Our New Bitter Clingers

If you're one of those unfortunate Liberals cursed with the superpower of memory, you probably remember five minutes ago when Lefties were galloping our little blogs through every Middlesex village and farm warning that the genial, aw-shucks David Brooks Conservatives you saw on your teevee were not in any way representative of the Republican base that we out here in the Real World were experiencing them every day.

Not by a damn sight.

That the GOP was not a collection of fiscally conservative, Burke-quoting pragmatists with a few, harmless, bug-eyed goofs straggling off in the fringes that professional ratfuckers like Rick Wilson were hired to round up every couple of years to add a few extra votes to the Party of Lincoln's tally.  

None of this was true because the Party of Lincoln had been dead for decades and the spawn of Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Gingrich and all the rest had spent those decades incubating something monstrous inside its husk, while the genial, aw-shucks David Brooks Conservatives you saw on your teevee were tasked with distracting the public from the shitpile of bigots and imbeciles their party had become.  With using their outsized media megaphones to perfume the rot and pooh-pooh any suggestion that Republican Party was racing towards out-and-proud fascism as the crackpot alarmism of a few, disgruntled Libtards.

And then along came a loutish Day-Glo Orange bigot who lumbered into the GOP's crooked game and took it over by doing literally nothing more than running the GOP's own racist playbook louder and more crudely than everyone else. He found a party of reprogrammable meatheads who had been primed for decades to respond with adoration to anyone who would finally come along and tell them that it was OK to say the quiet, racist, crazy part out loud. In the GOP Trump found a place outside of reality teevee and the New York real estate sewer where all of this grotesque character flaws were suddenly virtues. 

In this way, Trump was a strange kind of blessing.  He was (caution: Dune reference ahead) the Right's fascist Kwisatz Haderach, but arrived too soon which screwed up everyone's long-range scheming.  He was the unplanned foreshock of the quake to come: his impact was strong enough to shatter the GOP's thin and aggressively maintained veneer of respectability and expose the horrors that had been long metastasizing beneath the mask, but he was too wrapped up in his own corruption and petty grievances and too shackled by his own incompetence to complete the Republican project of ending our democracy once and for all. 

In other words, in one, loutish, corrupt, preening, asshole package, Trump showed the world irrefutable proof that the Left had been right about the Right all along.  And this, more than anything else, is what has fried the circuits of  "experts" like a Tom Nichols.  Never Trumpers who are so enamored of their belief in their inherent superiority -- so snockered on the certainty of their expertise -- that the very notion that they've been wrong along about the one thing they're paid to be right about is, well...

To be perfectly frank, I had no intention of writing this post at all.  I've got a thing about Juan William cooking on the back burner, and a thing about Andrew Sullivan cooking behind that.  But at the moment, Tom Nichols is out promoting his new book about what a brain wizard he is and how everyone else is a moron.  Which is fine.  Good for him.  

But even during non-book-tour times, Tom responds poorly to lesser humans daring to ask him uppity questions like "Hey Mr. Brain-The-Size-of-a-Planet, how the hell did you not notice your party going loudly and publicly insane over the past several decades?" on social media.  And now that he's practically going door-to-door Fuller Brush-style to sell the public a book about what a brain wizard he is and how everyone else is a moron, I'm guessing his normally thin skin is being stretched to itchy translucence.  

Or maybe there is some other explanation for why ol' Tom chose yesterday, the Lord's day, to go on an extended jeremiad about, well...

I am not interested in dumb comments like “they were always like this“ or “you just didn’t notice it“ or any of that crap.
I am watching people I once knew, whom I knew to be intelligent and reasonable people, become completely delusional crackpots and authoritarian paranoids.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 8, 2021

1. Plenty of people went nuts who used to vote for both parties.
3. Life is a more complicated than "trickle down and Iraq."

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 9, 2021

Let me just remind folks like this that some of the people I know who are now complete psychos voted for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But sure, Nixon and Reagan and something something. https://t.co/3KoKJ7xWut

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 9, 2021

It really comes down to the fact that there are two, mutually-exclusive explanations for what happened to the GOP.

The first is that this has been a long time coming.  That the growing trends and the warning signs were there, plain and clear, for anyone with unjaundiced eyes to see.  Those who didn't see it were those who didn't want to see it.  Whose social and professional standing depended on not see it.  And because their status depended on their continued, willful blindness, it's not surprising that they developed a seething, outsized contempt for those on the Left who would not be quiet, and whose archives are proof-positive that these Very Serious experts had been, at best, lying to themselves all along.  

This explanation is supported by an enormous body of work from hundreds (thousands?) of writers documenting the devolution of the Right dating back to editorials like this from Rod Serling in 1964 writing in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in  in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind (transcribed by me from Serling's biography:

What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.…

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

The other explanation is that, for some inexplicable reason, the entire Republican party went spontaneously insane in 2016.  And since there had been no inkling whatsoever that there was anything fundamentally wrong with the GOP until the entire party went spontaneously insane, no one could have possibly known in advance that it was coming: an explanation which coincidentally also allows people like Tom Nichols to 1) retain their professional standings as a heavyweight Diviners of Political Truths and, 2) continue to airily dismiss anyone on the Left who says otherwise as disgruntled alarmist cranks.  

This explanation is supported entirely by [checks notes] a tiny handful of Never Trumpers who bitterly insist that it must be true and who angrily bark at anyone who says otherwise.

No Half Measures