Kevin Drum draws a lesson or two from Kavanaugh hearings:
This sense of endless victimization by liberals didn’t start with Donald Trump, but it’s no surprise that it’s reached his peak during his presidency. He literally rode conservative victimization to the White House and taught Republicans that it was even more powerful than they thought. Now they’re using it as their best chance of persuading a few lone Republican holdouts to vote for Kavanaugh not on the merits, but so that Democrats don’t have the satisfaction of seeing their contemptible plot work.
The problem here is not that Republicans were grandstanding over imagined liberal schemes to destroy anyone and anything in pursuit of their poisonous schemes to crush everything good about America. The problem is that most of it wasn’t grandstanding. They believe this deeply and angrily. And it explains the lengths Republicans are willing to go to these days—even to the appalling extent of accepting a cretin like Donald Trump as a party leader. If you believe that your political opposites aren’t just opponents, but literally enemies of the country, then of course you’ll do almost anything to stop them. I would too if that’s what I thought.
There are some liberals who do think that—and more and more of them since Donald Trump was elected. But it’s still a relatively small part of the progressive movement. In the conservative movement it’s an animating principle. This is why it so desperately needs to be stopped—not by destroying Republicans, but by voting them out of office. We simply can’t afford to have a major party run for the benefit of fearful whites who are dedicated to a scorched-earth belief that liberals are betraying the nation. It has to end, and Republicans themselves are ultimately the only ones who can end it. We need a real conservative party again.
While we could talk about the merciless patronizing attitudes you find in the outer reaches of the progressive movement and other minor details, I’d like to note that Kevin didn’t delve into the psychodynamics behind all this.
As Barry Goldwater predicted so long ago, the conservative movement has become intractable due to the influence of religious personalities & dogma. Keeping in mind that conservative Christian sects teach that morality is immutable, then the signs of societal change becomes one of the signs of the pervasive evil of the liberal movement, from same-sex marriage to transgender bathrooms.
This belief in the timelessness of the current order of yesterday is not confined to the sexual arena, either. There is, of course, the close association between these Christian sects and American patriotism, often resulting in the mistaken claim that the United States is a Christian nation. Patriotism is a pillar of the religious-conservative movement. But it also resonates in the commercial world. Remember this Trump rally slogan, Trump Digs Coal? The persistence of coal mining families in their devotion to an occupation which is manifestly on its way out is embodies a belief in the rightness of an unchanging reality. The libertarian wing of the conservatives believe in the creative destruction of the free market, and so they must find the rigid stance of the conservatives to be an annoying character flaw, and it makes me wonder how much longer the libertarians will form any sort of substantial portion of the conservatives, confronted as they will be by quasi-conservative-mercantilism, seeing as the Republicans seem to be in the process of discarding their devotion to free markets (see: tariffs and, especially, tariff waivers).
President Trump has tried to ride this belief in his tirade against those companies which have made strategic moves to minimize the impact of his tariff wars on their financial results, perhaps most notably motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson. The tariff wars are weapons against the forces of change in the world in the minds of those conservatives not married to free market principles, and it must strike those folks particularly hard that H-D, perhaps the motorcycle manufacturer most closely associated with American patriotism, chose to move certain operations to Europe. Perhaps Trump was unsurprised, but his supporters must have been shocked that H-D did not choose to tough it out in the belief that fighting for unchanging reality was the way to go. Their acquiescence to the need to change in order to survive marked them as traitors to the movement that marries the blasphemy of religious certitude to the commercial world.
But in this reality in which we all exist and operate, change is inevitable in virtually all domains, including religion, society, morality, mores, and commerce. H-D recognizes the easy truth of the last in that list; the others are a more difficult sell, but I think the mendacious nature of President Trump is proof of the essential truth of my assertion concerning the necessarily malleable nature of religions, morality, and mores. No, these are not unchanging institutions, nor are they unflawed.
The refusal to recognize these truths has already transformed the Evangelicals from a group that could at least make an argument to holding the moral high ground into a group that would be the laughingstock of American society due to its imbecilic hypocrisy in voting for a President at such odds to their alleged principles if it didn’t happen that they are one of the most important groups enabling President Trump to win high office – and have one of their own occupying the office of Vice-President.
And a number of pundits with more coverage than I have remarked upon the extraordinary transformations of various conservative movement conservatives from reasonable politicians into ideologues who espouse new ideals in opposition of old ideals. Some have asked outright what has happened; one of the most recent examples is Senator Graham (R-SC), who at one time was an affirmed NeverTrumper, but now golfs with President Trump and does his bidding in the Senate. The mendacity of the Republicans over the last decade has been quite astounding, and is again indicative of a spiritual illness at the heart of the movement, an inability to accept the basic nature of reality; notable as semi-exceptions are retiring Senators Flake (AZ) and Corker (TN). The fact that both men, neither particularly elderly members of the Senate, have chosen to retire rather than continue indicates their deep unease with a movement that is cancerous at its heart. Senator Flake, in particular, has made speeches to this effect.
Oh, look, there’s Senator Graham! Or is that Senator McConnell? It’s so hard to tell.
Naturally, no one wants to taint themselves with evil, so compromise is impossible; in the desperate dance to avoid that liberal evil, though, other puddles of evil are splashed in, until the coating of evil that comes from irrationality religious certitude begins to resemble that of the La Brea Tar Pits. In the interests of bad analogies everywhere, the trumpeting of Senator Graham at the recent Kavanaugh nomination committee hearing in his attempt to shame the Democrats for the tactics originating with the Republicans (mention Merrick Garland within Graham’s hearing and he’ll turn into dust, I fear) may be that of those creatures caught in the gooey tar, calling for help, yet unable to comprehend their imminent irrelevance to the future survival of this country’s true core: secular justice and prosperity. The only thing that keeps them vaguely relevant is their superior marketing machine, and even that may not be able to overcome the monstrousness of their twisted former selves.
Senator Lugar (R-IN), where are you? I think you’re party needs you and your spiritual descendants.
