Elite Conservatives Disown Their Spawn. Again.

Way back during the Before Time one subject that I wrote about frequently was how Elite Conservative Tastemakers like David  Brooks and David Frum were struggling to disown the paranoid, racist ogre party that they had labored for so many decades to bring into the world.

Here's a sample from 2011:

Well into their 117th trimesters David Brooks and David Frum both suddenly decide they really don't want to keep Reagan's baby.

Earlier today Mr. Brooks placed his order for a political D&C through pursed-lips and a frowny face by rewriting Reality's Timeline so that he was somehow never a part of the 30-year lead-up to the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire we see bearing monstrous fruit all around us.

Mr. Frum, more comically, decided instead to pretend that the person most responsible for the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire...was the Reasonable-to-a-Fault Democratic President! Because he [Obama] has so far failed to put Frum's Republican Party down like the sick animal that it is, and failed to clean up the toxic partisan sewer that David Frum helped create..despite Mr. Frum and every other Conservative douchebag in America being warned to beware just exactly these consequences for the last 30 years by two generations of Liberals...

And since the Rise of Trump I've written I-don't-know how many scores (hundreds?) of posts about how, once Trump was elected, so many of the architects of the modern Conservatives movement and the modern Republican party had dashed for their ideological finger bowls and bidets to wash their doughy, pink hands and their lying asses of any responsibility for his rise to power.  

It was a fluke!  It was magic!  It was Hillary's fault!  It was, somehow, the Liberals fault.  Their party ran out of gas.  They had a flat tire.  And so forth.

And you know what?  It worked.  

Thanks to the power of their friends and fellow travelers in the media, they barely never missed a meal as they seamlessly morphed from bleating about Barack The Kenyan Usurper and the vile socialist Left on op-ed pages and wingnut radio...

...to scolding Dems on op-ed pages and on MSNBC for not understanding what a grave, existential threat Trump really was, which is why Dems should step aside and let them run the show.

Well, this here post today is about those same clout-protected goofs are now disowning an entirely different litter of their monstrous whelplings:  Elite Both Siderists.

Oh noes!

It begins with The Bulwark's Mona Charen using her podcast to hand-wring over what No Labels is up to:

Charen  Let's turn now to a threat to all of the foregoing because I want to talk a little bit about third parties.  

driftglass:  Or you could just listen to our No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast on this very subject.

Charen:  We are seeing stories that, for example, Joe Manchin the Democratic senator from West Virginia -- a state that went for Trump by about y'know 90 percent or whatever -- but in any case he is going to New Hampshire next week to do a forum hosted by No Labels.  And also in attendance will be Joseph Lieberman former Senator, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, former Congressman Fred Upton, and former Congressman Joe Cunningham.  All people who, y'know, two Democrats two Republicans but everybody you know is sort of more in the center of the political spectrum.  And y'know, nobody understands more than people who participate in this podcast the appeal of moderation. 

Translation:  We have all been worshipping at the altar of the Fake Sensible Center for as long as any of us can remember.  

Make a note of that: it'll be important later.

Charen:  But this is arguably very dangerous in a year, 2024, when we still face the threat of the y'know, Orange Lunatic being returned to office.

The discussion then  widens out into a surprisingly transgressive act of memory (for this group) in which they're finally far enough away in time to admit that, yep, Ralph Nader cost Gore the 2000 election and stuck us with George W. Bush.

And, yep, Jill Stein tipped enough voters in enough swing states to cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and stick us with Trump.

And, yep, pretty much every reputable poll shows that, if No Labels makes good on its threat to put up a third party challenger in a few swing states (because there is no hope of any such candidate winning outright) it would almost certainly pull enough votes from Biden to put the Republican candidate -- probably Trump -- in the White House.  

The whole thing becomes grimly hilarious to me when the entire panel of political professionals professes to be utterly baffled as to why No Labels would do such a thing.

I can tell them why, but they're not gonna listen.  Because they never listen. So, onward!

Charen: And it isn't just No Labels.  It's also Cornell West running on the Green Party and People's Party ticket.  So I'm going to turn first to you Bill Galston.  You were initially involved with No Labels but you've since broken with them over this.  So one thing I want to tee this up a little bit is No Labels has promised to end its efforts if polling shows that quote "Biden is way way out ahead against Trump next spring". Bill isn't the problem that it could be very close and therefore they could act as spoiler?  I mean if Biden is way ahead they're irrelevant anyway?

Galston:  As some of the listeners to this podcast know I was present at the creation of No Labels 13 years ago and I worked hard over that period to promote the core mission of the organization which was to get the two major parties to cooperate more frequently and effectively to pursue the common good of the country as the American people defined the common good of the country. 

And just like that the actual history of the modern Republican Party disappears like a fart in a firestorm..  

All memory of the extended, berserk racist primal scream that the GOP was engaged in 13 years ago in reaction to Democrats electing a reasonable, cooperative, centrist Black man named Barack Obama is just fucking gone.  

Because the lie that conjured the No Labels scam into existence and that Galstone and others like him were fully invested in -- the lie that our politics is broken because both parties are so equally extreme and intransigent that they require firm Sensible Centrist hand of carrion-pickers like Joe Fucking Lieberman to force them to work together -- had long since become the Beltway's state religion.  

Make a note of that too: it'll be on the exam.

Galston: But I drew the line when it came to mounting an independent bipartisan ticket in 2024 because I feared that such a ticket would draw a lot more from potential Biden supporters than from potential Trump supporters.

Too late fucko.

Galston: And recently a very well regarded Republican-leaning firm by the name of Echelon Insights did a survey that added fuel to my fears because it turned out...

And so forth, and so on, and, once again, too late fucko.

Galston: Which led me to write an article which I believe was just posted on the Brookings website...

Wow.  Such daring. 

There follows some talk about the Green Party.  Memories of Jill Stein.  The way the electoral college works.  Nothing you don't already know about.  And then:

Charen:  Noah [Smith] there's such a huuuge gulf between the reasonable sounding things that people, for example, associated with No Labels say and the reality that we face. So here's an example.  Joe Manchin said, "It is clear that most Americans are exceedingly frustrated by the growing divide in our political parties and toxic political rhetoric from our elected leaders."  And he goes on to say, "Our political discourse is lacking engaged debates around Common Sense solutions to solve the pressing issues facing our nation." Unquote.  Well, yes. I mean who can disagree with that.

driftglass:  I can.  100%.  But Mona ain't gonna call on me so...

Charen:  I understand lots of really well-meaning voters can listen to that and think, "Wow that's exactly what this country needs."  But if the two major party candidates, y'know, were Bob Dole and Bill Clinton and somebody said, "You know I'm going to run a No Labels candidacy that y'know attempts to bridge the divide," fine.  But that's not where we are.  I mean, again, it's an existential threat that Donald Trump could get reelected. 

driftglass:  But of course, back during the 1990s, these sorts of Conservative clowns were talking about the dire existential threat posed by Bill Clinton, weren't they?  I wrote whole, long thing about it back in 2009 called "Like a Virgin".  Perhaps you've read it.  For at least the last 30 years, according to leading Conservatives, every Democratic president has been a degenerate, America-hating wanna-be Pinochet who was definitely going to be the End of the Republic.

Note that for the record.

Charen:  And I am just...I'm gobsmacked that people don't see it in those terms.  And they're sort of "La, Dee, Dah" y'know, let's consider this option of y'know third parties. And so on.  What do you think?

There follows Some discussion about FDR's support slipping slightly during World War II which has no relevance whatsoever to this situation. 

Then get ready, because this panel of elites is about to lean hard on the "most Americans" bullshit.  

Smith:  I would put my money on Biden against Trump but I think that not everybody sees Trump as an existential threat.  Most people think of Trump in the context of culture wars. Most people are still thinking of trump in terms of BLM and crime and abortion and trans whatever and you know whatever culture wars. That's how most people think about politics in America, I believe. 

Smith then explicitly makes the "Ya gotta understand, people who are not us are basically barely literate rubes" argument. 

Smith:  We are elite media junkies who just read all the news about what's going on in, like Ukraine and Asia and all this stuff, and about what's going on in, like, industrial policy or whatnot,,.

Yeah, because Ukraine n' stuff and economics or whatever is exactly how "we" literati talk.  

But please, tell me more about the lumpen proles.

Smith: ...and then most people are just thinking, like, "Well Trump, he hates the guys that I hate or that I think I hate even though I've never met them, etc." So I think that it's unsurprising given all those baseline factors that Trump would have a decent amount of support most people are just pretty low information.  Takes them a long time to catch up and often they never catch up.  But that's democracy. If we want to keep Trump out of the White House we can't just say that he's an existential threat for reasons that we understand that the average person doesn't understand.  We can say that all we wantand we should for elite audiences, whatever, but for regular folks we need to make a regular folks case that Trump is really bad.  

driftglass:  There are 81,283,501 people who voted for Biden/Harris in 2020 that would disagree.   So, to be crystal clear, by "regular folks", Noah Smith actually means "Republican meatheads".  Y'know, the base on which Charen and the others built their entire party.

Charen:  Cathy [Young.  Another Bulwark employee], no question that you have to make a different case when you're presenting it to a broad audience.  But the thing that's frustrating me right now is that the people who are endangering the next election -- or,let's say... let's put it bluntly, the people who are threatening Biden's re-election, which is all that stands between us and Trump arguably.  I mean it's not over -- he could still fail to get the nomination -- but let's just say he looks likely to get the nomination.  But these are elites! These people who are doing this are all elites.  I mean Cornel West is an elite!  Joe Manchin -- all the people associated with No Labels -- these are all elites who are who are playing a very dangerous game, arguably.

Young: Yeah I really don't know what they're thinking 

driftglass:  Oh I do.  I can tell you pretty much exactly what they're thinking, which is the subject of this post towards which I am slowly circling.  But please, go on.

Young: And you know, before I go on to sort of speculate on that, I have my own confession to make which is that I donated money to No Labels, like, years ago when it was first founded.  

I was young.  I was drunk.  Barry White was playing on the Victrola...

Charen:  That's totally fine!  You don't have to say it like it's a sin!  I mean... I mean at the time Bill [Galston] was involved.  

And now we get to the nub of the matter.

Young: And I also wrote [inaudible] article.  I wasn't involved in it the way that Bill was but his involvement certainly was part of what made me interested in the group.  But yeah, it just seemed like, uh, y'know this fresh voice against, y'know, rampant partisanship and I certainly had no inkling that it could ever end up playing spoiler in an election at a crucial moment.  

Once again, this goof is talking about 2010 -- a year in which the GOP very publicly lost its fucking mind because Democrats had elected a black guy -- as an era of "rampant partisanship" because apparently that's how she remembers it.

Which is exactly why we do the No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast.  

Because properly understanding the difference between what actually happened during the Before Time and the Never Trumpers' abridged, bleached-out, Disneyfied version of what happened is so terribly important.  Specifically, how knee-walking drunk on Both Sides Do It popskull every future Never Trumper was during this time.  How frantic they all were to prop up their Republican party by deflecting or diffusing every Republican atrocity with the shield of "But the Democrats..."  

How it was all on autopilot.  

How the easy, lazy "Both Sides Do It" lie became the state religion of the punditocracy and the Beltway media.

Young: So yeah, I don't really understand the irresponsibility.  I can sort of understand in 2016 when a lot of people, including myself, kind of thought well, y'know even if Trump does get elected, y'know how bad can it be?  Well I think now we know exactly how bad it is.  ...  I think in 2016 a lot of people -- basically a lot of people on the Left -- took the view that, ah well, it's all the same.  It's the... the elites. The political elites. It doesn't matter if that's Hillary Clinton or Trump, it's the establishment.  

Nope.  This was indeed the opinion of a handful Greenwalds and Chapo Trap House louts, but, as I documented ad nauseum in real time, the real vanguard of that message was this asshole.  Then-ABC News' chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd (on the right) -- 

- and, on the left, his partner in crimes-against-journalism The Sad Clown of Centrism, Ron Fournier: 

And, of course, there was David Brooks...and all the rest.  Right down the line. 

All the Very Serious Elites, all singing from the same "Both Sides Do It" hymnal.

But of course, that isn't how this Bulwark flunkey remembers it.  She remembers it as "basically a lot of people on the Left".

Bulwark flunkey continues:

Young: I mean can any sane person not even necessarily left-of-center, but, y'know non-right-wing take that view?  I don't think so.  I don't want to speculate on  whether our democracy can survive another round of trump but I'd certainly rather not take that chance.

It goes on and on like that, and I've already inflicted more of this on you than is polite, so the sum and substance is this: roughly between the time that the Bush Administration went tits-up and the day Donald Trump was elected, the entire punditocracy -- and especially the Conservative punditocracy -- had to scramble to find some fig leaf -- some lie -- that was not only big enough to cover their own callow and catastrophic complicity with eight years of the worst presidency in modern history, but also big enough to smother the rising Liberal netroots community who had, in fact, been right about the Right all along.

And thus the Both Sides Do It lie, that had been kicking around for decades, was elevated to the status of the official state religion by both the political media and the Republican Party who found, in the Both Sides Do It lie, the perfect cover from which they could metaphorically lob cinder blocks into traffic with impunity.  

The lie was so suffocating and so profitable that its evangels swallowed the media whole.  From my local newspaper every day, to NPR, to Meet the Press, to cable news it was everywhere, all the time.  It was so ubiquitous that those who ate and breathed the lie for a living never noticed that they were creating an entire ecosystem in which nothing but the automatic blaming of every Republican atrocity to Both Sides could survive.  

And in that ecosystem there grew monsters.

Elite monsters who spread like black fungus into every damp corner of every commercial political media platform, every think tank, every advisory group, the C-suites of corporations and universities  -- succeeding precisely because they were incapable formulating any political or cultural thoughts outside of the Both Sides Do It matrix.

So when Mona Charen moans --

But these are elites! These people who are doing this are all elites.  I mean Cornel West is an elite!  Joe Manchin -- all the people associated with No Labels -- these are all elites who are who are playing a very dangerous game, arguably.

-- and Cathy Young replies --

Yeah I really don't know what they're thinking.

--that is what I find so grimly amusing.  

Because congratulation, Ms. Charen.  By dint of the sheer, endless, sanctimonious repetition of the toxic Both Sides Do It lie on every media platform for decades, you and those like you gave birth to this litter of horribles who are just as incapable of imagining a world where only one side is to blame for Republican malevolence...as Republican base voters are incapable of imagining a world in which -- holy shit! -- they have been grossly wrong all along. 

In both cases such a revelation is a thing to be feared and guarded against at any cost because it would mean completely unwinding their persona and (horrors!) admitting that the Left had been right.  

And in the case of elite Both Siderist monsters the pathology is worse because of how professionally successful most of these monster are.  

Thanks to ample bank accounts and the professional protections they enjoy, there is no personal threat to their freedoms or their livelihoods great enough to make them give up their insane Olympian perspective. Cornel West is 70 years old and currently holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at the Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan.  Joe Manchin is a 75-year-old United States Senator with eight cars, eleven houses, two yachts and a net worth in the $18M range.  The executive board of No Labels is top-heavy with wealthy insiders, and awash in an ocean of dark money.  And if, thanks to their monkeywrenching, Donald Trump were to squeak back into the White House in 2024 and terminate the American experiment, I am absolutely sure ot two things.

First, none of these clowns would be materially affected in any way.

Second, all of these clowns would instantly and automatically blame Both Sides.  

Me?  I'm Partisan A.F.