If you gaze too long into The Donald, The Donald gazes back into you.
And everyone is dumber for it.
The problem of Donald Trump hit the conservative movement like a problem-shaped figurative landmine hitting a foot, which is to say reactively, with explosive force, and with a great deal of collateral damage. (That metaphor sounded much cooler and smoother when I started than when I finished, but blogging is great for indulging rhetorical flights of fancy.) The vaguely brutal reinforcement of the fact that conservatives are at best a plurality in their own party hit the movement hard, fracturing old alliances; altering priorities; and realigning the entire thing around an orange, blustering lodestar, in opposition, alliance, avoidance, or some combination.
I'd thought the fallout more or less reduced to rival camps of people with way too much time on their hands putting cured meat products on the table of Twitter when the Weekly Standard up-and-died.
I'm hesitant to say too much about the Standard for fear I'll reduce this to a blubbering series of nostalgia-painted trips down my incredibly hum-drum memory lane, but I'll say that from when I was in law school through late last year, the one conservative publication I consistently read was the Weekly Standard. Cheeky, insightful, funny, smart, never self-reverent, witty, and never afraid to be introspective, it was everything a 22-40 year-old guy who thinks too much of himself wants to imagine he'd write.
Three of my favorite writers -- Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, and Jonathan Last -- could be found there, and I devoured their articles the way Rosie O'Donnell devours inhabited planets. Last will always have a special place in my heart, for his cheerily-doom-ridden obsession with (declining) demographics on a par with mine; my one major point of disagreement with him was in his identification of Labash and Ferguson as top-shelf writers without including his own name. He never had their flair; he always had the boards nailed down and the carpet perfectly placed. As anyone who's ever written and edited knows, this is a non-trivial accomplishment, even for nominally accomplished writers.
And then the Weekly Standard just died. Poof. Its increasingly strident tone against the Trump Administration -- of which it had not been fond since before there was one -- was cited as one explanation. Another was the consolidation of conservative opinion mags. From my perspective, its constant ownership shifts made it look perilously like The New Republic, but without billionaires in love with eugenics and sodomy to bail it out.
When Last teased a successor, and then it launched, I was relieved. There was hope! A great publication had been saved!
Not so much.
The Bulwark is something of a case study in what happens when one is (1) convinced one is the last righteous man standing (2) obsessed with the demon that laid low or corrupted one's former allies and (3) unmoored from any need to hide either of those things. Publishing the creepy stalker-of-women-on-Twitter guy (whose primary oeuvre is screenshotting conservatives sympathetic to The Weekly Standard and also conservative women, but especially the latter, to hold them up for mockery) and giving Molly Jong-Fast a byline to discuss, inter alia, the pro-life movement as part of the conservative movement can only make sense if your priority is not preserving 1990s-2000s era conservatism so much as it is the absolute destruction of Donald Trump and anyone saying anything that could possibly so much as help someone who helps someone who might help him.
Worse than bad writer selection, however, is the content. To call The Bulwark obsessed is to engage in understatement so profound the very language might collapse on itself; a fate that, philosophically, has struck the Bulwark as well.
I'll offer an example, drawn from using the site's search engine to search for two terms: "the" and "Trump."
A search for "the," which should theoretically yield every article posted on the site, yielded 537 results. A search for "Trump," unsurprisingly, yielded pretty close to every article posted on the site: 445, or 82.87%, of the "the" results. (The Bulwark's search function appears to be default-Boolean, so articles like "The Age of Trumpshevism" did show in these results.)
Perhaps I'm being unfair; as I said, I tend to put Last on the top shelf of editorial and analytical thinkers of my generation, and his hand is, according to the masthead, the last or one of the last to open the bomb-bay doors. Let us therefore look at the stories on the first page of the "Trump" search:
(My mad Photoshop skills are neither mad nor usable when I don't have any tools other than the ones Microsoft hands out for free, so I've reproduced the links below.)
How to Impeach Donald Trump
It’s a Terrible Idea for Trump to Cozy Up to Nigel Farage
Only the Best Deals: How Trump Got Pantsed By Mexico
The Definitive Explanation of Why Donald Trump Is Bane from The Dark Knight Rises
The Trump Kids Go Royal
Sohrab Ahmari’s ‘Culture War’ Is Really Just About Donald Trump
Trump’s Poverty-Line Proposal Is Wonkier Than It Seems
Trump Wants Our Allies to Spend More on Defense. Is That a Good Idea?
Trump’s Mexico Tariffs Are Forever
America’s Trade Laws Were Not Designed for a President Like Trump
Of these, I think it's safe to say that an instruction manual on impeaching someone is disfavorable to the impeachment target. Similarly, describing someone as "pantsed," even the great Wade Boggs, is not a kindness. Making an explicit equation between someone and a completely uninteresting villain from a completely uninteresting movie from a badly overhyped superhero movie sub-franchise does not rate high on the compliment scale.
Any piece by the odious Jong-Fast is, by definition, going to be harsh to Donald Trump and the conservative movement of which the Bulwark claims to be one of the last standing parts. The Bulwark's decision to briefly be the Paper of Sohrab Ahmari Record was apparently incomplete until it topped off with an explanation of how the intra-right contratemps Mr. Ahmari set off, and against whom the Bulwark set itself, was really all about Trump.
That leaves five pieces that, from the headline alone, cannot be sussed out. (In the interest of full disclosure, I read each of the pieces here, because few things are as obnoxious as headline-sniffing, with the possible exception of headline-baiting, which we're all supposed to pretend is basically fine because clicks.) Let's look at those.
The Nigel Farage piece is really an explanation that Nigel Farage sucks, and Donald Trump does as well, for treating him seriously. (The Tories are currently treating Mr. Farage quite seriously for the same reasons Mr. Trump does, which is quite beside anything mentioned in the piece; the analysis of how playing nice with Farage undercuts the Tories (and Labour? the 9/11 discussion makes this mixed) would be much more compelling if the Conservatives weren't doing a fine job of undercutting themselves.)
The poverty-line analysis piece is a relatively even-handed look at a policy proposal that conservatives have favored for years, with a conclusion that ... it likely won't matter all that much, and either should or shouldn't be enacted, who knows.
The NATO defense target piece carefully notes that (1) it has been a policy of multiple Administrations to urge or require Europe, and especially NATO, to spend more on defense; (2) they have not (but they're starting to! sort of!); (3) if they do hit their defense spending targets, it will likely be on soldier welfare (as opposed to the civilian welfare systems most of their armed services already use, one supposes); (4) even if they spend money, it would "only" be worth a few aircraft carriers, ships we all know aren't terribly useful for combat; and (5) if we do, we're begging for European regional hegemons and possibly another Reich or World War. (The implicit answer to the headline, then, is "no.") Unmentioned is that conservatives have been pushing for greater NATO defense spending by constituent powers for decades, an omission that makes perfect sense because reasons. There is a complicated dispute bound up in this question, involving America's sway over NATO, member-states' publics' support of military spending and American military measures, American support for military actions abroad, the decline of Russia from world power to regional hegemon-basket-case, military focus on the Far East, and a dozen other concerns, of which "maybe Germany will re-arm and grab Eastern France and Poland" isn't even remotely one.
Days before Mexico made (possible) concessions and the tariffs at issue in the penultimate piece were called off (for now), the Bulwark announced they'd never be called off because, and I do not believe I'm being unfair here, Donald Trump is an idiot who painted himself into a corner on tariffs and is too stupid to realize it and will never end them. That he did is best explained as ... being too stupid to realize that he'd been pantsed by ending the things we were all confidently told he wouldn't end.
Finally, there's an analysis by the ever-demure Andrew Egger explaining that a late-1990s Congress was too stupid to realize that handing off unilateral authority to the President can be dangerous. While repeatedly emphasizing the stupid, blundering nature of the current occupant of 1600, the piece does close by noting that this is an instance in which Congress was too generous with its powers, and that maybe reconsideration, post-Trump (or intra-Trump!) is needed.
Thus, there are eight highly-unfavorable-to-merely-unfavorable results in that latest ten hits (as of June 18, 2019) for Donald Trump, one of which hammers Donald Trump for pushing a policy endorsed by numerous Presidents and years of American conservatives. There are two analysis pieces, one of which skips right past the fact that the Trump administration is enacting a conservative policy choice in order to suggest it may be a bad idea (or not!) and another to say Donald Trump is so singlehandedly bad, Congress has to have learned a lesson or two by now. Reading deeper does not change this: From only the coverage on The Bulwark, one might reasonably infer that Donald Trump's administration has quite literally done nothing right, from a conservative or even competence perspective.
This is demonstrably silly. One does not have to think the Trump Administration, or its head, has always been right to note that a lot of things have gone well precisely because a lot of traditional conservatives and Republicans swallowed their bile and stayed the course. Judges, Middle East policy (sorry, Rand Paul), life issues(!), heck, even arguably immigration, depending on which part of the screaming parts of the conservative movement one surveys on that front on any given day -- all have had at least reasonably good outcomes.
Let us get something out of the way, many, many paragraphs later than the Bulwark would like or would believe appropriate: Donald Trump is a clown, a crass man who in any reasonable time would not be President unless he first served in the Senate and happened to be Vice President when the squalid, raping, aborting, philandering, vicious, nasty, casually-racist President under whom he served was assassinated. (Thus, a Democrat, in party registration as well as fact; but a proto-neocon, so perhaps occupying a warm spot in the Bulwark crowd's heart.) His presidency has had its share of errors-to-disasters and then some, most notably, on immigration (again, depending on one's perspective; in this case, I think it the one grounded in reality), tariffs (not since George H.W. Bush has any Republican tried so hard to raise tariffs on Americans while pretending it away), and let's just say "communications" has been a byword for "hash." Additionally, there is no need to play carrot-and-stick; The Bulwark acts as essentially Breitbart's mirror image, the back of the hand to the soft, loving palm, and this is a perfectly reasonable position to take.
Someone has to be the guy telling the town drunk to go home, he's making an ass of himself, even when the bartender is slipping him another whiskey. That's an honorable role to fill, although it's a bit much when you follow the guy home, yelling at him the whole way and rousing the whole town in the process.
The essential problem is not even that the Bulwark is obsessed with Trump. He's the President, and that staff has loved an imperial presidency right up until someone they hate with the hate of Rosie O'Donnell facing a diet plan sat in the Oval Office. They're within their rights to focus on the man they basically see as an illegitimate usurper of the throne.
The problem is that they've lost all touch with perspective. It's not just the ridiculous byline pieces -- authors chosen for their open, seething hatred of Trump over the wit, pinache, and learning that used to occupy the Weekly Standard. It's not just the sudden policy shifts -- the Alabama abortion law is not merely a tactical error, but is actually a world-historical betrayal of a movement dedicated to ... ending legalized abortion. It's not the skewed policy perspective -- quite aside from now wanting NATO to bear less of NATO's burden, it appears that making a government-mandated exemption from civil liability dependent on actually complying with the original conditions for that exemption is a form of statism. It's not just treating Bill Weld(!) as a serious candidate for the presidency, something even his exhumed mother would not be able to bring herself to do.
It's all these and more. Altogether, it suggests an unmooring from decades of principles for the sole purpose of screaming at and about Donald Trump, and destroying anything aiding him, even to good outcomes. It is a derangement. It is stupid, precisely because it is unthinking, or worse, surface-level thought in defense of a lack of it.
It is neither too late nor too hard to end this experiment in madness; the writers are smart enough, Egger being the possible exception, and decent enough, the stalker guy and Jong-Fast being the obvious exceptions to that, to at the very least remain solid on principles while opposing the man they hate. The alternative is to be a revanchist holdout of a world that never existed outside of their own imagination, so determined to slay the blundering ogre that they force their own allies away in the process; or, worse, a laughingstock.
The conservative movement has fractured; that doesn't mean that some of its leading lights must lose their mind. I would submit that they should not, for their sake and ours.
Nevertheless, my bet is that they remain what they've become: The Mirror Universe Breitbart (or worse, to their mind: Federalist). My further bet is that they scoff at this even as the world drifts away from them, reassuring themselves that at least they don't champion hopeless or despicable causes.
And yet: Bill Weld.
