Back in the day— I mean the day when Bill Clinton was trying to push through his plan for universal health insurance—Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that such a sweeping program should only be enacted on a bipartisan basis, sage advice that was proffered again at the start of the Obama administration, and now, of course, is being offered once more, a fortiori, regarding the impending impeachment of Donald Trump.
Well, it is good advice—that is to say, it would be if it were not impossible, because ever since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 Republicans have opposed virtually any and every idea put forward by the Democratic Party. And the Republicans never propose “compromise”. They never propose alternatives. They never do so because they have no purpose other than to prevent the Democrats from doing whatever it is they want to do and/or to undo/destroy whatever it is they have done. Republicans never consider the “merits” of a Democratic proposal. It is, rather, a point of honor—and a very high one indeed—not to consider the merits. Only weaklings “think”.1
Thinking has never been held in less repute by the Republican Party than it is today. To say that nothing “profound” can be attempted in politics other than on a bipartisan basis simply grants veto power over any meaningful decision to the squalling pack of vengeful two-year-olds who are the “brains” of modern-day Republicans. It doesn’t matter that the evidence against Trump, already overwhelming, becomes more so every day. It’s quite possible that even if we know more—much more—than we know now, not a single Republican senator will vote for conviction. Spiritually if not physically, the Republican “Party” is nothing more than the Walking Dead, a phalanx of Dorian Grays.
As outrage follows outrage—Trump “suggesting” that China join in the fun by investigating the Bidens—“I have a lot of options on China … but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power”—while U.S. diplomats agonize over the fact that they’re being turned into political fixers—“assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington”—so do the excuses manufactured by “the right”: “There’s nothing wrong or unusual about a United States president asking foreign leaders to provide information useful to his attorney general in a duly constituted investigation,” remarks a bewildered Rich Lowry, aka “confused at the National Review”. “No matter how cynical I get, I can never keep up,” remarked Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner back in the day. Rich doesn’t have that problem.
The biggest cliché pushed on the right, often pushed “thoughtfully” by thoughtful types like Ross Douthat and Nick Gillespie, is that the “masses” respond to Trump because he’s exposing “the swamp,” although Douthat, unlike Gillespie, points out that Trump, by jumping in the swamp, only made it dirtier.2 There is, and has been, no greater cliché than “Beltway Corruption” for the last 25 years. And wasn’t it Bernie Sanders, unloved by either Ross or Nick, and not Donald Trump, who was the first to start blasting the reign of Goldman Sachs? And didn’t Donald, when he first took office, give the keys to the U.S. economy to the board of Goldman Sachs? Why didn’t “the masses” bail when they saw that Trump’s one triumph, the corporate income tax, was nothing other than a spectacular giveaway to the rich?
Because they don’t care. What Trump voters want is a president who will smash the Left—smash the foreigners who live off our welfare and corrupt our gene pool, smash the blacks who besmirch our great cities with their filth and crime, and smash the elites who waste their tax money on them both while sending the “good jobs” of honest Americans overseas to fatten their investment portfolios. They want a president who panders to their hatreds, and Donald Trump is the King of the Panderers, Hatred made flesh, the apotheosis of Unreason.
Afterwords
When Trump first took office I opined that Karl Marx wrote the book on the Donald over a hundred years ago when he penned The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (aka “Napoleon III”) back in 1852, which I slightly updated for the occasion. Karl, in terms markedly more measured than mine, explained Bonaparte’s appeal to the French peasantry as follows: “Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.” “Unlimited governmental power”—the more outrageous Trump grows, the more his supporters will cling to him. There is no reality outside him.
1. In a 2012 article for the American Conservative, Bruce Bartlett describes both his disillusionment with and his ostracism from the “Right”. “People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.” Megan McArdle similarly admitted that when she tried to place an article in a conservative publication explaining that tax cuts, while perhaps laudable in and of themselves, do not pay for themselves, no one would touch it, even though they acknowledged that what she was saying was true. (Sorry, but I’ve lost the link. Call her if you doubt me.) Group think on the left? Uh, yeah? Has Elizabeth Warren spoken from anyone who wasn’t from Cambridge in the last 20 years?
2. Over at Slate, William Saletan labors heroically to enlighten Trump apologists as to how their man brought the corruption rather than exposing it: “Trump and his henchmen [and his dittoheads—AV addition] don’t care about corruption or conflicts of interest. They don’t care that Trump secretly negotiated to build a hotel in Russia while he was running for president. They don’t care that Trump tried to save a Chinese telecom company while his daughter Ivanka sought lucrative trademarks from the Chinese government. They don’t care that Giuliani is up to his eyeballs in shady overseas business deals, including in Ukraine. They don’t care that Sondland got his job by donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. They don’t care that Volker, while working at the State Department, advocated for a missile shipment that earned millions of dollars for Raytheon, a defense contractor whose lobbying firm simultaneously paid Volker as a consultant.” (Follow the link for all the links Saletan features to back up his charges.)
