I couldnt resist plugging Paul and some of the other blogs. They are great.
Thereās no change radical centrists donāt fight, even when at worse it would just be a different color of shit.
Go ahead, you know you want to say it again! Here, Iāll say it for you: āconservatives want to preserve white privilegeā.
You know, Scott, I would think if thereās one thing you should have learned from the gradual rot and sudden implosion of the Republican party, itās the danger of demonizing those with whom you disagree. Especially since theyāre on our side for at least another year.
-Tom
They do, among other things. Their wealth and property, status, preferred culture and faith.
The thing is, we donāt agree on the gradualness of that rot. The GOP reaction to Ukraine-gate isnāt substantially different from Iran-Contra: that it is a nothingburger, that it is just business as usual. Before that it was secretly bombing Cambodia. Itās a lawless authoritarian party and has been for my entire life, even during the āgoodā conservative days. The fact that some conservatives now decry the GOP and want to destroy it so they can replace it with another conservative party and get back to conservative business as usual is not, to me, good news.
This does invite the question, though, whether anything seems different to you between the Trump years and, say, the Reagan years or the George H.W. Bush years? (Iāll leave Dubya off the table for now: a case can be made that he did more harm than Trump thusfar has, although I remain conflicted on that question. In any case, Dubyaās awfulness had the left in quite a tizzy, as I well remember.)
A lot of us feel a particular sense of emergency with this particular President and the realization that even he has attained such loyalty from the GOP. A sense that he has exposed deep institutional fragility, distinct from objectionable policy. Do you think that sense of emergency is largely illusory? I ask the question genuinely.
Put it another way. Yes, Tom Delay was awful, and yes, William F. Buckley is on record as being a racist, and yes, Iran Contra was impeachment-worthy. Yet why does this guy get our spidey senses tingling like mad, making us feel like democracy in America is genuinely imperiled? Is it really nothing more in your opinion than that he behaves with less guile/decorum than his GOP predecessors?
Generally, yes. That, plus the fact that saying the quiet part out loud seems to work so well. But that doesnāt point to a change in conservativism so much as it does to decades of eroding norms and weakening standards of public discourse that is, itself, a legacy of conservatism. If you e.g. sell the idea that opposing racism is itself racism, youāre going to encourage a lot of nascent racists to embrace their views publicly.
Edit: To clarify, it would be fair to say that, in the past, many prominent conservatives pretended that certain things were beyond the pale, and the fact that they no longer feel obliged to pretend is certainly cause for concern. But thatās more about the climate of public discourse than it is about a sea change in the nature of conservatism. And the climate of public discourse is what it is because they made it so.
Nesrie
3394
Reagan was a monster. People who overlooked what he and his like did back thenā¦ they probably didnāt have targets on their back. That doesnātā make him less vile. Years of GOP or conservatives, whatever the heck people want to call them, overlooking the horrific acts and targets against other groups, read not them, to get their tax cuts does not make it somehow better.
Not everyone was surprised to see white supremacy in our streets although them mingling with actual Nazis might be called new, as was not bothering to hide it.
I think this piece expands on the points Scott is making:
RichVR
3396
For me? The other scumbags were politicians. Trump is a petulant child with power.
That is a very good piece, thanks for linking it.
Consider this exhibit by Bill Kristol.
Bill is one of the so-called serious conservative commentators and intellectuals who helped bring us Trump. Now he offers the following: Trump is so bad that we could more readily survive the horrors of Warren, but only for one term, after which we can presumably get back to the good conservative governance that led us here in the first place.
Has Bill learned his lesson? I donāt think so.
On the other hand, heās offering a fig leaf for self-styled conservatives to support Warren, who if nominated will be the most liberal major party candidate since perhaps McGovern, so, yāknow, any port in a storm, strange bedfellows, etc.
Sure. Iām happy to have his vote, and whatever little influence he may still have, but that doesnāt mean he isnāt a conservative, or that the bulk of existing Republican politicians and pundits arenāt conservatives, or that conservatism isnāt bad.
Thatās got nothing to do with it. My point is that your inability to assess conservative principles without ascribing to them some sort of racist agenda says more about you than conservative ideology. That kind of how rot starts, isnāt it?
-Tom
Conservatism is an elitist philosophy and agenda. If the elites are white wealthy Christian men, itās going to serve their agenda. If the elites happened to be non-white Muslim women, it could be made to serve their agenda equally well. But we donāt live in that world, we live in this one, so itās going to serve the interests of white wealthy male Christian dominance.
Is the broader āConservatism seeks to conserve privilegeā a less objectionable formation? Because while it isnāt specifically about whiteness, a lot of privilege in America happens to be of the white variety.
Thrag
3405
While itās a shame that even if Rudy does go to trial and testify we wonāt get video of it, I look forward to the courtroom artistās deceptions of his facial expressions.
