NY Times house conservative and man obsessed with decadence, Ross Douthat has offered in his latest screed on April 1 advice on how Republicans can use the indictment of Trump to move on away from him. (Hint — Not going to happen. They can’t quit him.)
Douthat starts out riffing on his bizarre brand of Christo-Fascism:
There is a presumption among a certain kind of analyst — rooted, I presume, in a deeply buried belief in the vengeance of Almighty God — that because Republicans morally deserve Donald Trump they will be stuck with him no matter what. That having refused so many opportunities to take a righteous stand against him, they will be condemned to halt at the edge of a post-Trump promised land, gazing pathetically across the Jordan even as they cast in their lots with the False Orange Messiah once again.
You don’t have to call on an Almighty God’s vengeance to find this outcome fitting. Simple human decency will suffice. But no matter — it’s irrelevant.
Douthat’s solution? There’s no point in rejecting Trump over high moral dudgeon because of his conduct — his base has shown they don’t care. No — the only reason to make a point of it is not because it's wrong, but because it plays into Democratic hands and keeps Trump from getting stuff done.
...Instead the plausible line of attack against Trump in a Republican primary has always been on competence and execution, with his moral turpitude cast as a practical obstacle to getting things done. And as others have pointed out, including New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, nothing about defending Trump against a Democratic prosecutor makes that case any more difficult to make.
They can have their cake and eat it too: defend Trump against the prosecution while simultaneously attacking him on the issue of his making himself vulnerable to prosecution! Genius!
Where the nitty really meets the gritty is when Douthat imagines the kind of speech DeSantis should be making:
Yes, I condemn the partisan witch hunt that led to this indictment. But the pattern with my opponent is that he makes it too easy for the liberals. If you’re paying hush money to a porn star, you’re giving the other side what it wants.
It was the same way all through his presidency — all the drama, all the chaos, just played into the Democrats’ hands. Into the deep state’s hands. He would attack lockdowns on social media while Dr. Fauci, his own guy, was actually making them happen. He tried to get our troops out of the Middle East, but he let the woke generals at the Pentagon disregard his orders. He didn’t finish the Wall because he was always distracted — there was a new batch of leaks from inside his White House every week. He’s got valid complaints about the 2020 election, about how the other side changed election laws on the fly during the pandemic — but he was president, he just watched them do it, he was too busy tweeting.
I admire what he tried to do, he did get some big things accomplished. But the other side fights to win, they fight dirty, and you deserve a president who doesn’t go into the fight with a bunch of self-inflicted wounds.
So what exactly is Douthat promoting with this messaging?
- The prosecution is a partisan witch hunt. (Attack the justice system)
- The real enemy is still the Deep State. (Keep feeding the paranoia.)
- Dr. Fauci is the villain behind the lockdowns. (Trump should have fired him.)
- There would be peace in the Middle East if not for woke generals. (WTF does that actually mean, other than it’s a chance to use ‘woke?’)
- DeSantis can get the Wall built — because he won’t get distracted. (More paranoia about immigrants.)
- The Big Lie — still pushing it.
- Democrats lie and cheat to win.
The whole message is fact-free, policy-free, and morality-free. There’s nothing in there about dealing with the country’s very real problems. Nothing about making life better for people. Nothing about sound domestic or foreign policy. It’s all about grievance and appeals to the gut.
Douthat believes this is how DeSantis can attract Trump’s voters to him — and if Douthat has any reservations about the toxic content of all this, it’s not apparent. Because, when push comes to shove, truth doesn't matter. Character doesn't matter. The rule of law doesn't matter. Basic human decency doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.
It apparently doesn't bother Douthat that DeSantis:
- Is at war with the press
- Is all in on the attacks on trans people, drag shows, etc.
- Is pushing ever more extreme abortion bans
- Has embraced Covid conspiracy theories and pushed policies that upped the infection and death rate
- Fired a whistle blower who revealed he wanted the numbers on Covid fudged to make him look good, and sent State Police to raid her home
- Has installed a health chief who also pushes Covid conspiracy theories and quack cures
- Is pushing book bans and wants to turn schools into indoctrination centers.
- Has exploited immigrants for political stunts
- Has backed pro-gun policies even after school shootings
- Has created his own “election police” while disenfranchising thousands of Florida voters.
The list goes on.
Douthat apparently has no problem with any of this.
Remember when Republicans used to make a big deal about “Family Values” and “Character Counts”? This is the same Ross Douthat who can spend paragraph after paragraph debating obscure points of Catholic theology, worrying that Americans aren’t having enough babies, warning that America is sinking into “decadence”.
And then there’s this image, offered up by Douthat in concern that DeSantis still lacks one critical advantage Trump enjoys:
Is this argument enough? Maybe not. It certainly doesn’t have the primal appeal that Trump specializes in, where all those self-inflicted wounds are transformed into proof that he’s the man in the arena, he’s the fighter you need, because why else would he be dripping blood?
emphasis added
All this with Easter coming up? At least Douthat didn’t go so far as to claim Trump actually nailed himself to the cross, but seriously? It's things like this that make Charlie Pierce’s prion disease metaphor so powerful.
...It has long been a contention at this shebeen that the Republican Party—and the conservative movement, which is its only animating life force—acquired a prion disease when Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains of supply-side economics and Protestant splinter theology back in the early 1980s. Prion diseases, like kuru, are progressive. The early symptoms can be as inconspicuous as a patient’s halting gate, or a citizen’s voting against his interests. The disease progresses and the high functions are eaten away until the patient is paralyzed and dies. I think, with the election of the president* [Trump], the Republicans may have drifted into the terminal stage.
And…
Far too many people are far too delicate about this. The Republican Party is completely mad, and it has been going in that direction for a very long time. It has been raving through all the halls of all the governments, large and small, like a lost soul with a big knife. The symptoms of the enveloping disease have been obvious for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan served up the first helping of monkey brains in 1976, when he nearly wrested the party’s nomination from Gerald Ford. It is full-blown now, and it is general throughout the Republic. The Republican Party has infected every institution with its own private insanity.
It’s pieces like this latest offering from Douthat that indicate he is far gone into the last stages of the disease. Further, it seems to be manifesting in all the pundit class who work the conservative side of the street.
There’s a quote attributed to Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
To be a professional conservative these days requires embracing and promoting absurdities while remaining oblivious to the resulting atrocities. It's no wonder they are having to shut down higher brain functions and take cognitive dissonance and sanctimony to new heights. It’s not a bug — it’s a feature.
Douthat is going above and beyond in the cause. If there’s anything surprising about this, it's that Douthat no longer seems to feel it’s necessary to skate around this stuff. It’s out in the open, fully normalized.
Now that’s actual decadence.