The following excerpts are from some brilliant tweets I read earlier from Vox writer, David Roberts. It sums up perfectly the current state of conservatism and trump's takeover of the right in America.
Here's the main point: the contemporary right-wing in the US has become, in Lionel Trilling's immortal words, a bundle of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." It's just a tangle of resentments & bigotries, driven by the erosion of white privilege.
There's always been that element, but for decades it was overlain by a class of DC conservatives who code switched, spoke the Very Serious language of ideas & policies. This is the conservatism that white moderate libs still imagine: an actual ideology, with arguments.
Trump's rise has shown that purported principles of conservative ideology meant virtually NOTHING to the conservative masses. Trump abandoned the Very Serious script & the RW base didn't care, at all. He voiced their anger & resentments. That's all the RW base is any more.
So @nytopinion faces a dilemma. It claims to want to expose its readers to the perspectives of the conservative masses. It claims to want to connect liberals to the heartland. But there's a problem.
If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today's conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.
The people who work at NYT & the vast majority of its readers would find those sentiments ... what's the word? oh, yes ... deplorable. They would recoil. The truth of what's going on on the right today is worse than virtually anyone in the political mainstream acknowledges.
The NYT's commitment to "intellectual diversity" doesn't go THAT far -- not far enough to expose its readers to that reality. It is too invested in America's own Noble Savage myth, the idea that conservative Heartland Americans are more authentic & in touch w/ simple virtues.
So NYT needs "a voice from the right," but not a voice from the ACTUAL right (which is oriented around white resentment, not any discernible governing philosophy). They need a voice from the Conservatism of the Mind, the noble, principles-base conservatism they imagine.
That's what conservative columnists on mainstream opinion pages have been for years now: voices who will present conservatism as a coherent intellectual argument, what liberals desperately want it to be.
It is no coincidence that these guys - Gerson, Douthat, Brooks, Stephens - have little voice or influence inside actual conservatism, or that they're all anti-Trump (unlike 95+% of Republicans). They are anomalies, idiosyncrasies, not representative of anything broader.
And notice, even those invested in pretending that contemporary conservatism is a governing philosophy have thrown up their hands lately. Claim something for conservatism today & Trump could disavow it in a tweet tomorrow. It's become impossible to even maintain the pretense.
And so what do the mainstream "voices of conservatism" have left? Wan, half-ass whataboutism. "Sure Trump & the GOP are terrible but whatabout that time that one person on the left said that one bad thing?"
That explains why everyone on the right has suddenly fixated on Farrakhan. It explains why every conservative columnist is writing (again and again) about campus speech intolerance. It's not much, but it's *all they have left*. There's nowhere left to go, intellectually." [Read more here.]
Conservatives have always offered a cover for the racists and more crass folks in their movement. That uneasy political truce worked just fine until Obama came along and made them (the trumpbots) restless. After Obama they got tired of playing pretend, and so, much to the surprise of the intellectuals in their gang, they elected trump. Now it's their movement. And sadly for conservatives, there is no political place to call home.
0 Comments