James Gillen

“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

-Joe Biden, 2019

Among numerous other bits in the news recently, people are still debating the potential impact of the “election reforms” passed by the Republican government in Georgia. Defenders are telling cynics to “read what it actually says.” The text is here. https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121 It starts off in a fairly defensive manner, Section 2 pointing out that “Many Georgia election processes were challenged in court, including the subjective signature-matching requirements, by Georgians on all sides of the political spectrum”, eliding the point that none of these court challenges produced fruit because the election processes were found valid, and concluding therefore that “changes made in this legislation in 2021 are designed to address the lack of elector confidence in the election system on all sides of the political spectrum”, which is a subjective interpretation at best, given that the lack of successful challenges meant that the only people creating a lack of confidence in the system were Donald Trump and the political party that gives his fingers a reach they would otherwise lack. Many conservative media have pushed their own defenses of the law, and some of them make a little sense. Like, the fact that the runoff period after the general election is now only four weeks. I don’t see why the race had to go into January. A runoff by definition means there are only two candidates left and everyone already knows who they are.

But if you’re criminalizing getting people food and water who are standing in line to vote, and are standing in long lines for extended periods BECAUSE the government has also reduced the number of polling places and hours, then clearly this is the political class picking its voters instead of the other way around, because they saw how a get-out-the-vote campaign shifted the results in Georgia, and they don’t want that happening again.

I am reminded of the old Libertarian joke that government is the guy who breaks your leg and then hands you a crutch and says ‘if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’ Well, in this case Republicans are more laissez-faire than the Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is a good-faith position. Cause we know that in Florida, Catholic Cuban and Venezuelan communities came out in a big way to vote for Trump and other Republicans last November. If black communities were the stable base for Republicans that Florida Cubans are, they wouldn’t be pulling this shit. Nevertheless, they are pulling this shit, because black vote turnout was critical in winning Georgia for Democrats. So saying they’re only targeting racial communities for political reasons rather than actual racism is either a chicken-or-the-egg question or a distinction without a difference.

I actually kind of think that for all their flapping of fans, Republicans lean into how much liberals hate the idea of not giving water to voters in (post-summer) Georgia, because that’s what conservatives do these days, embrace their heel status as a sort of punk rock credential. It’s also distracted the press from the real problem with S.B. 202: Section 5 amends existing Code 21-2-30 to create a State Election Board which does not include the Secretary of State (who previously had authority over elections and who was personally leaned on by Trump to conjure votes he did not have) and in Section 6, the bill directs that “After following the procedures set forth in Code Section 21-2-33.2, the State Election Board may suspend county or municipal superintendents and appoint an individual to serve as the temporary superintendent in an election.”

Again, there were existing rules that highly benefited Republicans (for one thing, in the 2018 Governor’s race, Stacey Abrams was defeated by Republican Brian Kemp, who was still serving as the Secretary of State overseeing his own election). These were modified only as necessary last year because there was a global pandemic. Democrats played by Republican rules and still won, and Republican officials and judges determined that the results were indeed valid. So now they’re trying to change the rules so that such a result can never happen again.

Basically these guys had the same goal as Donald Trump, this is just the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Stupid.

Make no mistake: This is how the government works in Russia. This is how the government works in Venezuela. This is how governments worked under the Warsaw Pact: You could say you had a “Democratic Republic” and maybe even have more than one opposition party, but somehow they would never have enough votes to win, or even come close. That’s the goal.

And that is why Democrats and the other NotRepublicans of America are looking to see what Washington is going to do about all this. That and other things. After another round or two of shootings, pardon me if I gloss over the details, President Joe Biden announced on April 8 that he is “trying to limit ‘ghost guns’ and make it easier for people to flag family members who shouldn’t be allowed to purchase firearms with a series of executive actions taken Thursday in the wake of recent mass shootings.” In response, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott declared that Texas was going to be a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.” Then a few hours later Abbott had to express that he was praying for victims of a shooting in Bryan, Texas.

I actually have to agree with Senator John Kennedy (BR.- Louisiana) when he said, “We don’t need more gun control. We need more idiot control.” The problem is that in both cases, it’s his party that’s getting in the way of that, because if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait quotes Andrew McCarthy in National Review, saying “The conservative movement has argued for decades that the problem with voting is that too many people do it because it’s too convenient. ‘Voting is a privilege,’ National Review’s Andrew McCarthy argues. (A privilege, not a right.) ‘It would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people, hypnotized by the flimflam that a great nation needs to be fundamentally transformed rather than competently governed.” And I’d agree with that too. And to elaborate on my last paragraph, the problem isn’t the superficial truth of the Republican statement, it’s the deeper truth that they are the problem they claim to be against, since the whole premise of modern Republican politics is preying on civic illiteracy, selling emotionalism and flimflam, teaching people that what we need is not competent government but a transformation away from the Founders’ Republic. The irony being that while the Founders intended counter-majoritarian systems to act as a check on the civic illiterates, this agenda is never going to appeal to a majority and can only work if a gullible plurality is allowed to rule over them.

So since one faction of this “two party system” is so malign that it’s worse than useless, that means everyone is obliged to see what the Democrats are going to do whether we like them or not. And that means Democrats have to consider not only their near-infinite desires but their very limited room to move.

Whereas the Republican platform as of the 2020 convention is literally “we continue to support Donald Trump’s America First agenda” (and we can see exactly how they’re planning to do that), the Democratic platform is basically giving the Federal government that much more control over our affairs, given that certain states are creating supporting evidence that they shouldn’t be running without supervision from Washington. But this unitary agenda, not even considering the social angle, implies a lot more legislation, and a LOT more spending, which really means a lot more taxes, though they’re hoping you won’t notice that part.

I am still basically a Reason Magazine, Niskanen Center, center-right type of guy. I still think that John Maynard Keynes was the worst thing to happen in Western economics last century, although not because his theories were invalid. In fact, the older I get, the more I see how right they were. It’s just that they set the wrong example. The main dynamic of Keynesianism is what he called “countercyclical spending”, or what I might call counterintuitive spending, where the government spends money when there is no money (like in a recession or depression) to “prime the pump” and then cuts back on spending when the private economy is flush. This seems counterintuitive because the government is spending money when there isn’t any revenue from the private sector, but that’s the point: In tough times (like now) there isn’t any other source of money, so it has to be created. The problem is that you take on debt. Which leads to the real problem with Keynesianism, which is that both parties dismiss the other side of the countercycle, cutting spending (and even raising taxes) during a boom period. For obvious reasons, Republicans are loath to raise taxes and even Democrats have become leery of doing so, but neither party is that concerned with cutting spending, which is why the overall size of government increases under Democrats and why the debt increases are even greater under “fiscally conservative” Republicans and especially under the Trump Organization.

Again, this is one of those times when you need to have government spend money that the private sector can’t, so I’m not doctrinaire libertarian on this, but just as the Laffer Curve is a curve and not an a priori axiom that “lower taxes equal more government revenue”, taking on more debt does not automatically lead to greater prosperity. Just ask Italy or Greece. Creditors accept a large debt load only if the party in question has so many assets that it’s more feasible to let them hold the debt than to make them default. In the case of the US government, our assets are such that “the full faith and credit” of the country allows us to take on a debt that would be unimaginable to anyone else. But that assumes we’ll be good for it, and further financial mismanagement and incompetence may change that assumption.

Keynesianism only works because of the ancient principle, “If you owe the bank 100 dollars, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much Donald Trump’s whole approach to finance.

Which is why Democrats aren’t going to care about the consequences of taxing and spending, cause they’ve got this thing called MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, or as I call it, Magical Monetary Theory, cause it holds that since government creates money, government is the source of capital, and therefore any degree of desired spending can be justified as necessary and beneficial to the economy. And the laugh is that the best evidence for this “deficits don’t matter” attitude were the Administrations of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, the free-marketest, most libertarianist president EVAR.

Like it matters, because there are limits to how much the President can do by executive order, and there are even more limits to how much the House can do without the Senate, because even if Democrats have a technical majority, in practice the chamber operates under a lazy version of the filibuster where the minority party doesn’t even have to hold the floor as long as they announce their attention to vote as a bloc to prevent a three-fifths majority vote. And this is why the liberal media was all aflutter at the announcement that Democrats are able to proceed with one more budget reconciliation bill this year (on the grounds that one was never passed for the 2020 fiscal year), because rather than hash things out with the other party like grownups (because the other party are not grownups), the Democrats who supposedly control the chamber have to wait for the word of the Senate Parliamentarian like she is the Oracle of Delphi.

There was an opinion recently from Jessica Levinson at MSNBC: “Democrats have the power to save democracy. Here’s why they won’t.“

Essentially, the only way Democrats can actually use their majority is to get rid of the filibuster, at least provisionally, but the main reason they don’t is that just as Republicans need it to keep such power as they still have while a minority, some Democrats want to keep the filibuster for the same reason, remembering how Harry Reid changed the cloture rules so that a filibuster is not required for judicial nominees, and then seeing how Mitch McConnell used that new standard to help Donald Trump flood the courts with new conservative appointees.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these unnamed Democrats that the only reason they even have a technical majority is because Raphael Warnock was elected Senator from Georgia, the 2020 runoff election was to fill the last two years of a seat where the previous (Republican) Senator had to retire, Warnock has to run again for a regular six-year term in 2022, and thanks to S.B. 202, it just got a lot harder for Democrats to keep that majority. And then guess what Mitch McConnell is going to do to the Democrats’ filibuster once he’s back in charge?

The Democrats did come up with HR1 (or S.1), the “For the People Act”, which is supposed to address a lot of the issues that Republican states want to create with voting, but that’s another one of the things that ain’t going to pass unless they ditch the filibuster. (Not like anyone who isn’t a Democrat will find it much help in opening up our politics.)

And if anyone ever does try to name those Democrats who are so dead set against actually acting like a majority, the name they usually get to is Joe Manchin, Senator from West Virginia. Manchin is notable in even being an elected Democrat in West Virginia, back from the days when that was the norm and not a blue moon event. He’s big on traditions, like back when he and other Senators could commisserate regardless of party. But however culturally conservative he might be, he’s also an old-time Democrat who believes in big spending, which is hard to see how his priorities as a representative and a Democrat align with his priorities as a Senator.

New York Magazine had this bit about how Manchin is actually keen on promoting an infrastructure bill that could actually be twice as costly as the $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan just passed. Such an expensive bill would seem to be at odds with his desire to maintain the (alleged) tradition of bipartisanship through the filibuster, since anything that expensive likely won’t get passed by Republicans.

“He should want to get rid of the filibuster because he suddenly becomes the most powerful person in this place — he’s the 50th vote on everything,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, sketching out, though not embracing, the argument.

When Senator Manchin wrote a Washington Post op-ed staking his position, including the idea that we shouldn’t even be using reconciliation to pass legislation, leftist blog Lawyers, Guns & Money rendered its interpretation: “The most natural reading of the op-ed is that Joe Manchin is an abject moron who has never paid attention to anything that’s happened in the Senate during his entire tenure there, but I don’t believe this is accurate. Essentially, there are two major possibilities:

• Manchin is setting up a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger defense when Republicans refuse to compromise on anything and Dems agree to some kind of filibuster reform Manchin can sell as technically maintaining his pledge.
• Manchin is perfectly fine with total gridlock, and is happy not to accomplish much of anything as long as people have to continually kiss his ass to even get judges and cabinet officials approved.

“Alas, while I used to have optimism about door #1 at this point it seems like the latter is much more likely.”

Problem is, if Manchin either seriously expects good faith from the Party of Trump or is trying to create a position to change his mind when they do not act in good faith, then refusing to endorse filibuster reform even as a negotiating tactic removes the only tool Democrats have to pressure Republicans with. As for gridlock, a Senate with no filibuster and a majority by tiebreaker makes Manchin The Man Whose Ass Must Be Kissed to an even greater degree, for the reason Senator Coons stated. Thus one returns to the rejected theory: That Joe Manchin is an abject moron who, if he ever paid attention to what the Senate was like in his entire tenure, is certainly not aware of what it’s like now.

Which means in the short run at least, the direction that “conservatives” claim to hate so much keeps reinforcing, as we turn more and more powers over to an imperial executive because Congress can’t get anything done. And that direction keeps getting more and more “radical left” because the former Republican Party refuses to act as a moderating influence because it has no more moderate influences within itself, and Democrats now know there is no point in dealing with them.

I used to think of our politics as a situation where the Democrats were Soviet Russia, the Republicans were Nazi Germany and America was Poland. It’s even more sad and absurd than that: It’s more like a fight between two squads of Star Wars Stormtroopers where neither team can hit a target, yet one of them falls down anyway.

And there’s always a place for the angry young man

With his fist in the air and his head in the sand

And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes

So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks

But his honor is pure and his courage as well

And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell

And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man

-Billy Joel, “Prelude/Angry Young Man”

So: February is over. And so is this year’s CPAC. The keynote speaker, of course, was Russia’s Viceroy in exile, Donald Trump, who actually told his crowd that he was looking forward to beating the Democrats a third time, so fat chance that any of these people will see reason. It’s pretty obvious that unless homeboy dies from swallowing a chicken bone whole, the Banana Republican Party is gonna hold the nomination open for him, and if he dies, they’re probably going to pave the way for Junior or Ivanka or one of his other sperm products. I guess it’s easier than coming up with new candidates or new ideas.

The former Party of Lincoln isn’t a political party anymore: It’s a pity party. In 2016, Trump achieved white-trash apotheosis by telling his audience what they wanted to hear (like ‘we’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it’) even though they, contrary to image, were educated enough to know this could never be true. Now, these same people, most of whom are old enough to remember when the Republican Party had a reputation for competence, are agreeing with Donald Trump and telling Donald Trump what he wants to hear, knowing now that it’s only lost them the White House and the Senate, not because they believe it, not because he really believes it, but just because it makes him feel better.

What is the alternative to the “alt-right”? The NeverTrump organization, The Lincoln Project, which was already in bad odor with a lot of “progressives” because it was run by exactly the kind of people who were mean to them before Trump took over the Republicans (and therefore, unlike the Left, knew how to fight him with his own weapons) practically disintegrated in the first two weeks of February when New York Magazine and other sources revealed that Project co-founder John Weaver was using his position to pressure young men into sex. I mean, this isn’t the first time that somebody I rooted for turned out to be a creepy sex predator, so let’s just say that February wasn’t a good month for me.

What’s the alternative to the Right? The Democrats, whom the Party of Trump will say are more lefty than Leon Trotsky at a Frida Kahlo party. Try telling that to the Left. Right now “progressives” are mad about at least two events in the Biden Administration, their bombing of Iranian allies in Syria, and their lack of support for Office of Management and Budget Director nominee Neera Tanden, who had to withdraw her nomination this Tuesday. This second issue is that much more rich because Tanden is one of those disingenuous, arrogant establishment liberals who has pulled off the diplomatic feat of pissing off both the woke Left and the Trumpnik Right. Not that it’s in any way hard to piss off either one, but it’s usually for radically different reasons.

It has been pointed out for instance, that Tanden is a Beltway insider and former head of the Center for American Progress, an ostensibly centrist think tank with strong Democratic Party roots, and while managing it catered to wealthy donors, including foreigners. She has also been slagged (mainly by Bernie Sanders fans) for “late-night, out-of-control rage-tweeting”, which is now the stated rationale for cloth-coat Republicans like Mitt Romney to oppose her nomination in the Senate, even though for most Republicans other than Romney that was hardly a disqualification for Trump being president. David Sirota:

“On the left, the Democratic noise machine is calling out the Republican party’s hypocrisy, while wrongly pretending that Tanden is a victim. These self-righteous Tanden defenders have gone completely silent about her actual record.

“Meanwhile, save for a few bits of solid policy-focused reporting, journalists are mostly hounding senators to get their reactions to Tanden’s tweets rather than asking them about her past behavior. Some media folk are even promoting the Neera-As-Victim mythology, somehow disregarding and distracting attention from Tanden’s alleged attack on a union of journalists.

“As evidenced by her record, Tanden is a victim in the same way war is peace, which is to say that she is not a victim, she is a perpetrator. But the Republican party, the Democratic party and the Washington media machine will not allow the record documenting that basic, verifiable, indisputable reality to be reviewed, litigated or considered. …

“Moreover, the Tanden brigade – and their online army now bullying reporters with racist vitriol – are cynically relying on a political and media environment that will allow such memory-holing to take place. They are banking on the brute force of their own denialist propaganda and a miasma of distracting misinformation to make sure that nobody recognizes that they are exposing themselves. They are making clear that their hope for career advancement, their desire for White House access, and their personal connections to a thinktank powerbroker are more important to them than any social cause.

“Taken together, such behaviors represent more than the death of expertise. They signify the premeditated murder of the most basic facts that are supposed to inform democratic decision-making. The motives here are unstated but obvious: nobody in either party or in the Washington media wants to center Tanden’s nomination on her actual record, because if that record becomes disqualifying for career advancement in Washington, it could set a precedent jeopardizing the personal career prospects of every creature slithering through the Washington swamp.”

As for the Syria bombing, I have to agree with a summary in New York Magazine’s website: “Biden has much more regard for constitutional checks and balances than Trump ever did, but the legal basis for Thursday’s action remains thin. To his credit, at least he attempted to make an argument on the basis of self-defense, and perhaps the threat the target posed was more imminent than we know. But most likely, the administration proceeded with the strike without asking Congress’s permission simply because the defense and national security brass knew they almost certainly wouldn’t get it and wouldn’t face any real consequences for acting without it. Dropping bombs in the Middle East without congressional approval has become a humdrum exercise by now.”

In other words, Democrats don’t seem to have learned anything either. And half of the reason we had the last four years is that America was sick and tired of Beltway business as usual no matter how obviously unqualified the alleged alternative to the swamp was. Biden won because Trump made the swamp that much more murky and vicious, but the reason bad politicians continue to win elections is because Americans have a notoriously short memory for what happened two to four years ago, and it’s that much easier to fleece an audience like the current Republican Party, which doesn’t want to remember what happened even yesterday.

On MSDNC in December, (before he was called to account over John Weaver) Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt told one of the talking heads that he’d officially switched to the Democratic Party. He said, “At the end of the day, there’s now one pro-democracy political party in the United States of America and that’s the Democratic Party. And I am a member of that party because of that. I’m a single issue voter. I believe in democracy.” Problem is, it’s a bit hard to present yourself as a defender of democracy if you’re actively working to reduce, not expand, the number of choices in the system. (It’s also possible that Schmidt’s claim of being a Democrat wasn’t on the up-and-up.) It may in fact be the case that there is only one practical choice, but again, America as a political consensus has a terrible memory, and when it is fueled primarily by negative partisanship, that means that there is always a chance that people will vote for the not-incumbent member of the duopoly no matter how objectively terrible it is. People apparently need to be reminded that that is how Trump won last time.

I keep seeing all these liberals and centrists tell me that a serious political system needs two parties to work, but I don’t know how serious they are when they say that. Basically they want the illusion of debate with a “Democrat Lite” party that is more generically conservative than they are. That’s half of why the Party of Trump is such a radicalized personality cult, because they really don’t like the Republican Party establishment either. And why should they? They’re just as much swamp creatures as Neera Tanden.

The problem with that zombie party is not that they disagree with Democrats, but that they disagree with reality. They are a malignant organ in the body politic. And frankly, I don’t see why the entire country (many of whom would still be Republican, except that they believe in heresies like that Earth-revolves-around-the-Sun thing) has to get swallowed up into the Democratic Party just to oppose the anti-reality insurgency, when that party isn’t even a good fit for the Left.

One of the better burns I’ve seen recently was somebody on social media pointing out that all the stuff they told us would happen under socialism is in fact what’s happening now under capitalism. “There will be lines for food! They won’t be able to keep power on! Medical care will be rationed! You won’t have real choices in elections!” Yes indeed. And I’m still not socialist, because all that stuff that socialists tell us is happening in this country IS in fact still happening in Venezuela, and if anything pissed me off about the Party of Trump winning Florida last election it was all the people who fled Cuba and Venezuela who were willing to vote for a corrupt thug to create a one-party regime. I guess it’s okay if you pay lip service to religion or something.

The problem in both cases is not whether the country is socialist or capitalist. The problem is whether public affairs are accountable to the whole community or merely to an elite (whether that be a political party or a business elite). And that is never going to change as long as the only alternative to the Republican Party is the Democratic swamp, and the only alternative to the Democratic Party is… what we saw at CPAC last weekend.

And I am not bringing up Democratic malfeasance to engage in whataboutism, because the premise of whataboutism is somewhere between “X is morally superior to Y because no matter how bad X is, Y is always worse” and “X doesn’t need to be better than Y because the two are morally equivalent.” The Right can’t play that game any more because after years of history it is too obvious that Republicans go out of their way to be more immoral and corrupt than Democrats when they get real power, escalating all the traits that they rightfully attacked when Bill Clinton was president, and combining them with incompetence to boot.

What I am saying is that if Y is going to be better than X, that has to be proven by action. You can’t just give one side a pass because you have good reason to not want the Republicans back in charge. The only way to break the cycle is to have something that is better than X or Y, and right now, the Libertarian Party ain’t it. However it has more potential to be “it” than anything else in America.

It’s pretty Goddamn obvious now that the Republicans not only will not learn anything, at this point they may not be able to. If Democrats expect me to vote for them again, they need to demonstrate that they’ve learned something after all this.

To Be Continued…

As we know, Rush Limbaugh died last week as a result of the cigars he held in his formerly nicotine-stained fingers. I leave it to you to decide what the “RIP” stands for.

The news of Rush’s death led to a LOT of negative comments on social media, which I shared in because of my current feelings about Limbaugh and the movement that he boosted. However my opinion isn’t that of a liberal who hated Limbaugh’s guts just because. I’m speaking as somebody who used to LIKE Limbaugh, and listened to his show (and to a lesser extent, Sean Hannity and Fox News) and while I may be more in agreement with liberals than I used to be, my antipathy toward Limbaugh is not because I always hated conservatism, but because I once agreed with it and hate what people like Rush turned it into. And even then, as with leftists saying “real socialism has never been tried” it’s a question of whether what I hate was a giant scam that I was persuaded had real merit or an agenda with real merit that was co-opted for a giant scam.

You have to understand, as much as some people think otherwise, politics is not eternal. I’ve already mentioned how liberals who find it hard to believe how Reagan destroyed their perfect world of regulations, upper tax brackets and unions don’t comprehend that at the time, a lot of people didn’t see that as a perfect world. I’ve heard it said, “if you remember the Seventies, you weren’t really there.” Well, I did remember that period, cause I was a kid, and unlike a lot of kids, I didn’t like drugs and didn’t like what they did to my peers. So I got to look at what was going on around me and I didn’t like it: Double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, an energy crisis, President Carter getting humiliated by the Iranians and even by a bunny rabbit. Reagan was my fuckin’ hero, frankly. If I’d been old enough, I would’ve voted for him. By the time I was old enough to vote, the Republican choice was George HW Bush. And as I said of him, he acted like Mr. Rogers when he should’ve acted like John Wayne, and he acted like John Wayne when he should have acted like Mr. Rogers.

So I was a conservative, or thought I was, and even in my conservatism I was still skeptical. I saw the whole political bag with a certain sense of humor that was lacking in most conservatives and certainly liberals. And of all the political observers, Rush Limbaugh was the least inclined to take the Beltway culture seriously. At the time, I considered that attitude a necessary corrective to politics as usual.

Rush was of course influential enough that when Newt Gingrich successfully won back Congress for the Republicans in 1994 – for the first time since 1954 – the Republicans invited Limbaugh to speak to the new Congressional delegates.

And among other things, he said, “You people in the press have got to understand something. This country is conservative, it has been for a long time. Get used to it. You tried to change it and you failed… (these reporters) were all trying to say in a roundabout way that I took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to mind-numbed robots. … there may be some talk show hosts who do that and I don’t think they’re the majority, I think the reason you’re sitting here tonight and liberals aren’t is that you understand the American people are intelligent. They are aware. They care.”

None of this is eternal. Even if both liberals and conservatives act like it is. Leftists assume that the government is built around the assertions of conservatives and reactionaries, when that was not always the case. The “conservatives” act as though the government is still built around the assertions of liberal Democrats and get-along-to-go-along Republicans, when that hasn’t been the case since at least Newt and Rush’s heyday. But both of those guys did perceive conservatism under attack, they did have a plan to get control of Washington, and they did execute it. That’s why there is still so much praise for Rush Limbaugh in conservative circles, because they remember when Rush was a serious influence on politics, hard as that may be to imagine today.

But then, it’s a bit hard to imagine today that Rudy Guiliani was once called “America’s Mayor” after 9/11. Which is for a similar reason.

Limbaugh is today less remembered for a constructive influence than a destructive one. For example, saying that Chelsea was the White House dog during the Clinton Administration. I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t care. I mean, the whole point of being transgressive is that you don’t care about other people’s peer pressure and political correctness. But a lot of us who did listen to Rush and fell out of that habit did listen because we thought conservatism was supposed to be promoting something positive. Capitalism, opportunity, the chance to make a success of yourself, and challenging government mainly when it got in the way of all that. Over the years, it became obvious that even if there was a core there, that’s not what was being advertised. Years later, I wrote that the problem with “conservative” philosophy was that there really ISN’T a conservative philosophy and that to be conservative means to be conservative relative to something. And that was the problem with trying to convey conservatism as a positive philosophy, and I think why the Republican Congress never really tried to do that even back when they aspired to ideas: “Conservatives don’t get anything done because they don’t know what they want. And they don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they ARE.”

Over the years I’d also noticed that Rush was starting to somehow… lose it, as a radio host. His voice seemed off, and he rambled. It wasn’t for some time that he announced he was going deaf, and that was only after he had to respond to investigations that he was using unprescribed painkillers. (Which wasn’t his only incident with unprescribed drugs. In 2006, he returned from the Dominican Republic and customs officials confiscated a supply of Viagra that was not in his name. After the incident, Rush told his audience, ‘I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it.’)

But I also mentioned in my piece that if one wants to find out what happened to conservatism, or why the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan turned into the Trump Fan Club, the mentality that led to Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere:
“Conor Friedersdorf had an excellent column in The Atlantic where he talked about how one of Rush Limbaugh’s own listeners (along with a columnist at RedState) called him on supporting Trump even when it was clear to many he would flip-flop on immigration, even when Rush said “I never took him seriously on this!”

“But that’s something I picked up on a while ago. Back when I was still conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh’s show, I remembered that right up to the last week of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign against Rick Fazio, he was predicting that she would find some reason to back out. Or that she would end up losing. Of course, she didn’t. I distinctly remember the day after the 2006 midterm elections (when Democrats under President George W. Bush regained the House) when Limbaugh angrily confessed, “I feel liberated. … I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.” Heck, way back in 1992 (when Rush had a TV show) I remember a TV Guide cover with a blurb on an article, “Rush Limbaugh: I’m so-o-o happy Clinton won!”

In other words, whether he wanted to admit it or not, Rush was a political hack. I’d mentioned in another column that I was reminded of another incident where I deliberately tried to go over Fox News programming for a whole day to get my impressions of it, and it just so happened to be the day that Malik Hasan shot up Fort Hood, so I got to see that Fox News does have a real news operation, and the fact that there was real news to report put the midday events in contrast to the speculation of opinion pundits like Bill O’Reilly (now Tucker Carlson) in prime time, where Fox makes its real money and ratings. I said that that wasn’t the end of my watching Fox News, but I started watching it less and less, cause it felt like I’d seen the wires behind the magic trick. That’s pretty much how I felt about Rush saying that he was carrying the water for the Republican Party. Who was making the implication that he was? Wasn’t Rush the brave truth-teller against the RINO establishment? No. He was there to tell his audience to support the Party. Calling himself a water carrier was simply an admission of what should have been obvious by then.

I’ve been saying this many times, many ways, but in politics, you don’t succeed unless you give people something to fight FOR. And when Democrats didn’t figure that out, they lost to Republicans in 2004, and in 2016. Republicans won under Reagan and (sometimes) under the Bush family because they associated their party with positive traits that Americans wanted to be associated with. Apparently that’s just too hard now. Rush could have used his golden microphone to present constructive ideas for what Republicans could do, as opposed to just making fun of Democrat women and using “socialism” as a Devil word. I say this because I seem to recall in the old days that he would come up with ideas. But I guess that just wasn’t commercial. Rush Limbaugh, like Rudolph Giuliani and even Donald Trump, took his ‘tell-it-like-is’ reputation, and rather than use it to tell it like it is, became a cartoon character whose job was to amuse a limited demographic. And as with the demagogue who basically stole his act and took it to the White House, a lot of people took him as seriously as the Gospel (more seriously, in fact) when his ideas were becoming less and less serious.

Now that is okay if you see your role in the culture as being a jester or wrestling heel, but it’s not okay when you’re trying to lead the free world. Even in this country, you normally win elections by getting the most votes, and the flukes where that has not been the case have convinced the Republican Party that they can survive on the political campaign equivalent of AM radio niche programming, and that’s why they are where they are now. The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it. Because if the uncommitted middle of the country can compare what woke cancel culture is telling them about you with what you actually do, and they see you are not the racist, sexist, whatever they are painting you as, you can prevail. But if you go out of your damn way to be associated with racists and other knuckle-draggers, then that’s on you. That’s how Joe Biden won Arizona, and Georgia, and the Electoral College by 74 Electoral votes, because even if Trump got more votes than he did in 2016, he got that many more people pissed at him who might not have been otherwise.

When all you have is negative partisanship, and you’re an effective minority, you’re setting yourself up to fail against a majority whose negative partisanship is earned by your actions. Of course, Biden also had positive partisanship, in that he seemed to be a real human being and professional government official, not a celebrity who made Snidely Whiplash look like Albert Schweitzer.

As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” I accidentally observed the same thing about Rush’s connection to Trump years before Rush’s death, as Trump was starting to take over the Republican Party, and concluded, “This attitude has been going on for quite some time, at least by the start of the second Obama term. The Republican Party has been Trump’s party for years. They were just waiting for him to show up.” And that’s because there isn’t a whole lot of space between Trump and Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush at least was coming off an intellectual tradition of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, and what he ended up doing was making something that didn’t even deserve to be called Zombie Reaganism. His fan club, who professed to disdain empty-headed celebrity millionaires, ended up becoming “mind-numbed robots” to a radio celebrity and a “reality” TV star, only one of whom could make a claim to being a self-made man.

Among the various other NeverTrump conservative autopsies of Limbaugh, on the 19^th Andrew Sullivan said (on Substack): “As with Roger Ailes, it’s stupid to deny Limbaugh’s media genius. He created an entire world for his ditto heads to live and breathe in; he mastered an often hilarious gift for self-mockery disguised as self-flattery; and he had an unerring ability to expose and prick the self-righteous humbug of pious lefties. I will confess to laughing out loud many times at his blasphemy.

“And in the context of the once-smothering liberal monopoly of mass media of the 1980s, this insurrection was ballsy and overdue. But like the Gingrich phase of conservatism in the 1990s, which also broke a long-held liberal monopoly on the House of Representatives, it curdled over time. The tribal mockery was funny when allied with a coherent and counter-intuitive defense of conservative ideas and arguments. But as the years went by, and as conservatism remained calcified in a Reaganite zombie phase, the mockery began to replace the ideas completely, faute de mieux. What was originally an argument became merely an attitude, like the grin that slowly became all that was left of the Cheshire Cat. And with the emergence of a figure like Trump, who was a walking assault on conservative ideas and sensibility, the attitude became detached from any principle but tribalism, and based itself in exactly the kind of personal cultism Limbaugh innovated for himself.

“He was as personally kind and generous, we are told, as he was publicly shameless. And it’s important to see the man as a complicated whole. But what he did to conservatism was ultimately to facilitate its demise as a functional governing philosophy; and what he did to the country was intensify its cynicism and tribalism. Few did so much to popularize conservative values; and few did more, in the end, to discredit them.”

In fact, the real summary of Limbaugh’s spirit was already written over ten years before he died:

https://www.theonion.com/i-dont-even-want-to-be-alive-anymore-1819584611?utm_campaign=The+Onion&utm_content=1613585718&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=facebook