A GO AT THE RIGHT

In Wednesday's blog, I promised I'd "have a go" at the political Right, if only to prove what I have so often claimed in this forum: that I am basically a centrist, with zero devotion to any party. It would be understandable if you thought me a liar in this regard. I so often "have a go" at the Left that you might think me one of those fakers who insists they don't drink anyone's Kool Aid while secretly guzzling the stuff by the gallon. The stark fact is that I rubbish the Left more often than the right out of sheer selfishness: as a writer, and as someone who respects art in all of its mediums and forms, I sense more of a danger from said Left than I do from the Right. I truly believe, and have argued at great length, that it is Wokeism which remains the most imminent threat to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of expression, without which art cannot exist. I am well aware, however, that to many millions of people, the politics of the Right are more threatening and also pose greater immediacy. And regardless of this, I'm also aware that the Right, in its present form, is terribly dangerous to everyone, including its most fervent adherents.

I am fifty years old, which is old enough to remember a very different political landscape. In the 1980s, for example, "Conservative" and "Republican" were not synonymous. The Conservatives were a wing of the Republican party, which also included Moderates and even a hefty proportion of people who identified as Democrats but agreed with the Right on foreign policy and certain other specific issues. (My father, a lifelong journalist who covered the White House for many years, called such people "Truman Democrats.") But regardless of what you called them, they existed, and in great numbers.

The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan had an ideology which was easy to identify. It favored a very tough foreign policy in regards to the Cold War, heavy military spending, and a sharply limited, hands-off Federal government. It was pro-business, anti-regulation, and socially conservative, and in this ideology it had been consistent for decades. It was, however, very much part of the "establishment" of American politics, in that it was effective in neutralizing its more radical elements -- keeping the fanatics and outright nuts in the basement, as it were, where they could not alienate the ordinary voter. It was also very hardheaded and realistic beneath its bluster. Reagan once famously retorted to someone who asked him why, since he didn't believe in abortion, he didn't do more to have it abolished, with the words, "Because I'm not insane." He understood -- the whole leadership understood -- that there were some issues near and dear to Conservatives which, if he pressed them in the legislature, would only lead to his political destruction. Reagan was smart enough to understand that he needed the Reagan Democrats, and could not afford to alienate them. Put another way: he was a politician, and knew how to deliver on his promises when it served his purposes, and to promise without delivering when it was good for him and his party. He had the sense to see there was a sharply drawn line between politics -- "the art of the possible," which require cold calculation and good sense, and ideology, whose chief appeal is that it requires neither.

The resurgence of the Republican Party after Nixon, which led to Reagan's ascendancy, owed a great deal to the fact that they were seen as the tougher and more ruthless of the two choices Americans had at the ballot box. Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was taken out of an unwanted semi-retirement to basically run the United States Navy during WW2, noted that he owed the resurrection of his career to one brutal truth: "When the going gets tough, the send for the sons of bitches." The demise of the Soviet Union and most of its vassal states ended the Cold War, and with it, the need for those Sons of Bitches, the Republicans, who at least knew how to play rough. Bush the First's administration was essentially a momentum presidency, and lasted only a single term, and Bush the Second's presidency, which followed Clinton's tenure, did not really reflect the wishes of the American people. W.'s victory in the first election was questionable at best, and even this outcome was really the result of the fact he ran against an equally unexciting candidate in Al Gore. His re-election was due almost entirely to the fact he was a wartime president, and Americans strongly dislike changing their leaders in mid-conflict. He was never a darling of the Right, being viewed, like so many in the Party, as RINO's, opportunistic con men who really didn't give a damn about ideology, only power, and had long ago surrendered on key policy issues as well as the burgeoning culture war. These people talked the talk, but they did not walk the walk.

And what was the walk? A friend of mine who was active in the Tea Party movement of the late 2000s expressed it thusly: "We want Republicans who will actually DO SOMETHING about illegal immigration, governmental, regulations, abortion, political correctness, taxes, and gun control." This is by no means a comprehensive definition of the movement, but it is probably representative of how many others who supported it felt, and it was astonishingly successful in suddenly and radically reshaping the Republican party's leadership from that of smiling, smooth talking car salesmen into firebrands and idealogues who either believed in what they said or were faking it so well, through their actions, that it didn't make a difference.

And this new Republican party, being born in frustration and anger, made that frustrated anger central to its identity. For this we can largely thank Newt Gingrich, who decided in the late 1970s that the real problem in Washington was civility and compromise. He didn't want Elephants and Donkeys playing basketball together in the Capitol gym, or eating lunch at the Ebbit Grill, or drinking beer in Adams-Morgan, which had always been the custom of these supposed mortal enemies when off-camera (I saw it myself). So throughout his political career, he worked tirelessly to draft a new playbook in which the goal was victory by scorched earth and not a handshake agreement. And he succeeded. The increasing temperature of political rhetoric, and the Republican voters' eagerness -- not willingness, eagerness -- to tolerate that rhetoric, made for a very different atmosphere in American politics. Of course, the Left had been radicalising by degrees for many years, but the Right was radicalizing like a pot of water placed on a burner turned all the way up. The fanatics and crazies who Reagan would have deftly locked in the hold were now threatening to run the ship. The trouble was, they lacked a leader. The Republicans eyeing the office during Obama's tenure were all professional politicians, and no matter how loudly they bleated their commitment to the new Republicanism, they still looked, and felt, like insiders.

Then, along came Donald Trump.

Trump ignited the great mass of deeply frustrated Republicans with his now-infamous "build the wall" speech -- a promise, incidentally, he never delivered upon or even came close to delivering upon. By and large the platform he put forth was incoherent, inconsistent and incomplete, but it hit the right buttons. The Tea Party had identified the source of the discontent: Trump drove a spike directly into its taproot, releasing the pent-up sap of frustration. He quickly grasped that what he was running on was not a policy but emotions and feelings. Some Americans were deeply alienated by "politics as usual" and shifting cultural winds. Many Americans were tired of political correctness. Most Americans were sick of "the Establishment." So Trump threw a harness over the restless bad temper of the masses and rode it into office. And fair play to him for utilizing this energy. It existed for a reason, and the incompetence and neglect of the Right's old leadership was only part of that reason. The Left was doing its absolute best to estrange everyone by increasingly allowing its own culture warriors to dictate both message and policy. The white working class, 75 million strong, used to reside largely in the back pocket of the Democratic Party, who were generally union-friendly. The ceaseless "straight white male bashing," the aggressive environmentalism conducted without suitable propaganda to help ease down the bitter pill to people like coal-miners (whose institutions were being wiped out by change), coupled with a bizarre streak of anti-Americanism -- rather a curious feature of an American political party, nicht wahr? -- drove millions away from their tickets. Their defeat in 2016 was a deserved defeat, all the moreso because they failed to immediately diagnose the cause: their own ideology would not let them accept that what they were cookin', not everyone wanted to eat.

But we are discussing the Right, and while it took the White House in 2016 and for a time held both houses of Congress, too, it showed almost immediately why it was, and is, completely unsuited for power -- why it will always be unsuited to and unworthy of power, so long as it retains its present shape.

The old Right was many things, but it was not intellectually bankrupt. Men like William Safire, George Will, William F. Buckley and even Pat Buchanan were among those who nurtured the intellectual roots of modern conservatism. Who crafted arguments and wrote position papers, speeches, and books in support of conservative and libertarian ideas, and who lent credence to Republican policies.

In addition to its intellectual bedrock, the old Right was also quite efficient -- sometimes brutally efficient -- at maintaining order and discipline within its own ranks. It was efficient because most of its leadership understood how to wield the power they had, and how to compromise when that power was lacking. And because it respected tradition, because it respected decorum, it was able to restrain some of its own worst impulses toward the acquisition of power. Even someone as dimwitted and morally compromised as George W. Bush grasped that the president was not a king, and should not want to be a king, even though, in the modern era, there is very little preventing any president from effectively becoming so.

It is hardly a coincidence that the entire intellectual wing of the Republican Party went into revolt the moment Trump emerged as frontrunner for the nomination: indeed, almost the whole of the Never Trump movement is made up of intellectual Republicans. They knew brain death when they saw it, and they judged -- correctly -- that in addition to being almost incredibly uninformed and ignorant about everything a president needed to know to govern effectively, or even to qualify as a human being, Trump was also completely unteachable. His party was to be a party of anti-intellectualism, in which science was laughed at, critical thinking was abolished and "expert" became a dirty word (unless of course it was Trump claiming the expertise). And it is this culture rather than Trump's own semi-willful stupidity that makes it so dangerous. To gain traction in the party nowadays, it is necessary to emulate Trump, and to emulate Trump, one must either hide one's intellectual capacity or lack any to begin with. Politicians on the Right are judged solely by the intensity of their rhetoric and unwillingness to compromise, not by their brains. In the technological age, such a stance is ruinous.

Another feature of the modern Right is its astonishing incompetence. This is a result of both the innate corruption which emanates from Trump himself (itself just the apotheosis of the besetting sin of Republicanism: blind greed), and the fact that like all autocratic personalities, he is jealous and insecure and cannot abide strong, independent, capable subordinates. Mediocrity is threatened by genius, and Trump, who must be the strongest and smartest in the room, crushed, drove from the ranks, or suborned anyone in the leadership who could think for himself. The cult of anti-intellectualism at the core of the new party favors cringing, servile, boot-lickers who must simultaneously demonstrate their loyalty to Trump at all times, yet remain sufficiently unthreatening to him to remain in his good graces. This is not a recipe for effective leadership, especially since Trump cannot abide criticism, even well-intentioned criticism, which to him is indistinguishable from attack. This means course-correction is impossible. Anyone who watched the election of Kevin McCarthy to the speakership bore witness to a party unable to govern itself, much less a country. It is worth noting that Trump lost the house, the senate, and then the presidency, all in the space of four years, a feat of ineptitude unequaled in American history, and one which is a direct result of Trump creating an intellectual desert at the top of his party.

The second most fatal of the fatal flaws of the new Right is, of course, its moral bankruptcy. This is peculiar because the Right generally claims to be the stronghold of "traditional family values" and there is some substance to the argument that it has in fact been just that. Republicanism is by its nature literally conservative, conservative meaning a dislike of change and a reverence for the past, and there is great strength in such a position, especially during an era when America is plainly fragmenting and in decline. But modern Republicanism is a reflection of Trump himself, and Trump's outstanding characteristics are his selfishness, his cruelty, his contempt for the truth, his greed, his need for attention, his and his complete lack of anything resembling ethics, morals or scruples. Trump has normalized behaviors which the party of Reagan would have rightfully abominated, and it is no use to say that all politicians are equally sleazy with the shades pulled down: paying homage to tradition, civility, established norms of behavior and standards of common decency, even if they this is entirely pro forma and constitutes nothing more than lip service and pantomime, are crucial behaviors in public officials. They are crucial because they set the tone for the rest of the country. Leaders lead not by their words but by example. Trump's behavior has consistently been petty, vulgar, mean-spirited, vindictive, and completely lacking in any kind of self-awareness. He is frightening not because he has these qualities himself but because he has normalized them, and encouraged and empowered millions of others to do as he does. The phrases "post-truth world" and "alternative facts" are outgrowths of Trump's own view of life, which regards objective truth as whatever he needs it or wants it to be.

You will notice at this point that I am scarcely distinguishing between The Right and Trump himself. This is intentional. They are impossible to separate at this juncture of history. And this is especially important because it brings us to the final, fatal, disqualifying flaw: the lust for power for its own sake, and the desire to keep it all costs, even if it means annihilating cultural norms, American traditions, and the law itself.

The new Right, post-Trump, has had a taste of what real power, unfettered by democratic checks and balances, is actually like. They found it intoxicating and the saliva running from the jaws of men like Ron De Santis is quite terrifying to witness. They see in Trump a crude blueprint for how to transition the presidential swearing-in ceremony to a coronation, whereby the president becomes king in everything but name, above the law, able to rule more or less by fiat. I am not quite sure whether the new Right is in effect a monarchist party at heart, or whether they prefer a kind of Christian nationalism of the sort Spain experienced when Franco took power, or whether the ultimate goal is a harder fascism of the Mussolini type, which openly made the state the tool of corporate power. What I am sure of is that they have deliberately attacked the foundations of democracy for years and continue to do so with brutal vigor. This is not a party dedicated to saving America, as they claim, but to destroying America and recreating it in the image of Putin's Russia.

By this time, if you lean to the Right politically, you have either walked away in disgust or are deeply offended. And of course this is why I dislike talking about politics in the first place. I cannot open my mouth about either group without alienating people, including people who might otherwise be interested in my work. But the fact remains that we do live in a political age, and it is naive in the extreme to believe that we can ignore the harsh reality that both the choices we have in this country are bad ones, because both parties in question have allowed the nutters and mental defectives, the con men and grifters, out of their asylums and prisons and let them grasp the levers of power. It would be irresponsible and cowardly for me to pretend that I don't see a threat in this, and since I regularly "have a go" at the Left I felt incumbent to stick that same dagger in the soft white underbelly of the Right. I do this without feelings of rancor to those who identify with Right-wing politics: as James O'Brien says, "Contempt for the con man, compassion for the conned."

George Orwell once lamented that religion and international socialism proved to be "as weak as straw" against the flame of fascism. He was within his rights to make this complaint, because he understood that a large segment of the human population is disinterested by nature in what the Left has to offer them. I understand these people because I used to be one of them, and in some ways remain so: I will always be vulnerable to simple answers to complex questions, to appeals to nationalistic fervor, to those who stoke fear and nurse dislike of change. I will always have a deep reverence for my country's past, even when I know that past has many dark chapters, and harbor a belief that things were "better back when." Beyond that, I understand that the Right is in fact right on some issues, and that the Left is wrong on quite a few indeed. But I'm not blind to what the Republican party has become, or to its ultimate goals, which are un-American and antidemocratic. If the Right cannot come back to sanity and integrity, if this malarial fever called Trumpism is a permanent condition, that it has forfeited not only my vote, but my respect. Forever.