populists – Tipsy Teetotaler ن

Best distillation ever?

Since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, politics in the Western world has polarized into a distinctive stalemate — an inconclusive struggle between a credentialed elite that keeps failing at basic tasks of governing and a populist rebellion that’s too chaotic and paranoid to be trusted with authority instead.

Ross Douthat

Ross goes on:

The 2024 campaign in its waning days is a grim illustration of this deadlock. We just watched Kamala Harris, the avatar of the liberal establishment, smoothly out-debate Trump by goading him into expressing populism at its worst — grievance-obsessed, demagogic, nakedly unfit.

But her smoothness was itself an evasion of the actual record of the administration in which she serves. Harris offered herself as the turn-the-page candidate while sidestepping almost every question about what the supposed adults in the room have wrought across the last four years.

…

The “ask” of the Democratic Party in 2024 is not, as some anti-Trump writers would have it, to merely compromise one’s convictions on this issue or that issue, to accept a few policies you dislike in order to keep an indecent and unstable populist out of office.

Rather, the “ask” is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won’t make those mistakes again.

This is the constant pattern of the Western elite over the last generation. A form of aggressive groupthink takes hold among the best and brightest, ideology gets laundered into supposed expertise or consensus, and the result is post-9/11 debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya … or Davos-man naïveté about the downsides of globalization and the rise of China … or Eurocrat myopia about the wisdom of a common currency, the manageability of mass migration and the true cost of Russian energy … or the recent phase of progressive mania that closed schools, legalized hard drugs, wrecked educational standards and warped curriculums, licensed dubious medical experiments in the name of transgender rights and turned the U.S. immigration system into a disaster area.

Then the bill comes due, the elites backpedal and obfuscate and conveniently forget (What do you mean, Kamala Harris endorsed publicly funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens? Sounds like Fox News nonsense!) and the unhappy swing voter is informed that no real price can be exacted for any of this folly, because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.

He can’t perceive reality

David French

When Trump repeated the ridiculous rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were killing and eating household pets, he not only highlighted once again his own vulnerability to conspiracy theories, it put the immigrant community in Springfield in serious danger. Bomb threats have forced two consecutive days of school closings and some Haitian immigrants are now “scared for their lives.”

That’s dreadful. It’s inexcusable.

And it’s vintage Trump. He’s most himself when he’s spewing hatred.

French continues with Trump’s refusal to say he wants Ukraine to win the war waged on it by Russia. Much of French’s argument on that point leaves me cold, but this conclusion is evergreen:

When the stakes are highest — for the election, for the country or for the international order — Trump isn’t just thinking about himself, he’s thinking about himself in the most unstable of ways. He can’t perceive reality. After watching him up close for nine years, our adversaries and allies know this to be true. They know he is both gullible and impulsive.

Trump’s reluctance to say the plain truth — that a Ukrainian victory is in America’s national interest — demonstrates that he is still a prisoner to his own grievances, and there is no one left who can stop him from doing his worst.

(Emphasis added) I added that emphasis because the distortion of reality by narcissism has been at the core of my opposition to Trump since the run-up to the 2016 election, as reflected here.

Don’t blame Laura Loomer for Trump

The idea that but for Loomer’s baleful influence Trump would behave normally is a symptom of copium poisoning. This is the guy who while defending the National Enquirer’_s trial balloon about Ted Cruz’s dad assassinating JFK would refer to the tabloid as the news. This is the guy who _still thinks that Hillary Clinton used actual bleach on her server. He thinks all humans have a limited amount of energy in their batteries and therefore exercise is bad because it depletes your finite reserves.

Jonah Goldberg\

Some nationalist

Donald Trump is a funny kind of patriot.

He loves America—except for the cities, the people who live in the cities, about half of the states, the universities, professional sports leagues, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal system, immigrants, the culture. He thinks the Capitol Police are murderers and that the FBI is a gestapo, that the government is an illegitimate junta maintained through election fraud, that the January 6 rioters are political prisoners, that the nation is a ruin, that it is “failed.” And when it fell to him to explain to Tuesday’s debate audience why he should be president, he spent most of his time repeating the praise of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.

Trump’s enemies are all Americans, his friends are all foreign dictators, and his money lives in Dubai and Indonesia. Some nationalist.

Kevin D. Williamson

Inquisitors, wokesters, MAGA

If I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to profess. But even if I yelled out a credo when the Eugenists had me on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed quite a week ago.

G.K. Chesterton. Substitute “wokesters” for “Eugenists” and this is fully up-to-date. For that matter, it works with MAGA, too.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Clear and convincing evidence

I have a theory that many grassroots Republicans don’t want to win elections anymore.

Well … maybe that’s too far. I think they’re generally indifferent about winning elections, let’s say, and for the same reason Jim DeMint was. Their commitment to their ideology is tribal more so than it is political. You can compromise when you view politics as a means to some policy end that you favor. But when, like faith, politics defines who you are, there can be no compromising on that. It’s an end in itself.

…

Winning elections is nice but not at the price of tolerating heretics.

If you could prove to populists that doubling down on the alleged innocence of January 6 protesters and Trump’s many other grievances and conspiracy theories would certainly cost them the 2024 election, I don’t know that it would rally them against him. The possibility that he’s an electoral drag on the party is relatively uncontroversial postmidterm, after all. He’s leading in primary polling anyway.

You don’t abandon your faith just because it’s unpopular. Better 30 Marco Rubios or Marjorie Taylor Greenes than 60 Arlen Specters or Mitt Romneys.

…

If the populist right believed its own nonsense about “Flight 93 elections,” the 2024 primary would already be decided. Trump and his political baggage would be unceremoniously tossed out of the rear of the plane and a more electable populist like DeSantis would be escorted to the cockpit. Instead, in primary polling thus far, Trump remains at the controls.

I think populists ultimately care less about defeating the libs than about owning them. And no one antagonizes liberals quite like Trump does.

Frankly, they might even quietly prefer minority status in government. The minority in Congress spends its time blaming the majority for all of the country’s woes, with no obligation to produce a policy agenda of its own. That’s populism all over.

Nick Catoggio, Learning From Mistakes

I can think of no theory that explains more 2023 Republican facts than this does. It is so perfect that if I had any sense, I’d stop writing about politics until Trump loses the 2024 primary battle or the general election.

I don’t often solicit feedback, but what evidence, dear readers, can you muster against Catoggio’s theory?

Fox News: A Safe Space for Conservative Snowflakes

If you search for “safe space” on Fox News’ website you’ll get over 46,000 results. Not all of them are about those woke snowflakes who need trigger warnings and cry rooms. But a whole lot of them are.

For instance, in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Tucker Carlson grilled a college professor about a student who came into her classroom crying about the election. “As the adult shouldn’t you say, ‘You know, it was an election, and it was democratic, and nobody got cancer, nobody died, and maybe you should toughen up a little?’”

Would that Carlson and the rest of Fox’s leadership had a similar attitude toward their own audience, the average age of which is 56. > > “A little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr.,” the New York Times’ Peter Baker reported, “top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up.”

The primary mess-up was the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden at 11:20 p.m. on Election Night. The call infuriated the Trump campaign and viewers alike.

Save for Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, who also served on the “Decision Desk” that made the call, attendees at the meeting believed the Arizona announcement hurt Fox’s “brand” – not because they got it wrong, or even because they got it right. It hurt the brand because it hurt peoples’ feelings.

Jonah Goldberg

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Tag: populists

Monday, 9/16/24