Aristocrats and Leninists

“Biden’s best State of the Union option is to give a speech detailing his achievements and agenda then ‘announce that he needs to focus on governing,’ drop out of the race, and say ‘he looks forward to a vigorous contest among many qualified successors.’” https://t.co/eXKD8ZRL2U

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 7, 2024

Every day Bloody Bill Kristol -- who is now the daily, public-facing voice of MSNBC subsidiary "The Bulwark" -- finds a way to prove my thesis about Never Trumpers. That in their exile from the fascist party they worked so hard to create, they behave...

...exactly like exiled Russian aristocracy after the revolution.

Aristocrats who had been run out of their out of their country by the serfs they had exploited.

Aristocrats who suddenly found themselves financially dependent on the largess of people they detested.

Aristocrats who, with that special, asshole-arrogance that comes with an inbred sense of entitlement,  become indignant when their hosts don't snap to and do as they're told.

Aristocrats who still believe in their God-given right to command a national spotlight and who go right on airily insisting they know what the serfs really want, despite being shown to be utterly wrong over and over again.

Here is Ross Douthat explaining why Democrats must bend the knee to him and his kind...

It goes on at length from there, citing examples from Douthat, Max Boot, Tom Nichols, Charlie Sykes, etc.showing their fury at the idea that they needed to accommodate themselves in any way to our party.  They maintained the bottomless, sneering contempt for Democrats that had have been their bread and butter for decades. Their mighty and noble party had inexplicably blowed up real good and sunk to the bottom of the sea, and we were nothing but a convenient garbage scow they could hitch a tide on for a little while until they could trade up to something better.  

Instead of carping, we should be on bended knee thanking them for deigning to grace our filthy, stupid garbage scow with their august presence.

Instead of continuing to pretend like we know anything about politics, we should ask them pretty please to take over the job of steering our filthy, stupid garbage scow through these dangerous waters. 

Wrote all about it here if you want the supersized version of the material that got me blocked by 2/3rds of The Bulwark staff :-)

And it is precisely because the GOP elite comported themselves and ran their party for decades as clueless and increasingly-despised royalists, that Steve Bannon's Leninist tactics were so successful.  

From  The New Yorker, November 14, 2016:

Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump’s White House

“I’m a Leninist,” Steve Bannon told a writer for The Daily Beast, in late 2013. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”*

Bannon saw exactly what we Liberals saw roiling just below the Republican party's smarmy, Bill Kristol/David Brooks/George Will/Michael Gerson/Rich Lowry/Charlie Sykes/Joe Scarborough/ Ramesh Ponnuru/Noah Rothman/David Frum/Dinesh D'Souza/Jonah Goldberg/Etc. Ad Nauseum carapace.  

A party whose base was being radicalized and whose worst traits, basest emotions and darkest fears were being cultivated and amplified by the real leaders of the GOP: Lee Atwater, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Etc. Ad Nauseum.

The party elite both needed the base and loathed the loutish, racist base like the czarists both needed and were repelled by the dirty uncouth proletariat.  And while the party elite played effete parlor games with each other and the Beltway media, more and more they relied on a sprawling, toxic and profitable  infrastructure of pure propaganda.  Telling the base over and over again that their paranoia was actually patriotism, that the real racists were the Libtards, and most importantly, anyone who tries to tell you anything you don't want to hear cannot be trusted.    

But not merely untrustworthy, or arguing in good faith but you just disagreed with the.  Oh my no.  Anyone telling the base something they didn't want to hear was an Enemy of Murrica!  And with Enemies of Murrice there were no holds barred in attacking them.  Their world was reduced to  Manichean simplicity: either you're with us, or you're a terrorist-luvin' traitors!  A dirty commie!  Obviously in pocket of the Evil Soros!  And since the threat from the Dems was so existentially dire, any tactic for making them squeal was acceptable.  You could lie.  Cheat.  Slander.  Didn't matter, as long you you owned the Libtards!

And as long as full fury of of the Conservative propaganda machine was being directed at the Left, the Conservative were happy.  Delighted, in fact, since the more angrily unhinged the base became, the easier it was to get them to the polls and voting against their own interests.  

Make a note of that, because Bannon sure did.

Bannon saw what we saw.  A broken corporate media full of cowards and careerists, and a feckless Republican party elite who had built a doomsday weapon that, unless some drastic action were taken, would sooner or later slip out of their control and quite possibly destroy the country.  But where we saw terrible danger, Bannon saw opportunity: an exploitable, brainwashed rabble that could be harnessed and ridden right over the party elite of weaklings, grifters, and and petty little men all the way to the White House, and a corrupt media which could easily be bullied or bribed into falling in line. 

All that was required was to appropriate the machinery by which the party elite kept the base in a constant state of aggrieved rage and turn it against the elite.  The party's "means of production" if you will.  

And we all know what that means of Republican propaganda production is...

... don't we.

And turning the instrumentality of the Conservative elite against them came about exactly as some us had been predicting all along.  All it took was someone with a sufficiently loud voice to run for the Republican nomination by speaking to the base in the language they already fully understood.  

Lenin said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” And that's almost literally what the Republican party elite has done.  Because along came Trump, who moved easily into the Fox orbit because he was already a teevee guy with a hit show and had been the loudest voice leading the Birther mob.  And when he came down the escalator and announced that he was running, he began talking to the base, not like Romney or McCain or any member of the Bush clan, but like Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Beck.  

He spoke to them in their own mother tongue, which was the language that brought them to the polls year after year to put Republican politicians in office.  But it was very much not the language of The Weekly Standard or The National Review, a language which Conservatives snobs found uncouth, but which was routinely dismissed or ignored because you know how these peasants are.  

But comes now Trump, saying out loud on national teevee all these awful things that were supposed to stay confined to the gutter culture of right-wing talk radio and Fox News.  Comes now Trump, telling the serfs that they had no reason to be ashamed.  That their rage and paranoia and grievances were all real and valid and the fault of not just Democrats, but their collaborators within the Republican party.  The squishes and the sellouts who rolled their eyes at the open racism and vulgarity of the base, even as they depended entirely on that base for their jobs.  

For decades the Republican party had been a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but with a respectable front parlor for entertaining the Beltway media.  And for decades, that part of the house was the only part the Beltway media would acknowledge.

And then one day the dirty mob who did their drinking and whoring and gambling at the back of the house, ambled into the parlor where the madam was serving tea to the parson and the mayor and the head of the Temperance League at the front of the house.  

Of course, the madam and the parson and the mayor and the head of the Temperance League all knew perfectly well what went on behind closed doors.  Knew that the mayor liked to discreetly get his kink on back there, that the parson was a secret, degenerate gambler (what's known in the trade as a "Bill Bennett") and the head of the Temperance League got knee-walking drunk back there at least once a month and slept it off in one of the empty room upstairs.  

Also, and of equal importance, each of those fine, upstanding citizens knew damn well that it was the profits from all that drinking and whoring and gambling was what kept them all in the black.  And the Conservative elite were all quite content to live in this state of incredibly lucrative hypocrisy and deception...

...until, one day, a Bad Thing happened.

A memorable event designed to delight the hoi polloi offended the sensibilities of a prominent member of the Conservative aristocracy, and she used her elite position to tell the dirty Republican proles something they did not want to hear.  She assuming, of course, that since her was of the ruling class, a condescending lecture from one of their betters would slap the proles back into line.  They would see the error of their ways, shut up and get get on with the job of voting as they were told.

 That is not what happened.  From my own archives since the sands of time have swallowed the FireDogLake blog where this was originally posted:

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for [Sarah] Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless...

Remember (if you dare!) that this was back during the Before Time which the media and our Never Trump allies continue to insist was some kinda collegial, kumbaya epoch when everyone kinda got along, and no one was gauche enough to raise their voices in hurtful,  vitriolic umbrage.  

Except it wasn't.  It very, very much wasn't.  

Remember (if you dare!) that by 2008 Rush Limbaugh had been the coast-to-coast syndicated voice of the Republican base for a quarter of a century.  That Newt Gingrich, slash-and-burn-style politics had become de rigueur on the Right.  That gay-bashing, Swiftboating and slagging Democrats as terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating surrender monkeys was how Dick Cheney and his sock-puppet George W. Bush won a second term.   

And nearly a decade before it began to dawn on some eventually-former Republicans that their party had created a monster that had turned on it's creator, certain vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left were warning that Republicans had created a monster that was turning on it's creator:

As long as it's just those people, Good Germans like Ms. Parker will always be more than happy to make a little bank firing up the mob. Only too willing to smirk and sneer and turn a little profit raging up the pig people in the service of demonizing anyone who doubts the infinite wisdom of the Dear Leader or the infinite goodness of the Christopath cabal that runs the GOP, ‘cause it all sounds just like sweet, sweet music…just as long as its being directed at the dirty Jews Liberals.

But now the monster has turned on its creator, and Good German Kathleen has finally heard an inkling – or an oinkling – of the baying, shrieking hordes whose bloody-mindedness we on the Left have been trying to curb for the last generation.

Out in the disreputable exurbs of the Liberal blogosphere we were waving our arms and shouting as loudly as our tiny platforms would allow, but it is a given that no one pays attention to vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left, so our warning-that-turned-out-to-be-true fell into the same abyss as all of our other warnings-that-turned-out-to-be-true.   

And as history teaches us over and over again, while such epiphanies do occasionally occur among the hacks of the Beltway, they are almost always fleeting.  Once the initial sting passes, they quickly return their true calling.  

However, as a proof-of-concept that a takeover of the Republican party by an authoritarian demagogue was not only possible but was becoming inevitable, the results of the Parker incident couldn't have been clearer.   The base was still willing to listen to the Conservative elite, but only insofar as the Conservative elite told them what they wanted to hear.  But publicly roll your eyes at the madness of the proles at your peril.  Which meant that the Conservative elite weren't really running things anymore.  Conservative propagandists were.  And the propagandists were running things only so long as they fed the mob the red meat they were now addicted to.

This made for a very fragile alliance, but one which could limp along as long as the interests of the party elite and the propagandists were aligned.  As long as everyone stuck to the script and played according to Hoyle: slag the Democrats any way you want, all you want, in any venue you choose, but keep the racism, the deranged conspiracies and the knifing of fellow Republicans to AM talk radio which the Beltway media very obligingly pretends does not exist.

Then along came Trump and Bannon, and everything clicked into place.

Trump speaks like Limbaugh.

The mob loves it.

The elite hate it and say so.

The mob turns on the elite.

The elite try to backpedal.

Trump mocks them as weaklings and pussies and Jebs.

The mob loves it.

The elite hate it and say "How dare you speak to us like this?" 

The mob turns on the elite.

Trump told the mob they should stop being ashamed of who they were.   That they should used their Limbaugh Language proudly and out loud.  And every time the elites recoiled in horror, Team Trump could point to them and say, "See!  See!  They were never with you!  They're worse than  Libtards!  They're squishes.  RINOs. Traitors.  And probably in Soros' pocket!"

As the elite of the GOP failed again and again to impede Trump in any meaningful way, it became impossible to ignore their fundamental hollowness and decadence.  Soon they would splinter into groveling, go-along flunkies like Lindsey Graham, and impotence aristocrats in exile like The Bulwark.  

The propagandists on the Right saw which way the wind was blowing and either got on board, got out of the way, scrambled around looking for a fence to straddle, or elbowed their way onto MSNBC.

The mainstream media was only too happy to air this odious thug saying repulsive things to crowds of cheering morons because it was great for ratings.  From The Hollywood Reporter, February 26, 2016:

Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: “It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS”

As the nexus of Republican power shifted, zombie centrists like David  Brooks, Ron Fournier and Matthew Dowd dutifully swapped Trump into their toxic "Both Sides Do It" algorithm, generating jaw-droppingly absurd equivalences like:  

And on cable teevee, the usual smarmy Republican ciphers began being crowded out by creatures like Jeffrey Lord, Katrina Pierson, Andy Dean. Omarosa Manigault, Boris Epshteyn, Sebastian Gorka, Eric Bolling, Corey Lewandowski and a cast of other bug-eyed fanatics and anything-for-a-buck freaks too numerous to mention.  

With the means of Republican propaganda production now safely in-hand, and the mainstream media's reactionary Centrist fetish obediently pivoting to normalize Trump as just one half of The Extremes on Both Sides, Bannon's Leninist takeover of the GOP was complete.

And whatever unsanctified hole in the ground Bannon is eventually shoveled into, the toxic fallout from the revolution he led will be with us for a generation.

If you don't believe me, believe Brother Charlie Pierce:

I No Longer Believe The Republican Party Will Ever Return To Normalcy

And right on time, Lil' Donny Coketwitch retweets their Bolshevik mop-up plan right into my lap:

On Super Tuesday, the official takeover of the GOP began when @realDonaldTrump dominated nearly every single state.

Now, the unification process begins by phasing the old @GOP out.

It's time to reverse our empire's collapse.

My latest for @HumanEvents:https://t.co/eZXQhS6DpQ

— Kenny Cody (@KDCodyTN) March 8, 2024

 

Burn The Lifeboats