The New York Times has a stable of regular opinion writers to present a range of views. This not unreasonable in normal times, when people may have differing opinions but still share some common values and assumptions. That is no longer the case in America where one party has essentially given up on being for anything and has pitted itself against everyone “who is not for them.” It’s abandoning long-held principles to aggressively pursue an anti-democracy agency while claiming victimhood. Its members increasingly live in a world of alternative facts and a media bubble. The party doesn’t solve problems — it exploits them.
So, what happens when pundits who are supposed to provide perspective on that party and its views seem to have trouble rationalizing what’s going on here for the rest of us? Here’s my very opinionated look at recent offerings from three of them.
Ross Douthat has a subscriber-only flight from reality - Why January 6 wasn’t an insurrection.” (I’m not going to waste a gift link on this excrescence or the others below.) Douthat is, to make a long story short, claiming the 14th Amendment can’t bar Trump from the ballot because January 6 doesn’t meet his definition of an insurrection. Here’s how he begins:
I’ve written several times about the case for disqualifying Donald Trump via the 14th Amendment, arguing that it fails tests of political prudence and constitutional plausibility alike. But the debate keeps going, and the proponents of disqualification have dug into the position that whatever the prudential concerns about the amendment’s application, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, obviously amounted to an insurrection in the sense intended by the Constitution, and saying otherwise is just evasion or denial.
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So how does he describe what happened on January 6?
...Note, first, that the 14th Amendment disqualifies anyone who engaged “in insurrection or rebellion against the same” — with “the same” referring back to “the Constitution of the United States” in the prior clause. This wording tracks with my own understanding: What transforms a political event from a violent riot or lawless mob (which Jan. 6 plainly was) to a genuinely insurrectionary event is the outright denial of the authority of the existing political order and the attempt to establish some alternative order in its place….
...Had there been — had, say, one of Trump’s aides rushed to the Capitol and announced that Congress was disbanded and that President Trump was declaring a state of emergency and would henceforth be ruling by fiat — then the riot would have been transformed into an insurrectionary coup d’état. But nothing like that happened: The riot did not culminate in an attempt to depose the Congress; it dissolved before lawful authority instead, remaining a mob until the end...
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Uh, Ross — what do you think would have happened if Trump hadn’t been blocked from going to the Capitol by the Secret Service?
Why did so many Republican members of Congress refuse to give testimony or turn over records of their cell phone conversations on that day? What were they planning to do if Trump had walked into the Capitol with the mob at his back?
What about all the evidence that what happened on January 6 was not some spontaneous event, but the result of weeks of planning and coordination all the way up to Trump, to overturn the election?
Douthat pulls up some examples from history of what he considers ‘real’ insurrection, and interprets them in such a way as to argue January 6 doesn’t meet the test of an insurrection as he sees it.
In case Douthat has forgotten, people died during this “not an insurrection.” The mob came very close to capturing members of Congress, and they had a gallows waiting outside.
Consider again this from Douthat:
...What transforms a political event from a violent riot or lawless mob (which Jan. 6 plainly was) to a genuinely insurrectionary event is the outright denial of the authority of the existing political order and the attempt to establish some alternative order in its place.
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That’s pretty much a running theme in Trump speeches, from before January 6 to now. (Everything is rigged — we’re going to overthrow the Deep State) It’s also the agenda of conservatism in this country — see Project 2025. The insurrection didn’t end on January 6.
Douthat may not be openly endorsing Trump, but it is really hard to believe he wouldn’t welcome Trump or someone like him overturning the current order of things that conflict with his view of the ideal world. Douthat considers Trumpism to be a form of populism — meaning things that would be popular with Douthat. A majority of Americans reject them.
Openly MAGA types are preferable to barely closeted authoritarians like Douthat. He has never accepted the Age of Enlightenment — so gather darkness and abandon Reason for Faith. This revisionist trope of the ‘non-insurrection’ is all of a piece with the desperation on the part of conservatives to revise history, rather than confront how many times conservatism has failed and continues to fail.
And today? The DeSantis Campaign Is Revealing What Republican Voters Really Want. I’ll spare you the gritty details, although this admission is worth noting in passing:
I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality.
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Lest you think Ross is making a case for Florida Man Ron, he concludes with this:
If a majority or plurality of Republican voters really just wanted a form of Trumpism free of Trump’s roiling personal drama, a version of his administration’s policies without the chaos and constant ammunition given to his enemies, the indictments were the ideal opportunity to break decisively for DeSantis — a figure who, whatever his other faults, seems very unlikely to stuff classified documents in his bathroom or pay hush money to a porn star.
But it doesn’t feel at all surprising that, instead, voters seem ready to break decisively for Trump. The prosecutions created an irresistible drama, a theatrical landscape of persecution rather than a quotidian competition between policy positions, a gripping narrative to join rather than a mere list of promises to back. And irresistible theater, not a more effective but lower-drama alternative, appears to be the revealed preference of the Republican coalition, the thing its voters really want.
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So Republicans essentially want bread and circuses, eh Ross? SMH. What happened to all that talk about “family values” and “respect for institutions”? So much for conservatism these days.
If you’re a real glutton for punishment, compare and contrast with Bret Stephens from a few days ago: The Case for Trump … by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose. The short version is that Bret is terrified of all the things that might put Trump back in the Oval Office — while being completely oblivious to the way his own efforts over the years have helped make that possible. Reflex disparagement of Democrats and government, knee-jerk libertarianism, reflex hawkism — that’s been his schtick for ages.
He’s screaming for Democrats to dump Biden and find someone, anyone who can beat Trump. In other words, he wants Democrats to save him from himself. It’s a tell that he isn’t applying the same pressure to the Republican Party. He knows it would go nowhere. Bret avers he’s been opposing Trump all along and promises to redouble his efforts — but he’s still living in a world of alternative facts and a skewed world view. Try this:
...As writers like Tablet’s Alana Newhouse have noted, brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government. At best, they have become shells of their former selves. And there’s a palpable sense that the autopilot that America’s institutions and their leaders are on — brain-dead and smug — can’t continue.
Uh Bret — you’re really channeling the Fox News view of America there. Whatever happened to “Morning in America” and the “Reagan Revolution”? Wasn’t that what Republicans promised us would make America Great, let alone Great Again? What went wrong? Who broke all this stuff? Notice who went beyond “Infrastructure Week” and actually got something passed? Seems like you’re also still stuck on “Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.”
And should we really listen to someone who can say, with all seriousness, something like this?
As for foreign policy, it’s worth asking: Does the world feel safer under Biden — with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s assault on Israel, Houthi attacks on shipping in international waters, the Chinese open threat to invade Taiwan — than it did under Trump? Trump may have generated a lot of noise, but his crazy talk and air of unpredictability seemed to keep America’s adversaries on their guard and off balance in a way that Biden’s instinctive caution and feeble manner simply do not.
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And don’t even ask what’s up with David Brooks. He apparently thinks Biden has had nothing to say to America during his time in office. Maybe it would have helped if the media had given Biden even half the attention they gave to every tweet the former guy spewed in the middle of the night. It sounds as if Brooks is looking for some kind of over the top performance to match the tales told by an idiot to idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. (apologies to the Bard of Avon.)
Today Brooks is all about that authoritarian ideal — the strong leader. What Makes Nikki Haley Tougher Than the Rest starts out looking like a Haley puff piece. Brooks goes into Haley’s background, her story of always having to fight and claw for respect, battle against the ‘good old boys’, etc. He hands out gems like:
…Tim Alberta quotes a former South Carolina Republican Party chair: “Listen, man. She will cut you to pieces. Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she won’t give a second chance to anyone who she thinks did her wrong.”
...Haley entered politics as a Tea Party maverick. As Hanna Rosin noted in The Atlantic in 2011, the Tea Party was female-led, and most of its supporters were right-wing women who, among other things, wanted to take on the Republican old boys network. Women like Haley and Sarah Palin presented themselves as whistle-blowers, taking down corruption.
I hope you weren’t drinking anything when you read that.
There’s been some commentary that Haley seems to bend with the political winds, depending on the moment. Brooks frames her flexibility this way:
Seen through one lens, she is a ruthlessly ambitious person who is happy to bruise people to succeed. Seen from another perspective, she is a brave renegade who fights the old guard to get things done. Seen through a third lens, she is a needlessly competitive personality who makes enemies in profusion. All three viewpoints seem to contain a piece of the truth.
Brooks goes on to note that it’s a bit more complicated — Haley supposedly still has a heart, a tender side. He ponders if Haley would be treated differently as a man, who has to be all about strength, whereas women in politics are expected to trot out a kinder, gentler side as well so they won’t be seen as, well for lack of a better phrase, threatening harridans. (Brooks missed an opportunity here to bring up conservative fears about the loss of ‘true’ masculinity among men.)
Ultimately Brooks get around to admitting Haley doesn’t have what it takes to go the distance. While doing so, he makes a telling observation about the modern Republican Party:
The Republican Party has come a long way in the last few decades. The party is no longer in the mood for compassionate conservatism or even Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. Republicans feel besieged and want a bruiser type who will defend them. In their different ways, Trump and Haley are both products of and architects of the current G.O.P. vibe. Neither Trump nor Haley sits around reading Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Neither Trump nor Haley has what you would call fully developed philosophies. Neither is conventionally partisan; both made their bones attacking the G.O.P. establishment, not working their way up within it.
Brooks blithely tosses this off as if it’s of no importantance. He’s essentially saying the G.O.P. establishment is broken, and what remains is looking for a strong leader who will strike back against its enemies. That it has abandoned classic conservative values and is acting almost like a wounded animal — or rabid; YMMV — doesn’t seem to distress Brooks at all. Brooks argues that Haley is tougher than Trump in that she has a better track record of getting things done, while Trump is better at getting ratings.
But — Haley isn’t going to go the distance because she doesn’t have the right enemies to appeal to the base. Trump:
...is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.
The thing that is disturbing about this is the detached serenity that Brooks appears to display contemplating the descent of the Republican Party into the abyss. It’s as though he’s reviewing a movie and is mildly entertained.
Stepping back and take a longer look at this, it’s instructive to look at how the Reagan Revolution has turned out. Where once the Republican Party was all about America as “the shining city on a hill”, America is now a dystopian hell hole according to them — and it’s all the fault of liberals with BLM, DEI, etc.. Conservatives were once celebrating the end of Big Government and the fall of the Berlin Wall, were celebrating the end of the Evil Empire and looking forward to a New American Century, where the U.S. would dominate the world and democracy would just expand like magic — well what happened?
Now? Mass shootings seem like a daily event — but Republicans insist we need more guns, everywhere. A pandemic kills millions — and Republicans embrace anti-vaxx conspiracy theories and attack people for wearing masks. Government aid during the pandemic lifts kids out of poverty — and Republicans refuse to extend it. The pandemic showed how critical access to health care is — and Republicans still refuse to expand Medicaid, fight bringing down drug costs, still want to repeal ObamaCare.
Women and doctors risk going to jail if they try to get what should be normal health care, as the “party of freedom, party of life” passes draconian laws and lie that Democrats allow abortion up to birth and beyond. The leading GOP candidate for the nomination is promising retribution; conservative think tanks are drawing up plans to totally capture the Federal government for a permanent lock on power. The party is ready to sell out allies and pick fights with some tyrants while sucking up to others. They are pushing a religious agenda Ayatollahs would envy.
And always, always more tax cuts for the rich.
So there things are at the moment. Expect much pontificating over nothing once the Iowa caucus charade is done, assuming it doesn’t get snowed out. I wonder if any of those “common folk” will ask Nikki or Ron or Donny if there’s anything to that climate change stuff…