The Well-Thumbed History and Plainsong Lore...

...of our Fucked Up Modern Age

The cheapest laugh down here in the Liberal cheap seats continues to be the hilarious "evolution" of the indignation of Conservatives who are watching their monster run away with their party.  Since no one listens to us and no one cares what we think, we here on the Left find ourselves oddly blessed with the greatest and most dangerous freedom of all: we are free to remember the past in country where almost everyone else -- especially the wealthy and powerful -- are expending enormous energies denying the past.

Ten years ago it was an act of unalloyed heresy and disloyalty bordering on treason to even hint that George W. Bush was not the Greatest Fucking President in Modern History.  Six years ago, it was sheer folly -- whistling into a hurricane -- to suggest that the Tea Party was not, in fact a sudden and spontaneous uprising of otherwise-politically-virginal patriots, but was instead a massive wingnut rebranding scam designed to get millions of bigots and meatheads off the hook for volubly supporting the Worst Fucking President in Modern History.

But now, as America's Conservative brain wizards flail around looking for someone or something onto which they can lay off the blame for the rise of Donald McRonald, look what is suddenly no longer verboten (Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times):

...

Reagan had his faults, like JFK, but he was optimistic and gentlemanly. He was pro-free trade and pro-immigration. He believed in limited government at home and American leadership abroad.

That's what I believed in too — and that's what I thought the Republican Party stood for. That's why, despite my disagreements with social conservatives, I worked as a foreign policy advisor to John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio this year. All of those candidates, different as they were, recognizably represented Reagan Republicanism.

For the time being, at least, that Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump.

From The Atlantic:

Is the Tea Party Responsible for Donald Trump?

The Republican Party’s old divisions have been scrambled by its new presidential nominee.

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To some, his rise is clearly the Tea Party’s fault. The right-wingers, this argument goes, weakened and divided the party, stoking people’s rage against Washington and government. With racial undertones, their rallying cries preyed on fear and hatred. Figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh spent years telling the conservative base that Republican officeholders were selling them out at every turn, and that the only solution was to toss out anyone who’d been in office for more than five minutes—to elect new representatives whose answer to everything, even funding the normal operations of government, would be: “Hell, no.” They encouraged the base’s paranoia and conspiracy theories; its distrust of institutions, including political parties and the media; and its irrational hatred of anything associated with Barack Obama.

Was it any wonder, then, that a candidate came along whose anger was even more consuming and less constructive, whose disregard for political norms was even more flamboyant, whose appeals to racial resentment were even more overt, whose disregard for fact and fondness for conspiracy was even more pronounced? As the conservative writer Matt Lewis put it last week, “Ted Cruz helped create an environment where populist demagoguery would flourish on the right.” But Cruz was hoist by his own petard, Lewis wrote, when Tea Party figures like Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter found Trump’s brand of this tonic even more potent. Trump, in this view, was just Cruz on steroids...

And my oh my, look at what version of American history is no longer a heresy so disqualifying that the media dare not speak its name (from The American Conservative):

Bush Wrecked the GOP Long Before Trump Appeared

By DANIEL LARISON

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One of the remarkable things about this election is the sheer intensity of hostility to Trump from many of the same movement conservatives who shrugged at Bush’s far more serious betrayals and failures. Many movement conservatives have been much more horrified by Trump’s momentary political success over a few months than they were by the real, costly, staggering failures of governance under the Bush administration over a period of eight years. Bush certainly drove some conservatives and Republicans into vocal opposition, including those of us here at TAC, but there seem to be many, many more on the right that thought Bush could practically do no wrong but have been driven into fits by nothing more than Trump’s nomination.

People that now panic about incipient caudillismo and the dangers of a nationalist demagogue didn’t care when Bush expanded the security state, trampled on the Constitution, or launched an unnecessary war of aggression, and people that yawned at the steady expansion of government and creation of new unfunded liabilities under Bush are now supposedly alarmed by Trump’s lack of fidelity to the cause of limited government. They correctly identify many of Trump’s flaws, but refuse to acknowledge the fact that the party was already killed (or at least severely wounded) years ago during the disastrous Bush era. It was that period of incompetence and ideologically-driven debacles that shattered the GOP, and for the last seven years the vast majority of die-hard Trump foes have refused to recognize that and have chosen to learn nothing from it. They lost to Trump, but the part they can’t accept is that they deserved to lose because of their role in enabling the GOP’s past failures. Now they’re touting their abandonment of the wreckage they helped to create as if they deserve applause for running away from their own handiwork. If it weren’t so serious, it would be quite comical.

Watch former Bush speechwriter and persistent Beltway stalactite, Michael Gerson, feign shock and horror at discovering the hollowness and depravity at the heart his party:

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Make no mistake. Those who support Trump, no matter how reluctantly, have crossed a moral boundary. They are standing with a leader who encourages prejudice and despises the weak. They are aiding the transformation of a party formed by Lincoln’s blazing vision of equality into a party of white resentment. Those who find this one of the normal, everyday compromises of politics have truly lost their way.

This is not even to mention Trump’s pledge to limit press freedom, or his malicious birtherism, or his dangerous vaccine skepticism, or his economic plans that would bring global recession, or his lack of relevant qualifications, or his temperament of brooding and bragging, egotism and self-pity, or his promise to emancipate the world from American leadership, or his accusation that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved with Lee Harvey Freaking Oswald.

Some are trying their best to act as though all this were normal. But we are seeing, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “lunacy dancing in high places.”...

If you are a Liberals living in America you are a pariah in your own land who has lived to see almost every one of your ostracizing blasphemies slowly, quietly become a widely accepted and largely uncontroversial fact of everyday life.

Every blasphemy except one -- that the Left has been right about the Right all along.   Because if Important People ever dared to start saying that out loud in Important Places, the entire system would implode.