The Fascists and the Blind Men

Since all of us here are snobby Liberal elites, I assume you're all familiar with the parable of The Elephant and the Blind Men.  

If you're not, here it is, minus the happy ending where a Wise Man happens past and says, "Hey, you're all partially right!" and then they're all filled with joy and go off together and get drunk. and they all get jobs writing opinion pieces for The New York Times.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”

They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right....

Well this is not that story.

This is the story of four elite Conservatives who spent their entire careers willfully blinding themselves to the burgeoning rage, racism, paranoia, arrogant ignorance and lust for a dictator that was motivating the base of their party.

Instead, as they patted down the fascism at the heart of the Republican party,  they reported back to the world that...

“Unlike those heathen, gay-loving Liberals, the Republican party is deeply, sincerely and faithfully Christian,” said David French.

“Virtuous Republicans who care deeply about deficits and institutional norms are all that keep us safe from those Liberal monsters,” said Bret "Bug" Stephens.

"There will be no Trump coup,"  said His Eminence Ross Cardinal Douthat, primate of the Archdiocese of Dorkylvania.

“It's gonna be Rubio!” said David Brooks.

So today The New York Times has presented its readers with four extremely privileged, out-of-touch Conservative white dudes on the payroll of Times, all of whom have spent their entire professional lives being willfully blind to the monsters they were helping to spawn, and being utterly wrong about the one thing they were hired to have savvy opinions about based on their alleged expertise and insider knowledge: the state of play inside the Republican party, and what the Right was thinking and doing behind closed doors.    

Let's see how that worked out!

David Brooks: I’d add another phrase: “brokenism.” This is the belief system popularized by Alana Newhouse in Tablet magazine in 2022. It’s the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down. Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption.

Translation: I personally have no idea what's going on but I gonna say that I still have Trump-supporting friends for some reason and they tell me...

David French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Ross Douthat: I think there are all kinds of ways in which Trump’s popularity is connected to distinctive shifts in the culture in the last 15 years — the trends on both left and right that have boosted populists all over the Western world. But it’s also important to stress that part of what Republicans like about Donald Trump is just that Donald Trump is a Republican.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides.  Also I don't have that much of a problem with Trump because he's mostly doing Republican stuff that I like.

Brooks: I’d offer up one more word for consideration: “exclusion.” Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Brooks: A lot of elite conservatives continue to struggle with what I call the near-abroad problem. They may dislike MAGA, but they (we) are mostly around progressives or moderates on a day-to-day basis, by virtue of being elite. These progressives sometimes make our teeth hurt. We react more strongly to minor sins of the people across campus than the major sins of the people far away. This is something I’m working on.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Stephens:  The other point that can’t be emphasized enough: Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the country. Just the fact that he drives the Rachel Maddows of the world into fits of rage and despair and thoughts of European exile is reason enough for many Americans to support him. Sometimes even including me.

Translation:  My bone-deep loathing of Liberals remains undimmed and I will exploit any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching.  

French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, “woke” programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.

That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact ... than anything they experienced under Trump.

 Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Liberals are the worst.

Stephens: ...some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness schemes? I also think millions of Americans are tuning out some of the claims of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior as so much partisan noise. That’s one of the downsides of some of the more doubtful efforts by liberal prosecutors to put Trump in jail.

Translation:  Have I mentioned that I still really, really fucking hate Liberals and will use any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching? Also Liberals are really to blame for everything.

French: ... We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years. Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream that the courts are lawless, not Trump.

Translation:  Fuck you, Stephens.  I'm an actual lawyer not some DEI hire from the Wall Street Journal brought on because Cardinal Douthat here wasn't red meat wingnut enough for the five MAGA rubes who Sulzberger believes still read his paper.  

French: It’s so important to distinguish between the core of MAGA — which dominates discourse online — from the bulk of voters who put Trump back in the White House.

driftglass: No it's not.  If they're not out-and-proud fascists, they extremely cool with being out-and-proud fascist-adjacent.  Fuck 'em all:  the three-strikes rule applies to everyone who voted for Trump during his third run for the White House.

Douthat: It’s not unique to MAGA, though — real partisans don’t change their vote just because the economy goes bad, and especially not under polarized conditions. It’s not like the inflation under Biden suddenly made partisan Democrats...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Stephens: Well, Treasury Secretary Bessent is right. Market corrections are healthy. Recessions should sometimes happen.

Translation:  Let them eat cake.

Healy: Trump calling for the impeachment of that judge — and the notion of impeaching or disregarding judges generally whom Trump disagrees with.

Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years ago owe the chief justice an apology...

Translation:  I am so consumed by my hatred of Liberals that there is nothing left inside of me, and it's really, really unfair that Trump's awfulness makes it harder to devote every word in every column I write to the subject of just how monstrous Liberals are.  

Stephens: Musk is off to a bad start in his government career, but I sincerely wish him success. The federal government isn’t just too big, it’s obese. Elon may yet be its Ozempic.

Translation:  Burn it all down -- I'll bring the marshmallows!  -- except for the parts I like.  

Douthat: We are two months into the presidency, and we just lived through four years of dramatic global and domestic upheaval under a Democratic president whose manifest incapacity was deliberately concealed from the country. I have a million concerns about where this administration is going, but it’s a bit soon to attack the president’s supporters for being irrationally loyal.

Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Democrats are the worst.

In conclusion, while the four New York Times Conservatives columnists did collectively manage to blame both sides, express their unalloyed contempt for people like me, and confess that they have no idea what people outside of their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege think about a damn thing, they very definitely did not pinpoint why the reprogrammable meatbag base of the Republicans party love Trump more than before.

For the answer to that question they would need to stop sniffing each others Buckley farts and ask any one of us who A) live well outside their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege and, B) have been writing about the Republican party for 20 years now.  

Which they will never do because an honest answer would, well...

It is one of the more amusing ironies of our age that while elite New York Times Conservatives (and The Atlantic Conservatives, and The Bulwark Conservatives, and so on) may be anathema to the Republican MAGA base, both groups detest Liberals for exactly the same reason:  our existence and our decades of warnings make both groups look stupid.

I Am The Liberal Media