Why oh why must certain Liberals, certain Democrats, be so willful? So obstreperous? So disobedient?
Why can't they see that our democracy is hanging by a thread? And that our Awesome Democracy Coalition is the only hope of saving it?
And why can't they see that the only hope of keeping our Awesome Democracy Coalition together is if we all play from from the same playbook? And that playbook is the one written by [checks notes] a tiny group of former Republicans and former Weekly Standard employees who got run out of our own party by the monster they help create...and have since been allowed to colonize the media to the point where Liberal voices might as well not even exist!
And that playbook clearly states that various topics are off-limits -- especially topics that involve talking about the past. It also clearly states that Neoconservatism was secretly awesome, that the Extremes on Both Sides are the real problem, and, now that we control the Awesome Democracy Coalition narrative, certain Liberals, certain Democrats, need to keep their heterodox thoughts to themselves and keep their whiny yappers shut.
Part 1. Glorious Neoconservatism!
And, no, I'm not just talking about the godawful David Brooks' column --
The Neocons Were Right
Not about Iraq. But the moral tenor of their political writings could be an antidote to Trumpism.
-- which The Atlantic paid him to write.
Instead, --surprise! -- your "allies" at The Bulwark had a merry old time doing that Never Trump thing where they pretend Republicanism and Neoconservatism are not what they manifestly were and are, but instead were what they wish they had been.
I mean, pointing at the Republican party -- which nominated Donald Trump for president three times in a row, overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the last three elections, and managed to elect him twice -- and declaring that this is not what being a Republican is all about is not just patently ridiculous, it's insulting. It's gaslighting.
And yet, there was The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell doing exactly that. Doing exactly what Blue Gal warned they would be doing all the way back in August of 2016.
From Crooks and Liars, August 1, 2016 (I hope she won't mind quoting it at length):Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump. Who voted for him again?Have you noticed a number of media outlets calling the Republican campaign for President, "Trumpism"?
It isn't Trumpism. It's the Republican Party. And it has been for far longer than Donald Trump has been running for President.
The video above is from a year ago (July 2015). Alisyn Camerota asks a focus group of Trump and leaning toward Trump voters why they like him. Those of you who have watched any of these "average Trump voter" interviews know their trademarks:
"He speaks his mind, and says what I am already thinking."
"Illegal immigration is the number one issue on my mind."
"He'll make America great again."
The reason the news media interviewed these particular people is, they are registered Republican Primary voters.
They didn't just register to vote this year or fall off a truck into the Republican Party. They voted for Bush, twice. They voted for McCain/Palin. They voted for Romney. And they're tired of losing and being embarrassed by their votes, so embarrassed that they fell for a "Tea Party" rebranding just so they would not have to associate themselves with Bush.
And then the establishment had the nerve to suggest they vote for Bush's brother.
Donald Trump lies about a lot of things, but he is not lying when he says he received more Republican Primary votes than any other candidate in US history. That statistic is skewed by how many Republicans voted "Not Trump," but the fact that the race boiled down to Trump versus not-Trump is not helpful to the "Trumpism" argument. Republican voters selected Trump as their candidate, in state after state after state.
The beltway news media is terrified that the Republican Party will be forever tarnished by this Trump candidacy. Why? Because Trump-as-Republican busts open their "both sides" myth, that "both sides" of the political spectrum are equally bad, equally wrong and right, equally to be blamed for the "mess" in Washington...
Then, after insisting that what 99.3% of Republicans think being a "Republican" means is wrong...Ms. Longwell went on to do the same with "Neoconservatism"
Longwell: ...people just say that things are Republican or conservative, and what they mean is they're Trump. they're Trump and Trump adjacent and whatever. Neoconservatism is very similar.
She then gives her own definition of what she wishes Neoconservatism had been. Then moves on to what Trump is doing in Venezuela
Longwell: That is not neoconservatism, guys. This is just it is the "Trumpro doctrine" or whatever.
...Anyway, so my point is... is like this is not neoconservatism by in any of the ways that we've ever thought about it and that neo neoconservatism itself has kind of lost meaning because people view it as like just what Afghan... uh Afghanistan and Iraq what they were. Um that was not that's not what neoconservatism was at its roots. Like, we have lost the sense of what it is.
Then a little jokey joke about how we're not going to talk about Iraq and neoconservatism on this show, and that's that. Done and dusted.
Before we ascend to the giddy heights of the Mountain of the Stupidest Fucking Things Anyone Has Ever Said (Non-Donald Trump Category) to carve the words "Afghanistan and Iraq Was Not What Neoconservatism Was at Its Roots" up near the peak for all the world to see forever and ever, some thoughts.
First, to quote Batman Begins,
"It's not who you are underneath. It's what you do that defines you."
It doesn't matter what your dorm room fantasy of Neocons was. What matters is what the Neocons did.
Second, Sarah, have you ever met a guy named Bill Kristol? Y'know, Mr. Neocon? The guy who was so cocksure of a quick, cakewalk victory in Iraq that he used his monthly Neocon journal, The Weekly Standard, to make sure that "Neoconservatism" and "Iraq" became inseparable. The guy who was advocating the decapitation of basically every Islamic/Muslim/Arab regime in the Middle East back when you were fresh out of Kenyon College and working for the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute? One of the two or three most omnipresent Neocon warmongers on the Sunday Shows for more than a decade? Son of Neocon founding father Irving Kristol?
Ringing any bells?
Y'know, the co-founder of the place you work now.
Part 2. Will no one rid me of these turbulent Liberals!
Here's a riddle that's fun for the whole family.
Q: Thanks in no small part to our successful campaign to make anyone trying to slip a "Both Sides Do It" cold deck into the conversation, how can you tell when one of your "allies" is about to do exactly that?
A: Here is The Bulwark's Tim Miller doing exactly that:
Miller: Um I want to uh I'm going to tie two items together that are in the news. And I just want to say very clearly upfront, I'm not creating an equivalence between these two people. I just want to talk about two news items in the context of identity politics and and the dangers of identity politics.
It beggars belief that Mr. Miller really not understand what it means to "tie two items together".
Anyway, he then goes on to talk about some of the straight-up Nazi shit that Elon Musk is saying. It's horrifying. Genocidally racist. And right there out in the open, coming from the richest man on Earth, Donald Trump's largest donor, and, via DOGE, the man who will probably go down in history as being directly responsible for the deaths of more human beings than anyone else in Trumpworld.
Then, this.
Miller: ...there's also a scandal going around one of Zoran staffer[s] much... much less prominent person but... but I just want to use this story as kind of a way to talk about something I have concerns about.
See, the Daily Mail and the New York Post had dug through the Twitter account this Mamdani staffer, who is white, and found some old Tweets of her excoriating white supremacy and white privilege and property rights.
Tim recited all of it.
And then...
Miller: I'm not saying that it's Cea Weaver's fault that Donald Trump's top donor and adviser is a white supremacist. I'm not. But I... I... I think that we have... get into a very... we live in... we get into a very dangerous spot. I think sometimes with folks on the Left who get very comfortable in the identity politics space and then start just throwing around pejoratives about white people all the time.
A week ago this story didn't exist.
Then the Daily Mail and the New York Post went digging.
Then came the "Mounting criticism...." and Ms. Weaver crying in public.
Then came the right wing pile on. Anything to not talk about Venezuela or the Epstein files, right?
The same day Renee Good was murdered by an ICE thug in Minneapolis, this is what Megyn Kelly and her pal Mark Halperin decided to talk about.
And once it'd been elevated to the status of Important News by the Right's gargantuan media megaphone, Tim Miller had another hippy to punch.
Because in case you hadn't noticed, nary a single Bulwark podcast ever goes by without one of your new, former-Republican "allies" making a point of finding something or someone somewhere -- real or imagined -- which can be used as a prop to scold "folks on the Left" for our naughtybad ways.
Because in case you hadn't noticed, this Awesome Democracy Coalition is all about making Republicans feel comfortable. And to do that, they need to be constantly reassured that they need not give up a lifetime of loathing Liberals that has defined their political identity, no matter how objectively delusional and frankly fucked-in-the-head that loathing may be. And to do that, The Bulwark needs to constantly reassure them that, see! see! you can trust us because we think Liberals are awful too!
So, to stress test this theory that the Awesome Democracy Coalition is all about making Republicans comfortable no matter what horrid shit they believe, while telling mouthy Liberals to shut up and sit down, let's put that shoe on the other foot.
Instead of a lefty saying mean things about white people and property rights and capitalism on Twitter years ago, let's posit a Republican saying genuinely awful things about Democrats.
And not some mayoral staffer that you'd never heard of two weeks ago, but a very prominent Republican.
In fact, let's make it a Republican from one of the most famous Republican families in modern history.
A Republican who had been in the national spotlight for decades. A Republican who was one of the most powerful people in Republican leadership.
Let us further posit that the horrendous things this prominent Republican was saying weren't potshots on Twitter, but were stated publicly, on camera, as the official position of the Republican party.
Let us further posit that the horrendous things this very prominent Republican was saying were bold-face lies: lies that imputed to Democrats the very worst things human beings can do. And that these lies weren't just a one-off, but something this very prominent Republican repeated on a number of occasions. And that this particular horrid thing was just the cherry on top of an entire political career built on slandering people us in the foulest ways possible.
And rather than retracting and apologizing for what they said, as Cea Weaver has done -- even bursting into tears over it, as Cea Weaver did -- let us further posit that this very prominent Republican never shed a tear or retracted or apologized for any of it.
Of course we don't have to put on our Imagination Hats to posit any of this, because this is exactly what happened with Liz Cheney. And the lies good ol' Liz calmly told about Democrats over and over again were orders of magnitude worse than anything some mayoral staffer ever said on Twitter.
And we don't have to guess what Tim Miller's reaction to these horrific lies would be, because he and everyone else at The Bulwark rolled their eyes and dismissed them as some minor disagreement over abortion policy that those loony Liberals were obsessed over for no explicable reason.
In fact, knowing that sooner or later we would arrive here, your humble scrivener took the trouble to transcribe one such conversation between Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller back in 2022. Here's the intro to that post:
Tim Miller has a new book all about how awful the Republican party is and his part in making it so.
I haven't read it, but have read *about* it, and the reviews are mostly positive.
So when then Tim Miller showed up for his regular spot on The Bulwark podcast, I expected it to go roughly the same as it has gone everywhere else he has shown up promoting his book. Scathing stories. Regret. Anxiety about the future. And so forth. A Bay-area, Gen X hipster version of Stuart Stevens' It Was All a Lie.
And there was some of that...until Charlie Sykes' steered the conversation right into the one subject he always steers every such conversation into: his seething contempt for the Left and the "Progressive media".
That's you and me, kid.
So, after 20 minutes of talking about Tim Miller's book and what a shit Mick Mulvaney is and how, unless you read Tim Miller's book, you will always be caught by surprise by how awfully the GOP base and leadership behave...
Sykes: If you don't have this template, a lot of what's going to happen will feel incomprehensible.
... Sykes performs the inevitable hard pivot over to what really obsesses and infuriates him: Why aren't we filthy, ungrateful Progressive peasants building statues to Liz Cheney?
Sykes: Let's flip the card a little bit though. How do you explain the psychology of -- and you... you... you... alluded to this -- the psychology Progressives activists including people like Don Winslow, who's a filmmaker, y'know, and, like, anti-Trump Progressive novelist and everything. Y'know, big Twitter guy who is obsessively -- I mean obsessively -- attacking, right now, Liz Cheney. It's like this is the moment when Democrats are facing a wipeout in the midterms...
And then they we're off to the races.
Because the only way The Bulwark's Awesome Democracy Coalition Awesome Media Corporation can continue to prosper is if Republicans are be made to feel as at-home, shoes-off, lemme-get-you-a-beer cozy there as possible no matter how objectively awfully they may have behaved, while at the same time making it clear that certain Liberals, certain Democrats, had damn well better keep our heterodox thoughts and memories to ourselves, and keep our whiny yappers shut.
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