Sunday, November 10, 2024

A brilliant Article - TRUMP’S TRIUMPH IS THE FAILURE OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CONSERVATIVES

 Worth reading the whole thing.

It’s not just the Democrats who have been utterly exposed and rejected

There is a lot of analysis going on now about why Trump won, from all the people who told you that Trump could not win. Apparently those who were most wrong are still keen to share their thoughts. Thanks to the am-dram, performative hysteria of the most devastated segments of the Democrat vote, schadenfreude and attention has focused on those extreme reactions.

I myself am still keenly awaiting the response of Little Bobby ‘Raging Bullshit’ De Niro.

But of course it’s not just actors, affluent young white women and radicalized trans who are in a period of mourning and meltdown. It’s not just mainstream media journalists who are howling ‘why, why, why’ as they examine the wreckage of their lies and the complete denial of their influence and power.

Spare a thought for the enemy within.

I’m talking of course of those who claim to be on the Right but who virulently detest Donald Trump, those Republicans who worked and campaigned to destroy him, who aided and abetted the Democrats, and who with increasing shrillness and hysteria (just like their Democrat allies) tried to cast Donald Trump and the MAGA movement as a recreation of the rise of Adolf Hitler and a threat to everything sane, reasonable, and decent.

Which always meant of course a threat to everything they profited from.

The failure of the Democrats is also their failure. The utter rejection of the Democrat platform of lies, corruption and graft is also an utter rejection of the lies, corruption and graft of the Country Club Republicans, of the Bush, Cheney and Pence model of Republicanism, and of the pundits, talking heads, think tank operatives, PAC founders and journalist shills of the Good Old Party.

It’s the failure and utter rejection of the War Whore model of Republicanism.

It’s the failure and utter rejection of the Polite Consensus Republicans, the military-industrial complex Republicans, and the neoliberal Republicans, all of which are different labels for the same thing: a smug, complacent and corrupt class of professional conservative happy to lose every battle at home so long as they got to sign off on another war abroad.

It’s the final humiliation and utter rejection of all the efforts of the Never Trumpers, RINOs, and ‘Our Democracy’ Republicans.

Over at CNN they suddenly seem to be aware of a few truths, and this is one of them. Here’s Scott Jennings suddenly realizing what others knew years ago:

“Bang-up job, guys. I mean — this “Never-Trump” whole complex that grew over the last several years, nothing has ever failed as hard in politics as this. The Lincoln Project, all these people that bilked millions upon millions upon millions of dollars from Democratic donors, and all the eggs that was put in this basket. The split was amazing. Trump got like 94 percent of Republicans. I don’t think they accomplished anything, except probably build a bunch of beach houses. That’s about what they did.

Republicans being lectured to, condescended to, browbeaten by all these folks over the last — look, at some juncture, it’s OK if we have different opinions about the election. You don’t have to beat people to death over it. And the more you do that, the more it drives people away. Total failure.”

Predictably, perhaps, his fellow panelists still pushed back against this common-sense assessment, noting that the Republican Never Trump complex had still shared a ‘valuable message’ even if it was an utterly ineffectual one rejected by voters. The difference here is profound. Jennings is finally judging a thing as a real conservative does-by pragmatic reality, by results, by achievements, by consequence. His fellow panelists still judge by ideological measures alone.

Jennings is suggesting he might be capable of taking another route, at least strategically. The others are still locked in the pure fanaticism of the false narrative, in which reality has let them down rather than their ideology having been proven wrong.

The point he makes though is absolutely correct. If anyone can be said to have failed harder than the Democrats and the mainstream media, it is the class of conservative who loathes Trump and loves automatic genuflection to a range of Globalist positions (including the need for the US to militarily intervene in support of some claimed ‘international rules based system’ but really as a profit motive command issued by donor interests).

The Lincoln Project has probably been the most vocal of the organisations set up by this establishment class rendition of the Republican Party. In 2020 they spent over 80 million US dollars on anti-Trump messaging, from donations to that point of around 200 million. They endorsed Joe Biden and they endorsed Kamala Harris. They released an endless series of ‘devastating’ and ‘hard hitting’ anti Trump ads, often even exceeding Democrat voices in the unhinged Trump is Hitler rhetoric.

The 2020 ad Unfit blamed Trump for the COVID pandemic and America’s unusually high death toll, ignoring inconvenient facts like the way that the most disastrous death tolls often occurred in Democrat controlled cities enforcing the strictest COVID rules (as with the nursing home deaths in New York), that the number of deaths after Trump exceeded those when he was still in office, and that death tallies anyway were dependent on counting procedures that made a Dominion machine height of COVID election look slightly more authentic.

That ad established a precedent ‘standard’ for all Lincoln Project ads to follow. A demonic obsession with casting Trump in the worst light imaginable, while ignoring key facts in doing so.

Subsequent ads would portray Trump as a Russian agent (“Comrade Trump”) hand-picked by Putin and who somehow helped Putin kill US troops (BountyBetrayed and Fellow Traveller) and who we were seriously supposed to believe was a secret Communist. Fellow Traveller discussed Trump’s alleged perfidy and evil while emblazoning a Hammer and Sickle emblem across the screen, a telling example of both the delusion and the lack of subtlety in the Lincoln Project approach.

For some reason ‘Donald Trump is a Commie’ didn’t stick very well. Who could have guessed?

Undeterred, the Lincoln Project clearly decided they had hit upon a worthy theme here. As more and more evidence grew regarding Chinese influence on western politicians outside and virulently opposed to the Trump and MAGA contingent, Lincoln Project brilliance turned to accusing Trump of being a Chinese agent. The ad Chyna, based on Trump’s (successful and beneficial to the US, a part they didn’t mention) trade war negotiations with China, somehow, by the contorted logic of the Lincoln Project, described Trump aggressively pursuing better trade terms with China as a thing which made Trump a Chinese agent (whereas Biden and others aggressively pursuing personal and family Chinese consultancy fees and business links was not a concern).

At the time, all this Establishment Republican frenzy against Trump was delightful to the Democrats, perhaps understandably so. Democrat strategist James Carville stated:

“Let me tell you, the Lincoln group and The Bulwark, these Never Trumper Republicans, the Democrats could learn a lot from them. They’re mean. They fight hard. And we don’t fight like that.”

Such statements are of course unintentionally hilarious on multiple levels. It’s hilarious because one of the things Never Trumper’s and Democrats claimed disqualified Trump from office (mean tweets, personal attacks, lack of politeness) became their own primary method against Trump, a method they would escalate very rapidly into the most insane and evidence-free slurs and smears imaginable. It’s hilarious too because Carville was claiming that his side don’t fight like this (the side that calls people ‘deplorables’ or ‘garbage’ and that compares Trump to Hitler). And it’s finally hilarious because Never Trumpers were spectacularly ineffective.

Their strident hysteria did not persuade anyone. Even more than the Democrats, the gap between their self-image and claimed status as the custodians of polite, reasonable, well-ordered politics and society where gentlemen and respectable ladies discuss moderate and sensible policies and the nature of their unhinged rhetoric and wild assertions regarding Trump was a gap that only the belief system of a fool could bridge.

You cannot both claim to be the sensible voice of Reason and scream that everyone who wants a secure border or a good economy is a Nazi. The two things jar. And its a jarring quality even more evident with critics of Trump on the Right, since they are the ones who were supposed to be (by job and Party definition) in favor themselves of a secure border and a good economy.

Despite Carville getting it so wrong (and other Democrats like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin who all described LP Republicans as a brilliant campaign asset), the signs of the sheer irrelevance and impotence of the Lincoln Project started building very soon after its creation. They were so over the top and ludicrous that even ex Romney staffer Oren Cass described them as “a group of political operatives who are not conservatives.”

It was a key point. For all that Trump was and is a former Democrat with some pretty classical liberal views on some key issues (invariably the exact opposite of how he is portrayed too-Trump is a notable Republican moderate on abortion) he was still much more of a conservative than his Never Trumper and RINO opponents. And it goes to the core of what conservatism and populism actually are, forces which no RINO and no fanatical Democrat have ever understood.

Max Boot wrote that the Lincoln Project members had “shown greater fealty to conservative principles than 99 percent of elected Republicans”. How is that and the Cass comment possible at the same time?

It’s possible because the Establishment Right let the Left swallow the mainstream and then define what is and is not respectable. In other words, what Max Boot means by ‘conservative principles’ is not what ordinary people or past conservatives mean by it. He means the type of Con Inc conservatism that accepts people like him (who loathe it) defining what kind of conservatism is acceptable.

To use the kind of comparison these Nazi obsessed creeps can fathom, when Max Boot says someone is a ‘good’ conservative he means that they are a captured conservative, an alleged conservative who cares more about etiquette and credentialism and status and respectability and the appearance of moderation as defined by leftists in authority. He means a Vichy Conservative who like General Petain to Hitler will still drape himself in the flag but who accepts defeat and works for the enemy.

For both the Democrat fanatic and the Never Trumper, the only respectable and sensible conservatism is one which considers the total radical progressive control of everything domestic policy wise to be normal, natural and positive. In other words, people who have conceded the Culture War, people who consider the combination of elite interests and radical progressive social ideology to be something conservatives should just accept.

But this isn’t what real conservatism is. Real conservatism isn’t the acceptance of the elite consensus of this moment, and it isn’t doing what the CIA tells you to do, and it isn’t following the foreign policy advice that has been failing for the last 30 years, or being more comfortable dining with a Democrat Senator than with a Republican voter. Real conservatism is certainly NOT supporting institutions just because they are established authorities when those institutions have become radically progressive. Real conservatism is NOT the status quo. Real conservatism is NOT dinner party prejudice. Real conservatism is NOT just social politeness and a desire not to make a fuss or to run screaming in horror from any accusation of being called Far Right.

Real conservatism is about CONSERVING your nation, your people, your inalienable rights and their inalienable rights. It’s not the post-war structure of institutions and trans national bodies that emerged after 1945 and protecting them and that vision of the world.

It’s loving your nation more than any of that. And its putting your own citizens, your own people ABOVE ALL INSTITUTIONS. Its knowing that your party, your power, your status, your system of government, your Congress, your Parliament, your Senate, your Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, alphabet agencies of every kind, everything official and empowered….is SUBORDINATE.

They only exist on the consent of the people and they cannot be allowed to contradict the basic rights of a specific and particular set of people (the citizens).

Real conservatism puts ancient inalienable rights ahead of institutions that are only justified to the degree by which they enshrine and protect those rights. THAT is what conservatism is supposed to be conserving, not the prejudices and power of a current elite and not a model of international relations and institutions that has only existed since 1945.

The real American conservative is loyal to the older loyalty. He’s a defender of the American people, not a defender of the necessity of NATO or the importance of the UN.

The Founders were not leftist rebels, on the whole. They were not internationalists with a sense of mission elsewhere. They were nationalists with a sense of mission about the land they were in. They weren’t even purely Enlightenment thinkers. They were radical conservatives. They shifted from calling the rights they demanded those of a free-born Englishman to calling them inalienable rights but the original assumption that they should possess those rights is a traditional English conception of liberty. That’s what an American patriot and an English patriot shares, despite the separation of our nations and that one was founded by divorcing itself from the other.

Trump is an American nationalist who believes in American exceptionalism, sovereignty, Founding traditions, the Constitution, and the inheritance of an English love of liberty and the rights of the people being paramount. He’s a person who instinctively and explicitly wants to put American people and the American nation first.

Establishment Never Trumpers and Respectable Republicans are less conservative than him because they put newer loyalties first and because they are prepared to abandon the majority of the people to radical progressive ideas and policies at home. They care more about the international order than about America. They care more about democratic norms (as falsely defined by progressives) than about the fate of the Republic. They are more scared of a populist leadership withdrawing funding from NATO or the UN than they are scared of American citizens struggling, starving and being neglected by a system that spends the money it won’t spend protecting the US border protecting the borders of Ukraine. Mike Pence summed it up when he made it very clear he sees his job a defending Ukraine rather than defending US citizens or caring about what happens to them.

The neoliberal foreign policy goals these Establishment Republicans are desperate to support are very modern. The radical progressive social attitudes they refuse to oppose or talk about are very modern. The Big State of high tax, high debt, high spend and damn the consequences is very modern. The Alphabet Agencies are very modern. The international order that must be backed by US military muscle is very modern. The attitudes towards nationality, race, gender, identity, nationalism being unsophisticated or evil and internationalism being sophisticated and good are all very modern.

A real conservative doesn’t exist to only support what is fashionable today. He is a person informed by the wisdom of the ages, respectful towards his ancestors, and determined to CONSERVE his inheritance from them to pass onto his children and their children.

He doesn’t believe in NATO and the UN and the EU and ‘gender affirming surgery’ and the most important thing being his ability to sit down with a Democrat or a European politician and share the same basic worldview they have.

He believes in America the way Trump does, not as a claimed love while fetishizing another nation (as a Mike Pence does), but as a first and only love. And a UK or a Canadian or an Australian or a New Zealander who is a real patriot and a real conservative totally understands this in a way a Lincoln Project supporter or representative never will.

Because they put a class consensus on what is respectable, and an internationalist agenda and infrastructure established in 1945, before America, just as their counterparts in the UK put that class consensus set of prejudices and that international order of priorities above the interests of the UK and the British people.

Ordinary people throughout the West simply want a conservatism that conserves THEM.

They don’t care whether the UN exists anymore. They care whether THEY exist anymore, and whether their nation is safe, prosperous and secure and capable of being these things independently and without State or transnational or billionaire elite or multinational corporation encroachment on their OWN basic rights and liberty.

Somehow the Respectable Conservatives and Respectable Republicans, like the Democrats, are surprised that ordinary people care more about the safety of their families and the existence of their nation than they do about invented new trans rights and postwar transnational orders.

And the same establishment class with very modern obsessions, calling themselves the Right, has been like the Lincoln Project elsewhere. British ‘conservatives’ who refused to fight the Culture War and who are obsessed with NATO, the UN, the international order, climate change and every other nonsense real people don’t care about, also stopped listening to their electorates and also hate Trump. The ‘conservative’ columnist Mathew Parris was devastated and apoplectic that Trump won. The failed Conservative politician and current podcast pundit Rory Stewart predicted a big Kamala win, just like the remaining members of the Lincoln Project (by 2024 of course 6 of the founding members of the Project had already quit, and one of them had been exposed as a child grooming pervert in 2021).

All of these Establishment Conservatives have seen their fake version of what patriotism conservatism and decency is even more discredited than the Democrat Party. Trump crushed them too. The public rejected them too, and the world has moved beyond them. They and their ideology, together with their control of the politics of the Right, is discredited and done.

They all got it wrong, and the voters hate them.

The embrace of populism is the death of Establishment Conservatism. But’s not the death of conservatism as a whole, not at all. It’s the return of it, in fighting fit form and mood.

Theoden has stopped listening to Wormtongue. The people are King, not the advisor who whispers the chant of defeat.

So this is a real understanding of what populism is. Populism is a demand from the people to respect their traditional and inalienable rights. Its a demand to put their safety and prosperity first. Its a radical conservatism saying ‘we built these things over generations and we own them. They are not yours to give away’.

Its a conservatism that will fight for its own people at home, instead of being obsessed with fighting for other people abroad.

That’s the dividing line between Trump and the Never Trumpers and between Trump and his British Con Inc critics, and the American people were very, very clear on which they prefer.

TRUMP'S TRIUMPH IS THE FAILURE OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CONSERVATIVES

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