Same Time Next Year

Party poopers redux

BRET STEPHENS: Well, David, it’s hard to believe it’s been a year since we came here right after Speaker McCarthy was seated to bemoan the state of the Republican Party, yet I see by my “clip file” it has. Since I’m usually writing about the excesses of the Left and cancel culture, I haven’t had time to revisit the subject until this morning. But now that I have, I must say I’m disappointed; now it’s 2024 and even my faint hopes for the GOP have gone unrealized.

DAVID BROOKS: I believe last year you said something about the GOP’s “road to recovery” and how it would “require some courageous and credible conservatives to speak up and denounce the current direction of the party.”

STEPHENS: Nolo contendere, David. I did hope the more sensible conservatives would step up and give the GOP a good talking to. But it seems that, as the Republicans have gotten even more radical, nearly every prominent conservative in America has just gone crazy right along with them. I just don’t get it!

BROOKS: I hear you. I believe I mentioned Yuval Levin as one of the conservatives for whom I had high hopes. He used to be so measured, so deliberate in his reasoning!  I was thinking of his National Review essay after the 2022 midterms that pinpointed Trump as the problem. But now, just one year later, it’s as if Yuval’s a different person — he doesn’t seem to care whether DeSantis or Trump wins so long as they “own the libs,” which is the kind of dumb language he’s using now. I mean he actually refers to the two candidates as “The GOP’s Twin Towers”! It’s just the lowest kind of pandering, not to mention in very poor taste.