Tom Nichols and the New Now Generation

Members of the New Now Generation are not hard to spot.  

They're overwhelmingly white,  overwhelmingly male,  overwhelmingly middle-aged Conservatives who suddenly discovered very late in life that their Republican Party was full of Republicans and were then either thrown out of the party, or left under their own power or still think of themselves as Republicans even though their party has  rejected them like a bad kidney transplant.  

If you go looking for a member of this New Now Generation , you don't need to look far.  They are wildly overrepresented across all major media platforms and, other than their age, their race, their gender and their political history, you can easily identify them by their virtually unanimous insistence that every horrifying aspect of the Republican party's very long and very public descent into madness has only presented itself during a period called "now" which extends from the moment they left the party until, well, "now".  

Before "now" the veil of time had not descended on the human species.  Nothing was known or knowable and the principle of "cause and effect" had not yet come into existence, so before "now" there is no history of what these people said or did believed.  

Sad!

What this mean from a practical point of view is this.  

If you were, say, a prominent and respected Liberal writer like Digby and you had written an essay entitled "The GOP Stands for Nothing" at any point before the  "now", well, if you were lucky, Kos might repost it and Atrios might clip a sentence or two from it and direct his readers to go read the rest of it, and much of the rest of the Liberal blogosphere might follow suit.  But that's it because any suggestion that something was fundamentally broken and diseased about the GOP coming from anyone before the "now" was obviously just crackpot Liberal alarmism.

And  if you were a prominent Liberal writer now but had written an essay entitled "The GOP Stands for Nothing" in which you proved beyond any doubt that the fundamental brokenness and derangement of the GOP began long, long before the beginning of the "now", well good luck finding anyone who wants to print your divisive crazy talk.  The crisis is nownownow. So who the fuck cares when it started, or why it started or who profited from starting it?  All that matters is the now.  The right now.

Ah, but if you're a member of the Conservative New Now Generation and your schtick is writing essays entitled something like "The GOP Now Stands for Nothing"...

...which casually ignores  +40 years of Republican party history (a period of time which encompasses your entire adult life) as if they never happened --

The Republicans stepped forward in 1980 as optimistic warriors.

-- and lands effortlessly smack in the middle of the "now" -- 

All of that is gone. Today’s Republicans exist only to stay in power, not least so that their elected officials can avoid what they dread most: being sent home to live among their constituents.

-- brother, the world is your oyster.

  TOM NICHOLS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic 

 

Burn The Lifeboats