Many of you will reacall the old Jennifer: assigned to represent the Conservative part of the political spectrum in WaPo, she did the job articulately—maddeningly so, at times. And, it would have been quite a surprise to think of her as someone who would permanently abandon conservatism and Republicanism, being more like a Lincoln Project type who wants to tear down Trump and Trumpites, and then rebuild the Republican party on the ruins.
Not so, with the current version of Jennifer.
On the “old version,” there is this in Wikipedia:
In 2005, she moved to Northern Virginia with her husband and two children. She offered a column to The Weekly Standard about Mitt Romney, and continued doing freelance work for two years before joining Commentary.[9]
Rubin's move to The Washington Post in November 2010 became a national news story and was discussed by the media on all sides of the political spectrum, ranging from The American Conservative and The Weekly Standard, to Salon and Slate. In welcoming remarks, The Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote, "her provocative writing has become 'must read' material for news and policy makers and avid political watchers."[10] In 2011, she was included on the list of "50 Most Influential American Jews" by The Jewish Daily Forward.[11] Slate blogger David Weigel called Rubin "one of the right's most prolific online political writers".[12] The Commentary editor John Podhoretz writes of Rubin, "She is a phenomenon, especially considering that for the first two decades of her working life, she was not a writer or a journalist but a lawyer specializing in labor issues."[13]
In August 2013, former Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton criticized Rubin in an open letter from his new desk at the Washington City Paper, saying that he received more complaint emails about Rubin than any other Post employee. Writing that her columns were "at best ... political pornography", he said "Have Fred Hiatt, your editorial page editor—who I like, admire, and respect—fire opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin. Not because she's conservative, but because she's just plain bad."[14][15] Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor for the Post, responded in a statement to Politico, "I appreciate Patrick's perspective but I think he is quite wrong about Jennifer Rubin. Regular readers of her blog know that she is an indefatigable reporter who is as hard on politicians on the right when she thinks they get things wrong as on the other side."[14]
Rubin is a conservative, but has also stated that the term has been "ruined" by pro-Trump conservatives and that she would "prefer to be a 19th century liberal or a wet Tory".[16][17][18][19] She has described herself as "a Pat Moynihan Democrat, a Scoop Jackson Democrat, an Andrew Cuomo Democrat. I’m not a Bernie Sanders Democrat."[20] Some conservatives (both pro- and anti-Trump) have disputed whether she can be considered a conservative, in part because of her willingness to criticize Donald Trump.[21][22][23][24] The journal Democracy has described her as "seem[ing] to have come closest to giving up on the whole enterprise" of conservatism in comparison to other well-known figures who have been called anti-Trump conservatives.[25] Charles C. W. Cooke has noted that Rubin has reversed many of her previous positions on economic, social and foreign policy during the Trump administration.[26][27]
This last point from Cooke is important, I think. Rubin doesn’t just want to repair Republicanism so it can go back to enacting the conservative positions she used to write about so fervently; now she seems so have basically conceded that a lot of these conservative views are simply wrong and destructive. Her commentary on cable TV has suggested that, as has a pretty lengthy litany of op-eds in recent months, and even before that.
Now in an op-ed today, she crystallizes a number of these views, that many conservative views are obsolete, and that the Republican party itself is pretty much worthless, either as the ruling party or as a useful counterweight.
Do we even need the Republican Party?
Actually, no, sez Jennifer:
In anticipation of President Trump’s loss in November, there is a cottage industry of speculation about the fate of the post-Trump Republican Party. The New York Times’s David Brooks pines for a Republican Party without racism, anti-government animus or unbridled faith in free markets. (The technical term for that might be “the Democratic Party.”) It would be refreshing to see the Republican Party cast off its obsession with old white men in favor of “a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites, working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks.” That, however, supposes Hispanic and Black voters have no memory of years of racism and xenophobia, and that the party’s heavily White support is based on something other than racial resentment. Both propositions are questionable.
A Republican Party that does not depend on White grievance and cultural resentment (leading to incessant whining that its members are victims of everything from Facebook to climate scientists to immigrants) and does not depend on what Brooks aptly describes as “an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive” would frankly not have much to say. After you strip away those two failed themes, what’s left?
The jockeying for the post-Trump future of the Republican Party has started, says Post columnist Max Boot.
The unpleasant truth for those expected to say “there are fine people” in both parties is that, aside from a few stray governors and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), there really are not fine people running the Republican Party. They have sold their souls to Trump and either passively or actively bought into white supremacy and religious authoritarianism (which weirdly has as its most vocal proponent the attorney general). They waged war on the Constitution and objective reality. There is nothing redeeming in any of that — or in the right-wing media machine encompassing the deluded true believers and money-hungry charlatans willing to throw red meat to an audience they suppose consists of uneducated bigots.
The issue post-Trump then is twofold: What respectable ideology could the Republican Party adopt, if it wanted to? And, if a think tank could concoct an acceptable center-right ideology, what constituency could it possibly attract?
We need a two-party system, but we do not have a two-ideology political culture if the price of admission is a reality-based, decent, inclusive and constitutionally respectful ideology. If there is to be, as I hope, a grand coalition from center right to center left that generally defends constitutional government, curbs on the excesses of the free market, globalization with a safety net, responsible international leadership and a determination to root out systemic racism, I am not certain what that leaves to the opposition. On the left, it might be Sanders-style socialism. But on the right?
As is inevitably the case on Kos, I expect that some here are going to quote Jennifer’s historical views as evidence that her current adjustment is temporary. I simply don’t agree.
She hasn’t wrote for a very long time about a Republican repair strategy, a la the Lincoln Project crowd that appears tro want to tear down Trumpism and then restart with a lot of the George W Bush-era conservative views—and before, going back to at least Nixon. As in her op-ed today, it seems clear to me that it seems clear to Jennifer that the support for deep racial prejudices, economic imbalances, envionmental disasters, corporate dishonesty and religious bigotry—even if implemented through corruption and cheating-- that are inherent in Reublicanism just can’t be fixed by merely blaming everything on Trump and Trumpites.
It’s an encouraging transition. Whether through Jennifer or through others, I want to see this change in thinking implemented as part our new political balance, with conservatism/Republicanism relegated to a tiny, dark corner with very little near-term or longer-term influence.
With that, we as a nation could then get to work implementing the goals of “movement politics” that are growing on the left and center-left, while Tucker Carlson and his buddies whine from a dark moist corner.
The one biggest risk to this scenario, I fear, is the potential impact of the Violent Right. The more Republicanism dwindles, the less powerful and dangerous the Violent Right is likely to be.
