Oh Brave New World That Has Such Centrists In It

Charlie Sykes bravely standing up to another straw man.  

If you were to listen to Friday's  podcast from Never Trump world headquarters (you really, really shouldn't) you might be excited but confused to learn that Bulwark founder Charlie Sykes and Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol have pooled their mighty predictive powers in order to peer into the mists of the not-too-distant future and declare that they perceive the emergence of a New Vital Ideological Center!

Which shouldn't surprise anyone since the Conservative Brain Caste has made a cottage industry out of predicting the imminent arrival of a new Sensible Center and/or Conservative Renaissance every few months for several decades now.  Hell, just a couple of years ago, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times confidently predicted that the field marshal of the coming Conservative golden age would be the same shitbag who wrote "Liberal Fascism" --

-- so honestly, I barely bother to keep score anymore.

However today is a little different because today the leaders of Never Trump HQ have so perfectly fulfilled my two-bit prediction of what tactics they would use to weasel out of accountability for the evil that they have done I felt duty bound to bring it to your attention.  This is from five days ago, but longtime listeners know that I've been beating this particular drum for longer than I care to think about.

Sure, [Conservatives] could clearly and unequivocally oppose the racist, atavistic forces that grabbed them collar-and-belt and tossed them out of the GOP.  But that would risk admitting that they were complicit idiots.  That -- horrors! -- the Left had actually been right about them all along.

Which they are manifestly incapable of doing, because it would negate everything they have always claimed to believe in.

It would destroy them.

So to armor themselves against such accidental self-awareness, they need -- absolutely need -- to be seen as the Reasonable Center equipoised between two equally monstrous extremes.

They absolutely need for you and me and the rest of the Left to somehow be as dangerous and destructive as Donald Trump and his myrmidons.

What good luck for them that the corporate media is already top-heavy with enough Bush Regime dead-enders who have already spent the last 15 years repeating this same lie so relentlessly the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It is hardened against almost anything short of a direct hit from a Texas-sized meteor.

So you say you want a new Vital Center? Well lets drop in on Messrs. Sykes and Kristol who are talking about this very subject right now with emphasis added because it's my transcript.

Kristol: I was thinking about that more broadly and just talking, corresponding with a couple of people by email on this in the last few days and I feel like there is, in an inchoate way, a kind of New Center, if I can use that term, and there are probably much better ones. 

Great!

But of course the "center" of anything isn't a fixed position in the firmament.  It's a mathematical function: a point defined by being equidistant between two opposites.

So take a wild-ass guess which equal and opposite extremes are those against which Bill Kristol's New Center contrasts itself.

Kristol:  Uh, a new kind of Liberalism and a new kind of Conservatism -- non-Trumpy and non-nativist on the Right and non-Cancel Culture on the Left.

So The Bulwark's New Center is that which stands foursquare against a very real threat -- an openly fascistic, white supremacist Republican Party which Never Trumpers spent their entire adults lives creating -- and a wholly imaginary threat, the Liberal Cancel Culture, which was dreamed up by extremely privileged white Conservative writers of shitty opinions to carve out a special exception for themselves from what the rest of us would call at-will employment.

Cool, cool.

And who will lead this mighty cause?

All the usual suspects! 

Yay!

Because it wasn't a dream.  It was a place!

And you...

Kristol: You can see, as you have put it, islands of those emerging, whether it's, y'know, whatever Bari Weiss next does now that she's left The New York Times

And you...

Kristol: ...and Yasha Mounk's got his project going. 

And you...

Kristol: Um, uh, Andrew Sullivan leaving New York Magazine and getting, I dunno, 60K people to sign up to his, what's gonna be his website

And you were there!

Kristol:  Our friends at the...us at The Bulwark I think were frankly more early on this under your leadership and Jonathan Last.  We've tried to, y'know, mostly focus on the day-to-day kind of Trump stuff but, y'know, tried to sketch out a little bit os what a New, Tolerant Liberal Conservatism or Conservative Liberalism would be.

But what about Toto?

Yes, and Toto too!

Kristol:  There's..there's interest... [noted thin-skinned nitpicker] Thomas Chatterton Williams -- I was DMing with him actually yesterday over some stuff he's written.

Then Kristol hands the ball off to Sykes to run it the rest of the way down the field:

Sykes:  No, I...and...and...more hopeful about whether or not this is going to be a continuing relationship -- whether there is a Vital Center/Left Center/Right that will continue after Trump.  Because look, uh, these issues don't go away after he leaves.  The issue of the Cancel Culture.  The...and I...y'know...I think part of it is...and I'm trying to remember where I said this, but I...I...the...uh...my sense is that one of the revelations that many of us have had is that our differences on policy are not as important as we once thought they were...

There's more, and any member of the general public is free to waste an hour listening to it for themselves and draw their own conclusions, although there are far superior podcasts out there with far small audiences which are far more worthy of your attention.

As for me, I'll just keep on doing what I've been doing for 15 years.

Calling things as I see them.

Being actually canceled as a crackpot alarmist for calling things as I see them.

And then, a few years down the road, amusing myself noting how the same people who made pariahs out of the disreputable Left for warning them not to lick the light socket, are now whining that no one warned them that licking light sockets was foolish and dangerous.

There's Never a Real Cancel Culture Around 
When You Really Need It