New York Times' Emergency Backup Conservative Public Intellectual

Confesses he really doesn't know anything about public intellectuallizin'.

Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff  Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:

The first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under George W. Bush and in the years that followed. Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly...

What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!

What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"

Mr. Douthat continues:

...

The second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right’s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before Sean Hannity swooned for Donald Trump. What the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that Fox News and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism...

Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible. Others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation.

...

For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they never had the slightest fucking clue as to what was really going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general (David Brooks, March 2016)

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

The only thing that could make this ideological walk-of-shame more tawdry would be for Mr, Douthat to seek solace by throwing himself into the ideological arms of Bill Kristol's idiot son-in-law.

But what are the odds of...

Wait!  I spoke too soon!

“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti, the editor of The Washington Free Beacon, in a long essay tracing how the highbrow conservatism of Burnham and William F. Buckley sought to work with and through the anti-establishment impulses of the Middle American right. “After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.”

And, Continetti adds, “what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.”

The only word amiss in this analysis is “may.” The crisis described in Continetti’s essay was not created by the conservative intelligentsia alone. But three signal failures of that intelligentsia clearly contributed to the right’s disastrous rendezvous with Trumpism.

Less than a week ago we found David Brooks using his priceless New York Times' real-estate to mainstream disgraced ratfucker James O'Keefe.

Today, we find Ross Douthat using his priceless New York Times' real-estate to elevate second-generation wingnut welfare queen, Matthew Continetti.

It's the Wingnut Rapture people!

And also for the record, Ross, There.  Is. No. "Trumpism".

It's Republicans, all the way down.

Behold, a Tip Jar!