The Decline of Conservatism

Right wing crackpot, former felon, and Trump court jester, Dinesh D'Souza.

Once upon a time there were serious conservatives who could be described as serious intellectuals who sought reasoned, fact based arguments for conservative positions and policies.  Those days are now gone and we have conservatives increasingly represented by outrageous and unhinged  conspiracy theory provocateurs, right wing religious fanatics that reject objective fact and science, and media outlets like Info Wars, Breitbart and numerous others where lunacy is the norm.  Watching Fox News is akin to witnessing an alternate universe where all inconvenient facts are ignored and those who would have once been viewed as the equivalent of moral lepers are given platforms.  David Frum is a one time conservative intellectual who, like most sane and moral conservatives have fled the Republican Party.  In a column in The Atlantic he bemoans what has happened to conservatism and uses the resurrection of Dinesh D’Souza as an example of the right's descent into insanity.  Here are excerpts (note D'Souza's contempt for blacks): 

Few have enjoyed quite so spectacular a comeback under President Trump as the conservative polemicist and filmmaker, Dinesh D’Souza. In 2012, D’Souza resigned as president of a Christian college amid charges of adultery and deception. In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty to violating federal campaign-finance laws. He was sentenced to eight months of confinement followed by 52 months’ probation. 

Now, as the saying goes, D’Souza is back—and bigger than ever. He has reinvented himself as something like the court intellectual of the age of Trump. Trump pardoned D’Souza on May 31, 2018. At the beginning of August, Donald Trump Jr. cohosted the premier of D’Souza’s latest movie, Death of a Nation. The movie compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln and his Democratic opponents to Nazis. If you need a historian’s point-by-point refutation of D’Souza’s grotesque and absurd abuse of history, Princeton’s Kevin Kruse has posted a useful recapitulation. I find myself pondering a different question as I watch so many people I have known and admired subordinate their talents and their integrity to Trumpism: How has my political generation of conservatives and Republicans laid itself so intellectually and morally low? In the early part of his career, Dinesh D’Souza had followed a conventional path. While always enjoying the part of the polemicist and the provocateur, he settled down at age 30 to grind out two serious books under the auspices of prestigious conservative institutions like the American Enterprise Institute. D’Souza quickly discovered much more spectacular new material rewards in the conservative mass market. But even as he prospered, his anger at his 1995 rejection by the scholarly and intellectual world burned hotter and hotter. In 2006, he published a book that opened with this startling claim:  The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. … Some leading figures in this group are Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky. Moreover the cultural left includes organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and moveon.org.

D’Souza then urged American conservatives to make common cause with Muslims worldwide against gay rights, feminism, and secularism generally. The book incensed many conservatives. . . . . D’Souza’s self-isolation from the conservative world did not last long. But his feelings of persecution did. A new note enters his writing after 2006, and it intensified after his forced resignation in 2012 and his guilty plea in 2014—a quest for self-vindication. . . . . He became convinced that he had been singled out for retribution by the Obama White House. The desire to wipe the smirk off the condescending face of some resented critic—to expose them, diminish them, hurt them—is that not the mainspring for so much of the pro-Trump political movement?  Shortly before the 2016 election, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal seethed at those who believe that “not only is Donald Trump coarse and boorish, anyone who supports the man is as revolting as he is.” The conservative columnist David Limbaugh lamented in the summer of 2017 the “snobbish condemnation” he suffered on social media from Never Trump conservatives. Tucker Carlson Tonight is a nightly eruption of rage against elite “preening.”

[A]n annoying thing for those who disliked Obama’s politics: He is at the same time a genuinely high-quality personality—intelligent, considerate, dignified, and self-disciplined. Those who hated him were deprived of any rational basis to despise him. Lacking a rational basis, they reverted to irrationality instead. Even as D’Souza published books attributing all American racism to “the Democrats,” his own writing seemed gripped by an ever less controlled and concealed racial animus. . . . . The animus shines even more brightly through the pages of Death of a Nation. Here’s D’Souza’s narrative from Death of a Nation of how the Great Society followed consistently and directly from slavery: “No longer would Democrats directly rip off the blacks by stealing their labor. Now blacks would become partners with Democrats in a scheme to extract resources from other Americans.” Here’s D’Souza’s description of what happened once blacks were assured the right to vote: “On this plantation they [blacks] had a different casting role, not as exploited workers who did not vote but rather as exploited voters who did not work.” Whites, by contrast, are described by D’Souza in admiring, almost heroic terms. “There is one group that the Democrats have not managed to enslave: working-class whites. … They were part of FDR’s labor coalition. But now they have broken loose … I call this group ‘holdouts.’ Trump is their hero, and this white working class is attracted to his populist American nationalism, both on economic and cultural grounds.” . . . "Only whites—even whites undergoing economic hardship and plagued by cultural dysfunction—have so far resisted succumbing to the lure of the Democratic plantation.” The psychology of aggrievement joined to racial resentment: Perhaps that is the recipe from which Trumpism has been brewed. It’s a dismaying thing to see so many in one’s political generation succumb to it.

Many of the disputes of the 1980s that excited me as a young conservative have subsided into forgetfulness. Who recalls now that it was once controversial that telephone services should be competitive rather than a regulated monopoly?

Meanwhile what was once universally accepted—American presidents should not try to incarcerate their political opponents—has now become the most hotly contested battleground. Try to imagine Ronald Reagan leading a chant of “Lock her up!” Try to imagine Walter Mondale doing it. Inconceivable. But it’s our present reality.

It’s stunning to those of us who came of age during the last phase of the Cold War to watch fellow members of our political generation enthuse over the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin. Yet in 2015, D’Souza retweeted a beefcake image of a bare-chested Putin over the caption, “REAL MAN CONTEST: Putin rides bareback, while Obama fishes with gloves.” A year later, D’Souza added: “What @realDonaldTrump admires about Putin is the way Putin—unlike someone else we know—LOVES his country & FIGHTS for its interests.”

In this crisis, old arguments fade before new, old ideological categories look obsolete, and old comrades look like avowed enemies of one’s most dearly cherished institutions and values. And one is left to wonder: Did they really change so much? Or did I?

I fled the GOP years ago and do not believe that I changed.  The same cannot be said for the GOP which, in my view, began the journey down the road to insanity when the Christofascists were embraced by the party establishment.  When you allow in those who reject objective fact and truth and condemn science and anything that challenges their beliefs in Bronze Age myths, don't expect logic and reason - and basic decency - to last very long.  Trump is but the end of a journey that began decades ago in the GOP.