Trumpism becomes conservatism

(and vice versa!)

I’ve said more than once that the Trumpification of the American Right is pretty much complete. Most formerly anti-Trump conservative writers have made themselves totally abject to him, while some “just-the-tip” Trumpers have pretended he has accommodated himself to them, or that they have only given him their support as a favor even though they are far too good for him.

But let me tell you in greater detail why I think that happened so easily.

It’s not that conservative intellectuals were doing so great before Trump emerged as a candidate. Back in 2014, for example, I was noticing that the guys from the bleeding-edge of intellectual conservatism, the “reformcons” (alternately “reformicons”) who were seeking a new direction for the movement after the second Obama victory, seemed, to put it politely, unserious. Example:

Room to Grow offered to “lower the risk associated with hiring long-term unemployed workers” for businesses,” said [American Enterprise Institute’s Natalie] Scholl. How? “By temporarily lowering the minimum wage,” she cheerily explained. As Room to Grow co-author Michael R. Strain put it, that exorbitant $7.25 required by the fascist Feds — never mind the $10.10 Obama proposes; that’s just crazy — subject[ed] employers to a “risk on long-term unemployed workers,” who “are already seen as quite risky compared to applicants who are coming from other jobs or have been employed more recently.”

Under Reform, workers would be eligible for “a temporary subsidy through an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit or a wage subsidy,” Strain added. How much the worker would actually get is left open — considering that reform conservatives also promised to lower his minimum wage, it might not be very much (this “will create winners and losers,” Strain admitted; “for example, it is likely that some firms would hire a long-term unemployed worker at a $4 minimum wage…”). But the important thing is the employer would pay him less; plus, this would add a burden on the government that would help destroy it, thus advancing Freedom.

(You should read the whole thing, it’s still pretty funny.)

You get the idea: Reformcons were basically proposing all their old, unpopular policies all over again but, since it was obvious that the punters were no longer enthusiastic about them, adding new and fancier explanations that might impress people with intellectual pretensions —that is, the sort of people who traditionally hired people like them to write for magazines.

My favorite reformcon one-liner came from Sam Tanenhaus, who admitted that a 2015 “revenue-neutral flex fund” (LOL) proposed by Senator Marco Rubio as a conservative-friendly anti-poverty measure

wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

From our current COVID perspective, this is totally ridiculous. But, let me tell you, it was ridiculous then, too — and, as I see it, that’s how Donald Trump found his opening in 2015.

I believe the Republican base was then as impatient with the old fuck-the-poor GOP strategies as everyone else. That wasn’t because they didn’t want to fuck the poor; the base was, then as now, mostly made up of smallholders and the would-be rich, and they hated the poor and all the disenfranchised, and any hint of their empowerment, because they thought anything that benefited such people would cost them respect and revenue.

But the base was impatient because, after the 2008 financial collapse, which had so rattled the nation that it agreed to elect a black Democrat president, the justifications for fucking the poor that the Party had been dishing out for decades had become worn out, insulting and, above all, ineffective.

They didn’t blame the message, though; they blamed the messengers.

At least their avatars on the Internet and on TV did. They were mad at the Romney people who’d lost what they thought was a sure shot to take the White House in 2012, and blamed his milquetoast, temporizing manner — just as they had previously blamed John McCain for not ripping the bark off Obama in 2008.

You and I might see why McCain and Romney thought yelling at Obama was a bad political strategy. But imagine how the conservative base, accustomed as it was to successful, full-throated assertions of their righteousness and superiority, felt about all that pussyfooting.

It helps if you actually know any Republicans (apart from the country-club types who have cocktails with their Democratic friends and think it’s all a great game). They’re not like the Democrats who, in the face of the Reagan Revolution, sniffed the winds and embraced DLC neoliberalism (or, for that matter, the New Labour types in Britain who later embraced Tony Blair). Those Democrats had lost their mid-century hubris, and felt they had to meet the voters where they imagined them to be, and once in power see what they could get away with. (That usually turns out to be not much, which annoys their situational allies like me.)

But everything in the modern history and temperament of the GOP had taught them that all the sweetness of victory was in domination. And yet here were their alleged champions playing patty-cake with a man they considered a black communist black Muslim black.

And they knew in their guts that they weren’t going to do any better next time with a “revenue-neutral flex fund.”

They were even more mad at the media than usual, and at the leftists with which they considered it allied. Most of you remember how Obama’s rust-belt-jobs policies clinched Ohio and thus the election for him, and think Romney was lucky to get as close as he did. But you may have forgotten Karl Rove on Fox News on election night 2012, demanding the network’s analytics team prove that Obama had won Ohio. That was unprecedented and deeply weird — Rove making a stink and confronting the number-crunchers, who looked at him as if he were simple-minded and said, essentially, no my dude, we do this for a living.

You may also have forgotten how excited many conservatives were then by Dean Chambers’ “unskewed” polls that showed Romney was on track to win — and who, when Romney lost, claimed it proved the election had been stolen.

Andy Kroll of Mother Jones, reporting on November 12, 2012:

Post-election, there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any of these states, and certainly nothing suggesting Obama’s wins in those four states depended on voter fraud. So Slate‘s Dave Weigel asked Chambers for evidence backing up his serious accusations. What followed was a collision between fact-based reporting and fact-free magical thinking:

“I’m getting credible information of evidence in those states that there [are] enough numbers that are questionable and could have swung the election,” he says. “I’m only putting good credible information on there, like the actual vote counts, reports, and mainstream publications reporting voter fraud. There’s a lot of chatter, though. There are articles people have sent me that don’t hold up. Crazy stuff.”

What’s not crazy? “Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes,” says Chambers. “Even Larry Sabato said that should be looked into.” (I’ve looked into this: 57 precincts gave McCain no votes in 2008)…

SOUND FAMILIAR?

At that point, Donald Trump had already appeared at the 2011 CPAC doing his belligerent drunk Archie Bunker routine (“$4.54 for gas. Get used to it, folks... nobody calls up OPEC and says, ‘That — price — better — get — lower — and it better get lower fast!’”). But no one was then taking Trump seriously except the Russians, Paul Manafort, and various scumbags — and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

Douthat, a huge reformcon fan and co-author of reformcom book The Party of Sam’s Club (the tenets of which, as described by a not-entirely-unsympathetic Ezra Klein, included “a tax cut that offered the bottom 20 percent an average of $23 and the top 1 percent an average of $260,000”), said this about Trump in a 2015 column called — believe it or not — “How Trump Might Help Reform Conservatives”:

First, I’m not sure it’s true that Trump’s campaign is substance free: Detail free, maybe, but he’s clearly associated himself with a kind of nationalistic politics that bears some resemblance to the Perot phenomenon, and some resemblance to European right-populism. That’s a combination of ideas that conspicuously lacks support within the nation’s elite — but it’s one that has a fair amount of popular and bipartisan appeal...

Sounds prescient! But then:

Now of course as manifested by Trump this anti-Bloombergist spirit is crude, clownish, extreme, politically unrealistic, and so on down the list...

But there’s a real opportunity here for reformers as well.

!!!!????

Because so long as a protean, ideologically-flexible figure like Trump is setting the populist agenda in the party, you’re less likely to have stringent ideological tests applied to other candidates and their ideas; so long as the voter anxieties he’s tapping into are front and center in the debate, you’re less likely to see other candidates ignoring those anxieties while chasing support from donors or ideological enforcers instead.

Ha ha ha. Like You-Know-Who supporter Franz Von Papen, Douthat told the nervous trimmers in his readership that Trump’s “crude, clownish, extreme, politically unrealistic” shtick could be used to promote the more ordinary “reform” capitalist interests of his own reactionary movement without letting things get too out of hand.

I don’t think Douthat miscalculated — I think he knew that, once in power, Trump would be a danger to democracy itself, but he didn’t give a shit — because democracy wasn’t what he wanted. Seriously: What parts of Douthat’s agenda, or any conservative intellectual’s agenda, did not dovetail with Trump’s, and vice versa? None, that’s what — and if you’re in doubt about that, see Douthat’s recent “Trump? Another coup? Ah, you don’t know him like I do!” bullshit.

We can’t expect Douthat to be held to account in any way, even if the next inevitable Trump coup attempt fails. But it should be noticed that he’s done everything he can to normalize Trumpism since then and, when Trump tries again to overturn the will of the voters, he will have made it easier for him to do so. And he won’t be the only one.

Part II here.