy-pants smart boys with their fancy “strategies” and their fancy fees! They were the boob-bumpers2 and we were the boobs! Well, well, well, Donald Trump is all your fault!
Okay, I’m being unfair to Ross because I want to be funny. In fact, Ross is only half wrong. Here’s a quote from Stewie that Ross gives in his piece and then replies to:
“What does a center-right party in America stand for?” Stevens asks, in the closest thing to an ideological statement his book contains. “Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution.”
In fact, this list neither distills the issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016 nor accurately describes the major challenges facing the United States when Stevens was trying to get Mitt Romney elected president. All it distills is a cloistered center-right elite consensus, hawkish and globalist and fatally naïve, whose failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and China and domestic political economy mattered at least as much to the rise of Trump as the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.
First of all, I’d say that Ross is deliberately talking past Stewie. What Stewie said, Ross, is “What does a center-right party in America stand for? Once this was easy to answer,” with emphasis on the “once”. Ross shifts the date from about 1984 to 2016. However, I will also say that Stewie’s formulation is largely bullshit. The Republicans, under Reagan, Bush II, and now Trump, never cared about “fiscal sanity,” invariably slashing taxes and massively increasing federal spending at the same time, which is the opposite of “fiscal sanity”. The only Republican in recent times to care about fiscal sanity was Bush I, who was all but booted out of his party for doing so.
“Being strong on Russia” is Stewie’s way of finessing the Republican’s compulsively hawkish, unilateralist, interventionist foreign policy, with particular emphasis, after the demise of the U.S.S.R., on Israel, popular with both the “cloistered center-right elite consensus” and the ignorant masses, something neither Ross nor Stewie wants to talk about. The ignorant masses didn’t object to the Bush administration’s interventionist foreign policy until we started losing, and grotesque increases in military spending remain the order of the day among Republicans, despite the fitful (and minimal) reductions in the commitment of U.S. troops overseas that have occurred under Trump.
As for “personal responsibility”, not to mention “the Constitution”, if Ross is implying that these days “real Republicans” don’t care about either, I agree. But they never did. Remember Newt “Lover Boy” Gingrich and Dennis “Lover of Boys” Hastert?3 Ronald Reagan’s secret sale of arms to Iran, and subsequent use of the funds to pay for a secret war in Nicaragua expressly prohibited by legislation passed by Congress and signed by him was stunningly unconstitutional,4 as was the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Bush v. Gore to halt the Florida recount and simply declare, by the “rule of five”, that Bush had won and was to be inaugurated.
What I find particularly bothersome about Douthat’s rant is that he seems to believe that it was guys like Stewie that “explain” why Republicans keep losing, rather the party’s racism, xenophobia, and, you know, total lack of ideas! If only we had a “good Trump”! That is to say, a good murderer!5
Okay, enough (more than enough!) about dumb Republicans. Now for a discussion on dubious Democrats, notably Kamala Harris. I would like to think that Harris is a cool, rational politician who keeps a clear eye on the “possible”, running in California back in the day as a “black woman tough on crime” because it made sense politically, not because she was a “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” type at heart, even though her record as state attorney general in California from 2000 to 2016, where she functioned as the “prosecutor’s friend” without restraint, makes one skeptical. Furthermore, as state attorney general she could display what I can only call a “Hillaryesque” devotion to authoritarian liberalism, harassing both for-profit and non-profit corporations over environmental issues, trying, as liberals so often do, to resolve essentially political issues by fiat.6
On the other hand, over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison has some good news! When it comes to foreign policy, she’s not (entirely) Hillary Clinton! Instead, a bit of a mix between standard hawkishness and restraint! Hey, beggars can’t be choosers!
The biggest rap against Harris is her lame performance in the presidential primaries. She seemed to think she was running in California and seemed to have paid no attention to the 2016 Democratic primaries, when tried and true neoliberalism was pilloried both without limit and with much success. Sentencing reform? Bail reform? Medicare for All? What are these strange new things? Kamala really didn’t seem to know, and she certainly should have. Well, she’s young, vigorous, personable, good-looking, and, above all, not an old white guy. Good news!
One odd benefit of Harris’ not very attractive “tough on crime” rap and record in California, which, I’m afraid, showed her as instinctively authoritarian, is that it helps inoculate both her and the Democratic Party in general from the leadership of at least the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, which is endorsing the “looting is reparations” fraud, which would push us right back to the Nixon era. The original Black Lives Matter highlighted the extent to which the U.S. had become a racist police state and advanced serious proposals for reform that would have held the police responsible for their abuses of power. But the current “woke” fervor that seeks to exalt any form of “resistance”, including arson and looting, if left unchecked, will provoke the sort of white backlash that stalled racial progress back in the 1970s.
1. “The Catholics say they eat God, and no bread. The Lutherans say they eat bread and God both. And the Calvinists say they eat bread alone, and no God.”
2. H. L. Mencken used “boob bumper” to mean a populist rabble rouser who pumped up the masses rather than an effete “consultant” who manipulates them, but words mean what I want them to mean.
3. Presumably, no one knew of Hastert’s molestations while he was in the House. But former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, in an interview given shortly after retiring, said that “I knew, and didn’t care, that Hastert had the gayest office on the Hill.”
4. Imagine if Bill Clinton had secretly sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund abortion clinics in Africa after signing legislation forbidding the use of U.S. funding for such purposes.
5. It may, or may not, come as a shock to Ross that none of the “populist” ideas for restoring the economy—reducing immigration and imports and “reviving” manufacturing (which, not so incidentally, is impossible) and cutting “welfare”—would work. In fact, they all would have a negative impact on the economic health of Americans. They are all the products of fear and mean-spirited ignorance.
6.Semi-good guy (but often creep) Kevie D. Williamson has the goods (some of them) here, but works the old “guilt by association” schtick a bit aggressively. Hey, they’re all Democrats! What more do you need to know?
