This brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism
Mona Charen, a conservative who writes for National Review, got boos at CPAC for saying conservatives shouldn’t be pro-sexual harassment. She doesn’t consider Trump a good representative of conservatism.
What happened to me at CPAC is the perfect illustration of the collective experience of a whole swath of conservatives since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. We built and organized this party — but now we’re made to feel like interlopers.
I was surprised that I was even asked to speak at CPAC. My views on Trump, Roy Moore and Steve Bannon are no secret. I knew the crowd would be hostile, and so I was tempted to pass.
But too many of us have given up the fight. We’ve let disgust and dismay lead us to withdraw while bad actors take control of the direction of our movement. I know how encouraged I feel whenever someone simply states the truth, and so I decided to accept CPAC’s invitation.
It’s somewhat, or maybe entirely, like the way a lot of us feel about activist atheism. It’s mostly a hostile crowd now, so we stay away.
(Funny coincidence that both rifts have to do with attitudes to women.)
Like the Republican Party, CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. Last year, they invited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (and withdrew the invitation only after lewd tapes surfaced). This year, in addition to the president and vice president, CPAC invited Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
Matt Schlapp, CPAC’s chairman, described her as a “classical liberal” on Twitter. This is utter nonsense. Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen is a member of the National Front party, and far from distancing herself from her Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist grandfather, she has offered him a more full-throated endorsement than her aunt has. “I am the political heir of Jean-Marie Le Pen,” Maréchal-Le Pen told the Washington Post last year. “He was a visionary. He was right about a lot of things.”
This isn’t conservatives a little too keen on the flat tax, she says, it’s blood and soil nationalism.
While there were reasonable, mainstream Republican speakers at CPAC, the lineup also featured demagogues like Sheriff David Clarke Jr. While he oversaw the Milwaukee County jail, one pregnant prisoner was repeatedly raped, and several prisoners died in the space of just six months. One was a mentally ill man who was denied water for seven days. No matter. The sheriff was cheered by the CPAC crowd.
Yayyyyyy sadism! Yayyyyyyy assaulting women! Yayyyyyyy overt racism!
That’s not conservatism, it’s just brutalism.
Her panel was about #MeToo. She was asked a question about “feminist hypocrisy.”
Ask me that at a cocktail party and I will talk your ear off about how the very people who had lectured us about the utter venality of workplace sexual harassment throughout the 1980s became suddenly quiescent when the malefactor was Bill Clinton.
But this time, and particularly in front of this crowd, it felt far more urgent to point out the hypocrisy of our side. How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate?
I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began.
I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability.
I’m not a fan of conservatism, but it’s not the same thing as Trumpism.
‘I’m not a fan of conservatism, but it’s not the same thing as Trumpism.’
I’m there, likewise.
Reading ‘What’s the matter with Kansas’ a while back, it seemed to me: the essential problem, the reason there _is_ a Trump (beyond that a couple of jokers thought it would be amusing to cast a washed-up, largely failed real estate developer and casino entrepeneur who prior had been reduced to doing cheesy advertising spots and cheesier licensing deals as some kind of parody of a master of industry in a surprisingly much-watched ‘reality TV’ thing) is that conservativism already had been, to a large degree, hollowed out by the ‘culture wars’ wedge politics started decades ago. What remained of actual ‘conservatism’ was pretty tortured, hunted in its own party by people far more interested in regressive social politics stressing iron age family values, versus mere fiscal conservatism, or (sensibly, relatively) social conservatism.
The authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ described it, really, as the radicalization of the US Republican party. Gingrich being one definite watershed, as ‘hardball legislative politics’ became a thing under him: he followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit of forbearance for political rivals…
What it opens up is a space for straight demagoguery: the appeals to violence, the attacks against the checks and balances, the threats to jail opponents, fully in the open, by the time of Trump. But it began long before him.
Don’t know, though. It seems to me conservativism in the USA and certain other Western democracies has been prety to these afflictions a while now. There was a sort of wave of economic fundamentalism, neoliberalism/neoconservatism more on the economic side, prior to this wedge politics madness…
… dunno what to say about the previous, but the latter wave, the latter authors describe as, in all probability, a sort of politics of last resort. All things proceeding as they have, the US Republican party is in big trouble, demographically. The gerrymandering, the hardball, the wedge politics, it keeps them alive, but alive the way a shambling zombie is. That they were prey, as they were, to an infection of the kind of dangerous, violent, and largely intellectually vacuous nativism and populism Trump epitomizes, intuitively, it seems to me it’s to be expected.
Charen’s ‘I almost welcomed it’, moving on, a bit, anyway: I really think I get that, ideological distances notwithstanding. It really is a bit freeing, saying, to hell with it, I’m putting my finger on what it _is_, and if bridges be burned, perhaps I’m better off not going back that way, anyway.
Trump is everything the ‘conservative’ movement has pressed for since Reagan. Its (just) possible to see that some of them are surprised by the fruit that the tree they planted and watered has born. But this wide-eyed innocent act won’t do.
Just look at the other candidates in the 2016 Republican primary? Was there a single one of them fit to be elected Dog Catcher in Mayberry?
It’s a classic ‘tiger by the tail’ conundrum. The GOP oligarchs thought they had an army of easily manipulated drones. They didn’t understand that that army was, in fact, TOO easily manipulated–they could be stolen by a more skilled manipulator–or one who was simply unfettered by the need to try to look ‘respectable’ to the mainstream.
And now they can neither control the tiger, nor can they afford to let it go, because it’s already shown that it will devour them if they give it an opening. Republicans who aren’t deemed ‘pure’ enough face harsh, vicious primary challenges, and even boycotts during the general elections. Not always, but often enough that they can no longer afford to try to placate the ‘base’ with lip-service.
I truly believe we’re on the cusp of a major shift–the GOP will break itself on these shores, eventually. The difficulty of such self-assurance, of course, is that so many people are going to be hurt in the interim.
Charen was on The NYT’s ‘The Daily’ podcast this morning. Good, long interview on this event.
Freemage @3,
Part of the problem in the 2016 primaries is that the other candidates focused on attacking each other, assuming that the Trump bubble would burst, either on its own or because another candidate would take care of him. But in retrospect, it’s very obvious how by 2016, the GOP had stripped itself of many possible defenses to Trump even if they hadn’t waited until it was too late. What arguments could they have made?
1. “He doesn’t have the experience and qualifications.” Well, first, Republicans spent years pissing on the idea of government service as something of value, extolling millionaires as the real “job creators,” and insisting that what was needed was to bring the discipline of the private sector to the “swamp” of Washington waste. How could they then disparage the executive credentials of a (supposed) rich businessman? Second, after getting behind George W. Bush on the theory that “the president doesn’t have to be that bright as long as he has smart advisors,” and then lowering the bar to “a fairly dim half-term governor of Alaska can handle the job if needed,” it really is hard to start insisting on intellectual standards.
2. “He’s promising things he can’t possibly deliver, because they’re not even in the power of a President to accomplish.” The GOP’s media organs have spent the last couple of decades bemoaning the “War on Christmas,” NOW you’re gonna tell your voters that actually, Trump won’t be able to make anyone say “Merry Christmas” after all? Your foreign policy critique of Obama has generally been no more sophisticated than “Obama is a weak girly man. We will be strong and project strength, and then Putin and Kim and everyone else will respect us and back down,” so how can you now argue that Trump’s chest-thumping gorilla routine won’t work? He’s just taking your strategy and dialing it up to 11.
3. “He lies.” Conservative radio host Charlie Sykes (a never-Trumper) has explained this pretty well. Conservatives did such a good job of convincing their voters that the mainstream media is hopelessly biased against conservative that there were effectively no referees left. Cruz and Rubio and Ryan and other “respectable” Republicans may have never out-and-out signed on to birtherism themselves, but they turned a blind eye to it, and Romney even begged for the Chief Birther Trump’s endorsement in 2012. The WaPo, NYT, CNN, et al could run all the fact-checking pieces they want, but Trump just had to cry “fake news!” and their base was preconditioned to accept it. The only folks who could have possibly put the brakes on Trump would have been Fox News, and maybe some of the big radio guys (although I think Limbaugh’s influence was fading at this point anyway). And they had no interest in doing so — in fact, Trump had (shrewdly?) spent the last several years making himself available to any Fox show that wanted him, cultivating positive relationships with the hosts and audiences.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on This brainless, sinister, clownish thing called […]