Rotting from the head

Even conservative "intellectuals" can't bother to fake it anymore

U.S. State Department

Sometimes I actually feel bad, though in a very limited way, that we have been forced to acknowledge there never was any such thing as conservative policy — just the “irritable mental gestures” to which Lionel Trilling condensed it in 1950. It makes a lot of the time and effort I’ve spent on it seem wasted.

When I started in this racket, I more often than not thought that when conservatives — those who were not insane, I mean — said ridiculous things in defense of their policies, it came from a sense of duty — that they had some idea what they were defending was indefensible, and might even have some lingering sense of shame at having to humiliate themselves publicly with threadbare defenses of same, but persisted because that was what they were paid to do (as opposed to thinking for themselves, which always pays much worse), and felt they had to come up.

That was part of the fun of my Farting Jonah Goldberg series — the idea that, the further he waded into absurdities, the more his guts would rebel, as in this one from 2013 in which Goldberg, who had decided to blame Republican South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s Appalachian Trail adultery scandal on liberals because they had destroyed morality so that even married Republicans didn’t know how to keep a marriage together anymore, expressed admiration of Sanford’s wife for “kicking him to the curb,” then mused:

Of course, one could argue that Huma [Abedin-Weiner], Hillary [Clinton], and Silda [Spitzer] were more “pro-marriage” in that they stayed by their husbands. And that just gets us back to how the culture has changed. It’s a fascinating thing….

The escalating gastric distress that, I posited, ensued (“‘Fascinating thing’ is Goldberg code for ‘holy shit, I just obliterated my own point fart, fart...’”) was based on the conceit that the unremovable legacy pledge was trying to put it over and failing, and knew that he was failing, and the more he tried to extricate himself the worse he made it.  

Comedy gold! But over time I got bored with Goldberg. Part of it was that he obtained a humorously-named quasi-academic sinecure and his prose — now in long papers loaded with citations but still devoid of intelligence — became so gassy it became an ordeal to spelunk it for jokes.

But mainly, the problem was that I lost faith. That Goldberg never got any better suggested to me that either he had an actual cognitive disability, in which case it was impolite to laugh, or that I had been wrong in the first place about him ever caring what came out of his pie hole or whether it made any sense or not.

I am increasingly inclined toward the latter interpretation, in part because they put the guy back on CNN, for heaven’s sake, but also because of the general turn in conservative discourse in the Trump era. Maybe it’s gotten more obvious or maybe the scales have just fallen from my eyes, but I seldom see anything from conservatives these days that even meets the general description of an argument, whether in the windy perorations of Hillsdale pseuds or the braying of talk radio/podcast goons.

I was reminded of this by Margaret Talbot’s essay on Sam Alito in The New Yorker. It’s pretty good and hair-raising on its own terms, sketching from shifting perspectives the evolution of Alito from rightwing law-school grind to made man in the Movement to theocracy’s best friend on the High Court. Talbot’s contempt for Alito’s jurisprudence is evident and, judging mainly from Dobbs, deserved, but the thing that struck me in the essay was Alito’s remarks out of court, at social events — what he said about what he believed when he was unconstrained by the rigors of legal writing.

For example, at a 2020 speech before the Federalist Society at which, Talbot says, “in certain moments, [Alito] sounded like a conservative talk-radio host deploying a set of tried-and-true culture-war tropes,” Alito bitched about how much you could hear George Carlin’s “seven words you can’t say on the air” on TV these days, and followed up:

At the same time, there were “seventy times seven” things that you couldn’t say on college campuses or at many workplaces. “You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Alito bemoaned. “Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.” As Alito saw it, “In certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right,” while “the ultimate second-tier constitutional right, in the minds of some, is the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms”…

In [another recent speech in] Rome, Alito said, “Think of the increasing number of young Americans whose response, when asked to name their religion, is to say ‘None.’ Think of those who proclaim that religion is bad. What can we say to such people to convince them that religious liberty is worth protecting?”

Talbot points out the holes in the reasoning here, and I’m sure you can do just as well. But what strikes me is, as with the reasoning in Alito’s Dobbs decision, this is no better thought-out than any other rightwing think-piece you might find in the wild. And this isn’t some numbnuts at the Daily Caller talking — this is a powerful judge whose very power is supposed to come entirely from his reasoning.

We’ve stopped even noticing that the avatar of modern conservatism is a real-estate thug whose yammerings make Diamond and Silk sound like the Algonquin Round Table, and that all his heirs apparent emulate his crudity and stupidity. But it’s really something to see that even the conservatives who are supposed to at least fake it are, when they’re off the clock from churning fancy documents, every bit as crude and stupid.

(I will also mention that Talbot quotes the repulsive Josh Hammer and does him the favor of not using the original pre-stealth-edit version of his quote, a favor he in no way deserves.)