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. 

The Closing of the Republican Mind

It is almost humorous nowadays to hear Republican "friends" describe me as a liberal.  Actually, by most standards other than those of today's Republican Party, I am not.  I still believe in fiscal conservatism, responsible government and judicious use of America's military power.  Pretty much the same things my parents and grandparents believed in.  Where I run afoul of today's GOP is that I believe in the Gospel message of caring for the poor, feeding the hungry and that all citizens are entitled to access to healthcare (the irony is that while I believe in this part of the Gospel message, I do not even see myself as Christian if it means being equated with the Christofascists). I also believe that constitutional and civil rights extend to all people, gay or straight, black or white, Christian or non-Christian - not just white conservative Christians.  My belief in the power of knowledge and science also disqualifies me from being a Republican given the party's enthusiastic embrace of ignorance.  A column in the New York Times looks at the descent of the GOP into something unrecognizable from even 30 years ago where education and intellect are abhorred.  Here are highlights:

The election of President Trump has coincided with a reaction among Republican voters against open-mindedness, open borders and an open society in general — not to mention a growing hostility to cognitive elites.

Take a recent survey showing a fundamental shift in the attitude of Republicans toward the value of higher education.

Between 2010 and 2017, the Pew Research Center asked voters whether colleges and universities have a positive or negative effect “on the way things are going in the country.”

From 2010 to 2015, solid majorities of Republicans and Democrats agreed that institutions of higher learning had a positive effect on America. In 2010, Republicans were 58-32 positive and Democrats 65-22. For Democrats, this pattern grew stronger over time, reaching 72-19 in the most recent polling in June.

That was not the case for Republicans, who flipped from positive to negative on college education.

In a survey that was conducted from Aug. 23 to Sept. 2, 2016 — a month after Trump accepted his party’s nomination — Republicans’ positive assessment of colleges and universities fell to 43 percent, while negative assessments rose to 45 percent. By June of this year, 58 percent of Republicans had a negative view of higher education and 36 percent a positive view.

Wariness toward homegrown cognitive elites now parallels suspicion of foreign-born entrepreneurs, including those who generate jobs and wealth for Americans.

On July 10, the Department of Homeland Security proposed the dismantling of a federal regulation that would have encouraged more entrepreneurs to build start-ups and to finance high-tech ventures in the United States.

[T]he International Entrepreneurship Rule infuriated the high-tech industry. Bobby Franklin, the president and C.E.O. of the National Venture Capital Association declared in a statement:

At a time when countries around the world are doing all they can to attract and retain talented individuals to come to their shores to build and grow innovative companies, the Trump Administration is signaling its intent to do the exact opposite.

Trump did not campaign against economic elites. Instead, he built a fire under animosity toward what has been called “the creative class” by Richard Florida, the demographer; the “plutonomy” by three analysts at Citigroup; and the “cosmopolitan class” by Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale.

In recent decades, this class has become increasingly influential in setting cultural standards and in shaping contemporary values. Its success has provoked deepening resentment, to say the least.

Simon Kuper, in a May Financial Times essay, captured the sources of this resentment among the less well educated:

Picture a coffee shop in a big city almost anywhere on earth. It is filled with stylish, firm-bodied people aged under 50 drinking $5 coffees. Fresh from yoga class, they are reading New Yorker magazine articles about inequality before returning to their tiny $1.5 million apartments. This is the cultural elite.

Trump, Kuper explains, labels this constituency:

“the elite” but not all class members are rich. Adjunct professors, NGO workers and unemployed screenwriters belong alongside Mark Zuckerberg. Rather, what defines the cultural elite is education. Most of its members went to brand-name universities, and consider themselves deserving rather than entitled. They believe in facts and experts.

Richard Florida, in an email to me, was harsh in his assessment of consequences of the current anti-elite reaction:

The United States is the first advanced nation since Japan and Germany during World War II to turn its back on progress and liberalism.

In doing so, the United States threatens its status as “the most innovative, most knowledge driven, most powerful nation on earth,” according to Florida:

The political backlash from this divide can kill us. It is the only thing that can hold back our cities and stop talented and ambitious people from coming here.

One of the more interesting findings that came out of the 2016 election in the United States — a finding that reinforces Goodhart’s thesis — is that voters who never left, or remain close to, their hometowns tended to vote for Trump, while those who moved away were inclined to support Hillary Clinton. Those who choose to leave such communities and find their fortune elsewhere are, in Stimson’s view, ambitious and confident in their abilities. Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.

Given that, Stimson says:

I don’t see them as once proud workers, now dispossessed, but rather as people of limited ambition who might have sought better opportunity elsewhere and did not. I see their social problems more as explanations of why they didn’t seek out opportunity when they might have than as the result of lost employment.

Stimson then poses another question: “Should the Democratic Party cater to these voters?” His answer is an unequivocal no:

The [rural] working class was once mainstream America, the most common and typical of all of us. It is now the residue of failed social mobility, when most have been mobile. After decades of social mobility, that residue is now more distinctive, it is those who are not willing to grab the ring, but rather to remain in the hometown and fear change and others. These people should be Trump voters.

While Stimson’s analysis is harsh — criticizing as it does many hardworking men and women whose loyalties to family, friend, community and church may supersede personal ambition — he captures a crucial element of contemporary politics. This is the potential of an angry electorate to provide a key base of support to a politician like Trump who capitalizes on resentment, intensifies racial and ethnic hostility and lies with abandon as a means to his ends.

If Democrats have one thing to be grateful for, it’s Trump’s failure to live up to his campaign promises on health care and taxes, at least so far.

In practice, Trump is going in the opposite direction, pressing for a radical alteration of health care policy that directly conflicts with the interests of millions of his supporters, and for legislation catering to the demands of the wealthiest Republicans for reduced tax burdens.

Trump promised at least five times during the campaign that he would not cut Medicaid. These promises included a tweet on May 7, 2015:

I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me.

Democrats, then, have both demographic trends and Trump’s abandonment (for now) of the moderate and lower income wing of his coalition to boost their prospects in 2020 — and perhaps in the 2018 midterms.

American politics has become fluid and volatile. Income differences have been supplanted by cultural and social practices closely linked to levels of educational attainment. Political partisanship is now firmly linked to race, with whiteness defining one of the two major political parties. Religiosity has taken on new meaning — if one can call it that — with devout churchgoers supporting an avowed libertine. The question that remains is whether President Trump can continue to exploit the fissures he opened as candidate Trump. The answers history provides are not altogether reassuring.

Note the comparison to the rejection of knowledge and education in Germany and Japan during  WWII.  Dictatorships and reactionary regimes need an ignorant and resentful population to take root and thrive.  Trump has found this base among the basket of deplorables that Hillary Clinton aptly, if not diplomatically, described. I very much fear for this country if the majority does not wake up and defeat this embrace of ignorance and bigotry.