In the wake of Andrew Sullivan’s encore performance on Friday night, the latest conservative to publicly congratulate himself for “leaving the Republican Party” while making sure to remind everyone that liberals and Democrats are still just a bunch of obnoxious politically-correct commie social justice warriors with “totalitarian instincts” bent on nothing but identity politics and Government Control of Your Life™, is U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, via The Atlantic.
We’ve heard this bullshit way too many times before. And many of us are struggling with whether and how to accept the Charlie Sykeses and Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots and Joe Scarboroughs and Tom Nicholses of the world as temporary, uneasy allies who are all but certain to retreat to Kenyanusurperville the moment the next Barack Obama is elected. Me personally, I have two criteria: (1) The person has to admit that the left has been right about the GOP and its cohort all along, since at least the 1980s; and (2) the person has to stop making shit up about liberals, liberalism, and the Democratic Party.
Seriously; who needs allies like this:
I have no love for the Democratic Party, which is torn between totalitarian instincts on one side and complete political malpractice on the other.
...
[D]uring the Kavanaugh dumpster fire, the performance of the Democratic Party … was execrable. From the moment they leaked the Ford letter, they were a Keystone Cops operation, with Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono willing to wave away the Constitution and get right to a presumption of guilt, and Senator Dianne Feinstein looking incompetent and outflanked instead of like the ranking member of one of the most important committees in America.
…
Does [agreeing with several liberal/Democratic values and policy goals] make me a liberal? No. I do not believe that human nature is malleable clay to be reshaped by wise government policy. Many of my views, which flow from that basic conservative idea, are not welcome in a Democratic tribe in the grip of the madness of identity politics.
And that’s leaving out the obligatory self-congratulatory paragraph about those wonderful Conservative Values® like “limited government” and “strong national defense” and all the other standard boilerplate rhetorical claptrap that I Bravely Still Believe In™. If one of these purported ex-Republicans has ever gotten through an entire essay without a scoop of self-praise, sprinkled with the foregoing conservative fan fiction about liberals and liberalism, I haven’t seen it.
I know that many of us are inclined to let this sort of thing go for now, because at this point we need as many allies as we can get. I have no quarrel with that sentiment. But Jeebus Fleebing Cripes already. Do we need allies who have such a low opinion of us? Do we need allies whose low opinion of us is based on bullshit, wishful thinking and 30 years of right-wing propaganda?
I’ve read and heard far too many people explain that they identify as conservative and vote Republican because liberals are this or Democrats are that, because they don’t believe or want certain things that liberals and Democrats supposedly believe and want but that no real person actually believes or wants. Like, for example:
I do not believe that human nature is malleable clay to be reshaped by wise government policy.
Neither do I. Neither does anyone reading this. Neither does any real liberal, or any real Democrat.
[And let’s not even get into the question of who “believe[s] that” human sexuality, which is indisputably part of “human nature”, can and should be “reshaped by … government policy.” Or that “government policy” should be crafted and deployed to “reshape” “human nature” toward “personal responsibility”. The dishonesty is bad enough; the hypocrisy is far, far worse.]
I have never once heard or read a conservative explain or distinguish a liberal position, policy or priority in a way that is accurate, fair, or honest; i.e., that their opponents would agree with. Liberals can do that. Conservatives can’t. Nichols obviously can’t, and for that reason, I can’t take him seriously or give him the benefit of the doubt.
The fact that the Nicholses and the Sykeses and the Sullivans can’t abandon the GOP without congratulating themselves for their conservative bona fides and without reminding everyone (and themselves) that Democrats and liberals still suck, but can’t explain why without making stuff up or invoking the canons of Republican fan fiction, makes one thing abundantly clear:
If conservatives were even minimally honest about who liberals are, what liberalism is really about, and what the Democratic Party actually stands for, they wouldn’t be conservatives; they would have abandoned the GOP long ago. But they’re not, and they didn’t. And it is that fundamental dishonesty about liberals and liberalism that has kept the Republican Party that Nichols denounces alive and well despite its atrocious governing record, its cruel and ruinous policy agenda, and its hypocritical moral depravity.