While Democrats in South Carolina got their primary last Saturday and Nevada gets its primary (sorta kinda) this week, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley doesn’t get to compete in her own state for the Republican primary until February 24. Prior to this she lost to Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump in New Hampshire. Yeah, Haley did get more than 40 percent of the vote but she still lost by double digits and there is no other non-Trump competition. New Hampshire, with its Yankee libertarianism and relatively open primary system, gave Haley favorable ground that she’s not going to have anywhere else, even in her home state of South Carolina, where Republican politics are famously cutthroat.
All the more sad, because I said a while ago that one of these notTrump Republicans really needs to answer a serious question: If your platform is basically the same as Trump’s minus the personal history, then why should anybody vote for you when Trump is already running, has been president and has a built-in following you don’t have? Well, Nikki Haley has gotten as close as anybody to answering that question, by making very good points. Mainly, if she is going to have the same policies people liked about Trump, and the main criticism of Biden is that he’s very old, you can’t choose Trump as an alternative to Biden cause he’s not much younger and no less unsteady. Sure, Biden is old, he’s slow and he might be senile. So let’s replace him with Donald Trump. RIGHT. Donald Trump makes Joe Biden look like Drake.
But we should really quit thinking that Trumpniks remain in the cult because they’re voting for something constructive. Quite the opposite. There is a Politico article that was making the rounds in January where staff writer Michael Kruse did one of those mainstream-media-Trump-whisperer profiles where a journalist tries to get into the head of what the typical Trumpnik is thinking. And he discovered that they aren’t just cynical, they’re nihilistic:
And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.
“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.
“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.
It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.
I’d already sussed this out. Not too long after starting this site, I explained why Trump’s fan club is completely immune to contradiction or appeals to logic:
“When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”
And that was almost… eight years ago. Fuck, why can’t I get a job at Politico?
There used to be such a thing as conservatism in this country, but it was always inherently contradictory. As I said quite some time ago, the real issue with “conservatism” is that it is not a political philosophy. It is a governing approach towards a political philosophy. For example, in the Soviet Union, the “conservatives” were the people opposing Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, even though that meant preserving orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which is the polar opposite of what Americans call “conservatism”. But the contradiction is even deeper in America, because conservatism means preserving the original concept of American government, which is based in 18th-century classical liberalism and anti-royalism. “All men are created equal” is not a terribly conservative concept, even if it was stated by a slave owner. There is still a valid definition of “conservatism” in America, but it is relative, not objective. It refers to conserving that old capitalist, classical-liberal tradition against a leftist tradition that really took hold after Franklin Roosevelt and somewhat resembles the approach of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, although most of its American proponents were not explicit socialists. (Indeed, in the early 20th Century, most of the ‘Progressives’ were in the Republican Party.)
But just as modern Democrats have been associated with a certain stereotype, Republicans have become associated with a certain stereotype of “conservatism” that they have been relying on since at least Vietnam. Their influence reached its high-water mark in the Reagan-Bush period, but since then, and especially in reaction to the Clinton Administration, “conservatism” has become less about promoting ideas and more about living in the stereotype, as intellectual models like Albert Jay Nock and William Buckley made way for political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh. Much like their existing approach to Christianity, “conservatives” focus less on the policies and ideas of actual conservatives and more on the attitudes and postures they associate conservatism with: “toughness”, nationalism, fiscal discipline. Believing in the idea, the feeling, is more important than preserving the reality, which is where “conservatives” always fell down even when they were serious. It’s why they keep talking a good game about budget cutting and border enforcement and always make the situation worse when they’re in office. They don’t really examine what they want or what would happen if they get it, so the “RINOs” – Republicans in Name Only cave to Democrats to make the system work. So Republican voters, with some cause, looked elsewhere for more purist people who would actually live up to the escalated rhetoric that politicians used to get them to vote, and politics, Republican politics in particular, became that much more about the slogans than anything backing them up. In the process, the Republican Party bypassed mere hypocrisy to become the opposite of what it claims to be. Like, how the party that made “McCarthyism” a thing suddenly was okay with Russian sympathizers. Apparently all Russians had to do was trade their army coats for business suits and the Republicans didn’t notice that they never really changed…
This is how the party of “fiscal conservatism” blew up the budget deficit while cutting tax breaks for the middle class. This is how the “borders, language, culture” party blew up a border bill that their Senators demanded.
And this is how “conservatism” came down to Donald Trump speaking to his cult from a podium on January 6, braying, “you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
“Strength”, apparently, comes from a millionaire’s son whose Daddy got him out of the draft by citing bone spurs, who needs a golf cart to travel from place to place at international summits, and who always has an excuse for why every one of his screw-ups is someone else’s fault.
To go over what I’ve said before: This is literally a Party of Trump. It does not have the priorities of a political party, like running the country or even winning elections so that it can run the country. Its priority is serving Trump. The Republican Party does not have the priorities it used to, even if it pays lip service to them. The House has been holding up aid to not only Putin’s target Ukraine but traditional Republican allies like Israel and Taiwan. Why? Because Trump wants it. This party isn’t pro-tax or anti-tax. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. It’s “What does Trump say?” It’s not pro-life or pro-abortion rights. It’s “What does Trump say?” If a tornado threatened to wreck a Republican-run town, the government wouldn’t appropriate services to get emergency services or shelters. They’d go, “What does Mr. Trump say?”
Wait, you’d wait for Trump’s permission before ordering emergency services? “Why not?”
Cause he might say no? “Why would he do that?”
Cause he’s a petty sadist who gets off on making other people suffer, and if they make themselves suffer just to please him and make him happy, he loves it all the more?
“You’re saying Our President would try to stop us from responding to a natural disaster and let thousands of people die or go homeless, just because he can?”
YES!
“THAT IS SO COOL! That’s a REAL leader! Not like these pussy Democrats who give charity to disaster victims! Get a JOB, ya hippies!”
What’s worse, because there is no room in politics for anything more than two parties, and one of those parties IS Trump, there is no room for anything outside of Trump even outside his party. There is no practical distinction between ‘real’ conservatives (the near-extinct species of NeverTrump Republicans), between what used to be libertarians (now that the Von Mises Caucus has basically turned the Libertarian Party into the Junior Varsity Club for the Trump Party), no distinction between hack liberals and woke socialists. It’s all just, are you sane, or are you Trump? Do you believe gravity is a thing that exists, or do you believe whatever Trump wants you to believe? Cause I can tell you, if someone convinced Trump that not believing in gravity would keep him out of prison or keep him from paying his bills, he would spread some bullshit story about how The Theory of Gravity is Fake News and everyone in the Party would have to believe it, on pain of death (and that might not be an exaggeration).
Which is a real problem, because the distinctions between conservatives, libertarians, liberals and “progressives” are real and will remain when or if Trump is gone. I say ‘if’ since at this rate Trump might well be immortal. Because God is real, and He hates us all. But assuming that this stale fart of a human being will fly out the window some time before the end of the century, we will have to address why this system is as screwed up as it is, specifically why the liberal-progressive spectrum that seems so ascendant now is in fact so incompetent and unpopular that in 2016 they made Trump look like a GOOD IDEA.
I mean, to a lot of people like myself, it seemed like a good idea to get rid of the “deep state”, which prior to Trump was just “the state” and in more mature terms is defined as the liberals’ “administrative state.” But then we saw what Trump was going to replace it with.
It should be obvious what a dilemma the country is in when the Lamestream Media is practically tearing their hair out wondering why Biden is STILL falling behind Trump in the polls no matter how wonderful they say the economy is. And that’s because we need an alternative to the Democrat mainstream. And that’s not what the Republican Party is giving us. They’re giving us “Trump is like Jesus, only better, cause Jesus has to be celibate.” And if THAT was good enough for America, then the 2022 midterms would have been a “red wave” and not a missed period.
Recently one of my liberal friends had posted something from The Newsroom about why the Will McAvoy character still considered himself a Republican, even though he didn’t think his own party was that Republican any more. It’s before Trump, but it only goes to show where things were heading:
We need a REAL right-wing party in this country. Not a wrestling heel or “reality” TV villain that plays to a bad-boy fan club, and not just as a “loyal opposition” to a social-democrat default. We need a governing party that can win elections and run the country. COMPETENTLY. We need a party that admits that we have a Constitution, it is written the way it is for a reason, and we dismiss it at our peril. We need a government that admits that as rich as our country is, it cannot spend more money than it makes forever and still expect to retain prosperity.
That is not what we have. The Republican Party has not been fiscally conservative since at least Reagan, but at least they used to be able to pretend. And as I say, we’re seeing that when you can’t even lie well anymore, there is a real qualitative decline in your positions from mere hypocrisy.
Because now it’s gotten to the point where Democrats can score by applying the Republicans’ old arguments. You cannot trust Republicans in Florida to keep their hands off of business, because Governor DeSantis killed a perfectly functioning administration the Disney company had in the state, since they weren’t following the right sort of political correctness. Republicans always were against Roe vs. Wade, but ostensibly because the abortion issue should have been left to the states. Well, now that it is up to the states, they want to make sure you can’t leave a slave uterus state to get an abortion in a free state.
In short, Americans don’t need government telling them what to do. This is something the Libertarian Party could take advantage of if it chose to, but like Ron DeSantis, they’ve decided they can get more scratch by being more Trump than Trump. And it’s worked out just as well for them.
And please don’t give us this Andrew Sullivan both-sides-ism that both parties are equally bad as a means of disqualifying the Democratic Party. Whataboutism is a standard Russian tactic for disqualifying your opposition on the grounds that both sides are equally bad and therefore you only need to choose on grounds of aesthetic preference (which the Republican culture warrior making that argument assumes his side will win). But that assumes, one, your preferred side will even do what it says it will, and that’s been a Republican problem. But to act like both sides are equally bad is to avoid a necessary comparison. To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats have equally bad, anti-American nutcases. But a comparison would require asking how many nutcases are in each party and whether they comprise a controlling plurality, if not a majority, of the national party.
To wit – Every “Defund the Police” initiative has crashed and burned in every locality where it’s been proposed. San Francisco Attorney General Chesa Boudin was recalled in 2022 after his “decarceration” program and other policies helped lead to a rising crime wave. Claudine Gay was kicked out of leadership at Harvard due to her (lack of) ethics and competence, not her race or her political positions. The nutsos are not in charge on the default Left and they are not setting the agenda.
By contrast, around one-third percent of Republicans polled support the January 6 riots, and at least a quarter think it was a false flag operation to make our President Trump look bad, and it’s all of a piece with Deranged Jack Smith’s persecution of Trump on fake charges, and if you’re a Republican and you don’t believe these things, you better ACT like you do if you don’t want to get hunted down and killed. So which party is run by the crazies?
Who smeared feces on the walls at the Capitol? Who tried to kill the Vice President cause he wouldn’t throw an election? Who ran the Confederate battle flag through the Capitol hallways, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do? The ostensible Party of Lincoln, that’s who.
And if you’re still a Republican after that… you’re not really a Republican.