Like a some Conservative version of the Casimir Effect*, I believe I can prove, to a scientific certainty, that when two old-school neocon Never Trumpers are put in close proximity to one another, eventually at least two of the most odious and deeply held core tenets of their ideological faith will always manifest themselves out of the air.
First element to emerge will be sanctimonious Both Siderism. An above-it-all certainty that because Both Sides are pretty terrible they are now "politically homeless".
The second element to emerge will be condescension. The airy dismissal of any prior criticism from the Left of their now-former party, which, in actual fact, will turn out to be just blatant Straw Man bullshit. We know this because such derision never involves interviewing any actual Liberals or citing anything that anyone on the Left has ever actually written. Instead, the entire constellation of thoughtful, detailed and brutally accurate analysis of the long, ugly trajectory of the Republican party -- decades of labor by hundreds of smart, savvy lefties -- is sneered at and waved off as, "Well, you know how those people are."
And thanks to whoever it was that had the bright idea of putting old-school Neocon Never Trumper Mona Charen and old-school Neocon Never Trumper David Frum together on Frum's podcast, we now had a perfect opportunity to either confirm or disprove my hypothesis by experiment and observation!
Let's see what happened.
First test: Emergent Both Siderism:
Frum: What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.
There is quite a bit of that. Sure, the right is awful, but they only scare Frum "a little more" than the left.
Also Frum: On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is Holocaust inversion...
Charen: As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That would be very, very worrisome.
So, Both Siderism? Check.
On to the second test: The Straw Man.
Frum: ...I think there’s something important that we [Never Trump Republicans] bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson, Trump was the inevitable outcome—
Charen: Absolutely. All the time.
Really? You've heard Liberals blaming Ike for Trump? "All the time"?
Because I am one of a whole army of Liberals who've spent decades warning you fuckers of the dangerous trajectory your party was on and I have never heard anyone say this. Not a single serious historian. Not a single political theorist. Not a single potty-mouth blogger. There is no record whatsoever of anyone arguing that the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1952, the eventual rise of Donald Trump became “inevitable.”
Of course what Frum and Charen are desperate to do here is avoid talking about things like Goldwater and the seismic ideological shift he represented in 1964 as the GOP began devolving through various stages, towards Trump-era populism.
They don't want to talk about Nixon's Southern Strategy. Or the Powell Memo. Or the red carpet the party rolled out for southern white conservative Evangelical segregationists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
They'd like you to forget Paul Weyrich too, and Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove.
They'd really appreciate it if you'd also forget about Newt Gingrich. And Tom DeLay.
They're also praying that no one mentions the profound, malignant influence of the Right's most popular bigot, Rush Limbaugh, or his hundreds of imitators, or the fact that George H. W. Bush was so thirsty for Limbaugh's support that he invited him to the White House for a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover and carried in Limbaugh's baggage personally.
In fact, they'd be eternally grateful if you'd agree to forget the rise of the entire Conservative media ecosystem -- talk radio, cable news, online platforms, church pulpits, direct mailing lists -- emerging from the 1980s onward.
Instead, Frum rolls out one of the stupidest Straw Men I've ever heard of, and he and Charen deal with their barely sublimated guilt and shame by taking turns punching it.
Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell you.
Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case...
*The Casimir effect is a weird little consequence of quantum physics that says even “empty” space isn’t really empty. Imagine putting two perfectly smooth metal plates extremely close together in a vacuum. You’d think nothing would happen — but tiny quantum fluctuations are constantly flickering in and out of existence everywhere. Between the plates, only certain fluctuations can fit, while outside them, more kinds can pop up. That imbalance creates a tiny pressure pushing the plates together. So the Casimir effect is basically proof that empty space has a kind of restless energy, and if you confine it just right, it can produce a measurable force.
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