The Seven Horcruxes of True Conservatism

Long ago, for safekeeping, the soul of True Conservatism was cut up into Seven Horcruxes.  These are Conservatism's foundational axioms which, up until a minute ago, pretty much every Republican agreed with -- both the 98% of the party that lined up behind Trump, and the 2% who were shocked! shocked that the 98% lined up behind Trump.

And every time one of these horcruxes is destroyed -- either by decay and disuse, or by actually being enacted, after which that "shocked!shocked!" 2% get shocked all over again by discovering that, in real life, their dearest Conservative masturbatory fantasy was actually horrifying -- True Conservatism gasps a little more loudly and dies a little bit more.

First Horcrux:  Deficits are evil and can only be reduced by massive cuts to social programs, which is legit because poverty is caused by moral deficiency and the poor being kept helpless on the Commie Liberal "plantation".

Second Horcrux:  Massive tax cuts/reregulation/the "free market"/private charities will solve all problems, including any disruptions cause by massive cuts to social programs.

Third Horcrux:  Racism isn't real.  And even if it is, Democrats [Did you know They Founded!! The!! Klan!! Huh!! Huh!! Didja know that!!!] -- are the real racists.  

Fourth Horcrux: Abortion is murder and repealing Roe v. Wade is a moral imperative.  Pretty much self-explanatory and self-evident.  But just for fun, hey, guess who wrote this?

"The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better. "

Yeah, that was Conservative thought leader David Brooks in April of 2005.

Fifth Horcrux: An armed society is a polite society, but gun-grabbing commie Dems want to take everyone's guns away and leave us all defenseless.

As mass shooting have become daily events in the United States, even some of the most, it seems to be slowly dawning on a number of True Conservatives that, just maybe a country that has a wingnut media which pumps apocalyptic rage and paranoia toxins into its audience 24/7 shouldn't also be a country that is drowning in guns and open-carry/zero-training/stand-your-ground laws.

Sixth Horcrux: Packing the courts with Federalist Society killbots by whatever means necessary is completely legitimate in the fight against Liberal commies.

Via the Savior of the Republic, Rick Wilson:

3/ The Senate can and must deny Obama the chance to make an appointment to the Supreme Court. We have both the votes and the power to do so.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 13, 2016

See also, "Justice Sunday" above.

Seventh Horcrux: All of the above is necessary because Liberals/Democrats are terrorist loving, Murrica hating weaklings who want to turn us into Soviet Russia!

If you doubt that simply consult the totality of Conservative media -- from the Limbaugh sewers to the National Review salons -- going back to Before the Time of Agnew.   All of it -- every paragraph, every sentence, every comma and period -- all of it is animated by fear mongering, barely concealed racism and a seething contempt for you and me and everything we hold dear.  

Here are a few excerpts from one speech by dead Rush Limbaugh, delivered at CPAC barely one month after Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.  His "Of course I want Obama to fail" speech:

I am safe from any liberal attack, in public, because they would be afraid of offending Stalin...

I sometimes wonder if liberalism is not just a psychosis or a psychology, not an ideology... 

I have learned how to tweak liberals everywhere. I do it instinctively now. Tweak them in the media. And no reason to be afraid of these people. Why in the world would you be afraid of the deranged? ...

President Obama with the communications skills, you know he could wipe out the Republican Party. He can wipe out the Republican Party if he would inspire this country to be the best it could be, but we don't have to worry about that because that's not what he wants. He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated... 

That the Democrats and Obama are asking you to feel better simply on the basis that they're going to get revenge for you, but your life isn't going to improve, somebody else's is just going to be destroyed and they want you to be happy over that. That's sick...

And beware of those different factions who seek as part of their attempt to redefine conservatism, as making sure the liberals like us, making sure that the media likes us. They never will, as long as we remain conservatives. They can't possibly like us; they're our enemy... 

This is the sewage of raw rage and paranoia that Conserative media scum -- including all of your favorite Never Trumpers -- spent decades pumping into the eager, thirsty veins of their reader, listeners and views. This was their native language.  Their mother tongue. 

And the all-powerful, all-occasion magic spell backstopping all seven horcruxes has been this Conservative fail-safe:  If you ever find yourself caught in a lie you can't deny, remember, Both Sides Do It (and Democrats are always worse.)

Soooo...

...if we take a look at the current condition of these seven pillars of Conservatism, what can we learn about the present state of the Conservative soul?

1.  Deficits?  Dead.  The canard of "fiscal conservatism" has gotten stomped near-to-death by every  successive Republican administration since Reagan.  And now, however hard Kevin McCarthy tries to reanimate that corpse, and however energetically our Conservative Never Trump "allies" try to blow on those embers...there are no embers.  The Trump years have proven what Liberal have said all along:  Republicans never gave a damn about deficits.

2.  Don't worry about massive cuts to social programs because, uh, tax cuts!  And, uh, deregulation!  Dead.  This has never been true, and once Dark Brandon got the entire Republican party on their feet, cheering for never cutting Medicare and Social Security, from hundreds of miles away, high atop the Fox News tower, once could almost hear the agonizing cries of Paul Ryan's granny-killin' soul leave his body.

3.  Racism isn't real/Democrats are the real racists.  Dead.  If you're a youngling you may not remember that, even though Nixon opened the front door and rolled out the red carpet for the bigots in the 1960s, Republicans continued to "LaLaLaICannotHearYou" the subject of their party's built-in racism until about five minutes ago.  As I have written many times  places, the average Republican comes off like they have a PhD in American civil rights, but only from history from the 1850s until around 1964.  

Then their knowledge gets terribly murky and uncertain.  

They'll recount the story of Republican Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves as if they, personally, had commanded the Union troops on Little Round Top, instead of being the goons who weep every time a Confederate traitor flag was pulled down, and rage every time a statue commemorating a Confederate traitor was removed.  

They'll lean hard on the puffed up fairy tale of Bill Buckley drive the Birchers out of the Conservative movement when, in fact, he very much did not.

Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley

The popular notion that the National Review founder expelled the fringe from the conservative movement is wrong.

And they'll swear they've never even heard of Lee Atwater.  

One of the last high-profile defeats for a Very Serious Conservative Public Intellectual in this dumb argument was back in 2007, after  the publication of The Conscience of a Liberal in 2007 by New York Times columnist, economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.  In his book, Krugman recounts the details of Ronald Reagan's infamous 1980 Philadelphia, Mississippi campaign speech.  Which caused his fellow New York Times columnist and GOP-apologist, David Brooks, to go absolutely ballistic, except due to longstanding NYT tradition, he was not allowed to cite his colleague Krugman by name, so his column was an 800-word rant against the "slur" and "calumny" of someone, somewhere against Reagan's sainted personage.   

Then pretty much the entire internet, from the high-born to your's truly, very publicly sawed Brooks' ass off and served it to him on the good china.  After that, Brooks was marginally more circumspect,  limiting his columns to his jog-by of a Teabagger Rally happening near a black family picnic and since  no one was punching anyone, it was obvious to Brooks that the Tea Party wasn't racist.

And there was Brooks in 2009, cocking his ear at the deafening, racist primal scream of a Republican party reacting to the election of Barack Obama, shrugging, and swearing he can't hear a thing:

Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point.

I wrote a whole long thing about the subject here ("David Brooks Doesn't Know When To Sit Quietly And Say Nothing") if you're interested.

The GOP went so far as to hire a black guy named Michael Steele to front for their racist party for a few years.  His job was basically to give someone the bigots in the party could point at and say "See!  We've got a black!" as their party's seething racism became harder and harder to ignore.

Trump killed that horcrux dead, and ever since useful idiots and sock-puppets-for-hire like Brooks and Steele have been explaining how all of this came as a complete surprise to them, that no one coulda seen any of this coming, and so forth.  And let's not forget Tucker Carlson's many recent and invaluable contributions to the subject:

The Tucker Carlson Text That “Set Off a Panic” at Fox: “It’s Not How White Men Fight”

The New York Times revealed the message that so worried executives that it precipitated the shock exit of the anchor.

A racially charged and bloodthirsty text sent by Tucker Carlson about the assault of a protestor by Trump supporters was reportedly a key factor that precipitated the anchor’s shock exit from Fox News last week...

4.  Abortion is murder and repealing Roe v. Wade is a moral imperative.  Dead.  Because Brooks (see above) has finally gotten his wish:  Roe has been struck down and millions of American women have been stripped of a right they had assumed to be inviolate.  Does anyone in their right mind think this has made our politics...

From the AP:

DeSantis signs Florida GOP’s 6-week abortion ban into law

From Politico:

North Dakota governor signs 6-week abortion ban into law

It takes effect immediately.

From CNBC:

Abortion pill mifepristone is banned or restricted in some states despite Supreme Court ruling

From Forbes:

Idaho Becomes First State To Restrict Interstate Travel For Abortion

...better?

And how is overturning Roe working out for the party that spent 50 years trying to overturn Roe?

From the Washington Post:

Abortion divides 2024 candidates and confounds many within the GOP

From ABC News:

Republicans will 'lose huge' without finding 'middle ground' on abortion, [Republican] Nancy Mace says

Hey dumbass, Roe was the middle ground.  

5.  Guns, Guns, Guns.   Dead.  Slaughtered over and over again in that endless fusillade of AR-15 bullets that has become the background music of American life.   As mass shooting have become daily events, it seems to be slowly dawning on a number of True Conservatives that, just maybe, a country that has a wingnut media which pumps apocalyptic rage and paranoia toxins into its audience 24/7 shouldn't also be a country that is drowning in guns and open-carry/zero-training/stand-your-ground laws.

6.  Pack those courts, and damn the cost!  Dead.  Even as the radical decisions that Federalist-rotted courts at all levels has all but killed the public's faith in the competence...

Poll: Two-Thirds of Americans Don’t Have Confidence in Supreme Court 

The drop in confidence comes as the Supreme Court debates the future of the abortion pill.

 ...and integrity of the judicial system...

The Supreme Court Is Lawless 

Join us in an urgent project to track the dangerous ideas and decisions of this activist court.

...the open and shameless corruption...

The real reason for the Supreme Court’s corruption crisis

Who watches the philosopher kings with lifetime appointments?

...and petty derangements...

Rage-filled Samuel Alito Baffled [That] His Fairness is Being Questioned. 

You will respect my authority, Justice insists.

...of the most conservative judges on the highest court in the land has driven the final nails into its coffin.

So...with six of the seven True Conservative horcruxes stripped away and destroyed either by the indifference of the GOP base or by the catastrophes created by True Conservatives actually getting their dearest wishes granted, what, at last, is left to sustain the rapidly disintegrating True Conservative soul? 

Just two things.  Their hardwired sense of moral superiority/contempt for dirty Liberals like you and me.  And, of course, the all-powerful, all-occasion conjure words that keep this last, mingy fragment of their soul from turning to ash: Both Sides Do It (and Democrats are always worse.)

And if True Conservatism had just wandered off into the woods and disappeared with only these two outrageous lies to keep then warm, I wouldn't have cared.  But they didn't exit the stage did they?  Instead, they were allowed to take over the stage.  These failures and outcasts and authors of our present miseries were, instead, allowed to fucking colonize every corner of non-Fox/non-Newsmax media.  

And everywhere they took root their message has been the same:  

Sure Trump is a monster.  

And obviously our republic is in danger from my recently-former party.  

But surely it must be equally obvious to all normal, sensible Americans that only viable way out of this mess is a Center-Left/Center-Right coalition of Sensible Centrists.

Because, as I'm sure we can all agree, the excesses on the crazy, zealot Left are very nearly as dangerous as the excesses on the crazy, zealot Right.

Because, as we all know, Both Sides Do It.

Except, of course...

Both Sides Don't