Republicans are responsible for what appears set to befall them
The Trumpism phenomenon has demonstrably worked out disastrously
There is still one core understanding shared by actual conservatives and Trumpists, even at this late date: that the Left’s fierce determination to impose identity politics and redistribution on the American populace would be fatal to this nation if it ever got an unimpeded opportunity to achieve its aims.
Even in the Obama era, there were sufficient political and cultural checks on the progressive agenda that its “accomplishments” - The “Affordable” Care Act, US participation in the Paris Climate Accord and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, erosions of religious freedom - were reified in compromised form and subject to subsequent challenge.
That won’t be the case if this election is a landslide in favor of the Democrats.
The Trumpists told us that conservatism, as conventionally understood since the 1950s, was woefully inadequate to the task of decisively sidelining leftism as a threat to the American enterprise. Some got quite nasty about it, painting conservatism’s thought leaders as effete pointy-heads who only thought they were moving the needle with conferences and panel discussions while leftism continued its relentless advance on the ground. Indeed, the word “sissy” has shown up regular in the work of a particularly obnoxious Trump-supporting columnist.
We need a pugnacious outsider, they said, someone who holds norms of conduct such as decorum in such disregard that he can’t help but come across as crude and mean. They either said that the Very Stable Genius’s sharp elbows and unfiltered blurtings were of no consequence, or they celebrated his abrasiveness and erratic ways, held them up as admirable traits excellently suited to the times.
We’re way past the point of speculating about how turning the Republican Party wholesale over to this new phenomenon is going to turn out. Four years’ worth of evidence is in.
The polarization that had been underway for years has intensified to the point that only 20 percent of those within the two broadly defined camps comprising our society say they share any of the same values as those within the other camp. 56 percent of post-Americans say they’re better off than they were four years ago, but it doesn’t help Trump since they also say that Trump lacks presidential qualities. He’s clearly perceived to so sorely lack them that better material circumstances isn’t the deciding factor in how they lean.
The effects of Trump being Trump aren’t confined to the man now. Tossup and purple states are leaning toward the Biden-Harris ticket, but heretofore reliably red areas of the map are now in play.
Why have the prospects for any kind of countervailing force that could stave off imposition of the leftist vision become measurably more grim of late?
What we’re seeing is something that was inevitable all along: the confluence of personal failings and policy consequences.
The tweets have become more juvenile. Trump made an ass of himself at the first debate with Biden. He’s sounded desperate in his attempts to make his own COVID-19 treatment regimen look like something that could be a panacea for the entire public. His ripping-the-mask-off-while-standing-on-the-Truman-balcony stunt was reminiscent of the Bible-waving-in-front-of-the-church bit of theater. He’s thrown his own team for a loop on two occasions in the past couple of days, abruptly calling off Mnuchin’s stimulus talks with Pelosi, when there was no downside to continuing them, and announcing that all US troops in Afghanistan would be brought home by Christmas. (You’ll recall that in 2017 he, in the course of bad-mouthing Obama-era policy, said that arbitrary timetables for withdrawing troops from world hot spots was no way to proceed.)
He has, despite five years of shooting off his mouth to the contrary, no plan regarding health care. Instead, we get isolated lurches such as the lame attempt, weeks out from the election, to bribe older voters with “incredible” drug-discount cards.
What’s to be done at this late date?
Nothing but watch the nation burn, in my estimation. The Lincoln Project solution - going all in for Biden-Harris and maybe a Democrat vote all the way down the ballot - is no solution at all. It strikes me as having a tenuous relationship with reality to think that a vote for the antithesis of what one stands for is a positive way forward.
Harris is that real deal. Her views on health care, the environment, human sexuality and race are not significantly different from those of any other Democrat contender for president during the primary phase of this election cycle.
And it looks like that’s what we’re going to get. Maybe even a Senate controlled by their likes as well.
How could this juncture have been prevented?
I do think that Trumpists had a point insofar as the leftist agenda was obviously not really impeded over the last several decades and certainly not during the Obama years. Where they have been dead wrong, though, is in thinking that Trump’s inconsistency would be an effective way to fight the Left’s advance. Scrappiness per se is useless when the administration, and the person at the top, cannot decide between a free market (as exemplified by tax cuts) and protectionism (as exemplified by tariffs), or between support for freedom in education (as exemplified by support for charter schools) and top-down curriculum control (as exemplified by the proposed “patriotic education commission” initiative).
Along with the inconsistency, there is, of course, his repulsiveness. His insult-laden style of interaction turns off the leaders of allied nations. It turns off US generals. It turns off suburban women voters.
No, the real lack of spine within the Republican Party and the right-of-center sociopolitical public generally was demonstrated by their failure to mount a swift and early resistance against this phenomenon. They were aided in their failure by the singular focus on the bottom line exhibited by the owners of supposedly conservative media companies who saw dollar signs in the pro-Trump stance of their star talk-show hosts and columnists.
The Republican Party looks set to get what it deserves, good and hard, and I say that as a staunch three-pillar conservative who wishes so much that it could be otherwise that despair is never far from frames of mind I entertain these days.
It’s very late in the day as we stand on the precipice.