Posted on 09/12/2023 5:24:58 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Conservative establishment journalists are hardly making a secret of their revulsion for the populist Right. In fact they are wearing that contempt proudly, as a badge of honor. The New York Post has just offered selections from American Breakdown, a book-length social commentary by Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker. This impressionistic study of why “America doesn’t trust itself,” begins its litany of complaints with what should be a predictable gripe: “And yes, let’s acknowledge it: Trump and his friends have surely played a part in undermining trust in recent years with their stream of falsehoods about stolen elections and other bogus claims.” Since Baker in the next several paragraphs tells us about the dishonesty of the media and the Deep State, how can he be sure the outcry of the populist Right against a rigged election in 2020 are uniformly false?
An even less subtle attack on the populist Right has come from neoconservative columnist Douglas Murray who last week wrote a commentary with the title “Pence Can’t Turn the Clock Back on the Republican Party.”” According to Murray, “the problem was not in the program” pushed by the Trump administration. The “problem” was that neither Trump nor his followers would accept the hard work of selective, delicate reform. Because Trump failed in this task, “a new generation of GOPers believe it isn’t worth performing the careful surgery.” Moreover, “There is a type of conservative who has become a type of revolutionary. They want to blow up half the country’s institutions and tear down the other half. Not unlike their opponents on the left. The FBI isn’t working as well as we’d like? Let’s burn it down and salt over the earth. The Department of Education is inefficient and too controlled by the teachers’ unions? Destroy the Department of Education.”
Obviously, populism is as much of a problem for Murray as it is for the explicitly anti-populist Pence, whom Murray hypocritically scolds for his negative remarks on the subject. For Murray and our former vice-president, favoring the dissolution of the Department of Education (which Reagan promised to shutter), is an “unconservative” outrage. But why exactly is the call to abolish a department created by the Carter administration, as a favor to teachers’ unions, and which now vigorously pushes LGBT instruction in public schools a reckless, “revolutionary” act. And why is it equally revolutionary (perhaps I should say “insurrectionary’) to call for the abolition of the FBI, which has been so weaponized by the Left that it may be beyond “delicate” tinkering with. The FBI is not a constitutionally established branch of our government, like the judiciary, which the Left has also weaponized. The FBI is a federal agency that was placed under the Department of Justice. Why is the proposal from some on the right to abolish this dangerously politicized surveillance agency tantamount to calling for scorched-earth war against the Left?
There is a settled view among establishment conservatives and a fortiori among neoconservatives that political institutions created or occupied by the Left should be treated as sacred by virtue of having been around for a while. These institutions, if kept, may even yield jobs for one’s friends or relatives. In any case, defending pillars of government overreach bespeaks “moderateness” and an indication that the defender can be invited to gatherings with liberal celebrities without causing social embarrassment.
Recently while reading in Tablet an otherwise engrossing article “The Bronze Age Pervert’s Dissertation on Leo Strauss,” I was struck by this gratuitous dig at the Claremont Institute for taking the populist side in the current struggle for the soul of the Right:
“In recent years, a set of wholly immoderate West Coast Straussians have convinced themselves that America needs a Trumpist revolution to reclaim ‘the republic’ from the progressive-bureaucratic ‘regime,’ election results notwithstanding. Divided between hapless moderates and unhinged reactionaries, the American Straussian project seems to be unraveling.”
While East Coast Straussians, according to the author, are prone to “soporific lectures,” the more riotous West Coast Straussians have become menacing reactionaries. The attack by the author, Blake Smith, does nothing to advance our understanding of the Bronze Age Pervert’s dissertation, but it may be designed to show that the writer seeks establishment conservative respectability and pursues that while writing for an unabashedly neoconservative site. But why is someone an “unhinged reactionary” for resisting a “progressive-bureaucratic regime” which is subverting our constitutional freedoms and harassing and persecuting its political opposition? Perhaps establishmentarians don’t regard what the Biden administration has done to weaponize entire departments of the government and turn surveillance agencies against critics of the Left as something that calls for serious pushback.
This may be the key difference between what is now referred to as the populist Right and the conservative establishment. Those who grouse too loudly about our current political condition may distress our “moderates” even more than the only mildly objectionable Left.
The problem is that there is overwhelming and convincing evidence of the following:
1. US government intelligence apparatus interfering in elections.
2. A two tiered justice system.
3. News agencies closely tied to the US government intelligence apparatus parroting propaganda, not limited to that ‘elections are secure’.
4. Unrealistic/impossible turnout of voters compared to registrations in many states and counties. Pennsylvania has more votes than registered voters.
5. A department of Justice that seems involved in everything except Justice. Especially when it involves investigating voter fraud (See multi-state voter fraud discovered by Michigan State police and given to FBI/DOJ)
6. Historical evidence that the intelligence apparatus was involved in removing a popular antiwar President, Nixon, by using CIA and FBI resources to frame him.
7. New testimony and eyewitnesses, as well as still to be released documents, implicating the CIA and probably the VPOTUS in a coup in Nov. 1963. See Tucker Carlson videos and recent witness on bullets collected at scene.
8. Abuse by the CIA, FBI, DOJ, State Department, to destroy a duly elected POTUS term by inserting fake dossier information and weaponizing the FBI.
You can’t argue with the above at this point, and you can’t deny that electorate choices are now driven by, and removed if necessary, by the US government agencies. So yes, it is rigged.
'Populist right' perplexed me, but the quoted term nailed it:
The left coast is hardly a bastion of conservatism.
DS psyops.
They’re all in on it. Corrupt to the core.
The “conservative” empire are Biden’s only hope.
It’s like an inverse Obi Won.
Pedants, not pendants.
Being pedantic.
They are revolted by us. But they insist we must vote for their candidates.
Could be worse.
The GOP's big donors do not like instability - as it is much harder to predict next quarter's profits. Keeping the dinosaur bureaucracy fully intact is smarter, in their view, than introducing reform that might have unforeseen effects. They like to engineer complex reforms that are int heir own best interest. Look at the way Obamacare turned out to be a dream result for the big insurance companies everybody supposedly hated.
If Trump loses the next election a new political party will be born. I’m sure the Whigs and Know Nothings thought they would last forever. The Republicans began weakly, and Lincoln won the election of 1860 by a plurality. Both the Democrat Party of 200+ years, and the Republican Party of 175 years are attenuated. Better said, diseased. The Democrats should call themselves the Democrat Socialists, and the Trumpsters, The New American Party, and then have at it at least with a veneer of honesty.
No more parties. There has to be a better way.
Yes. They are the the obsessed psychopath ex-boyfriend. If I can’t have her (the GOP_ then NOBODY can have her. They’ll burn it to the ground rather than let the people have their voice.
The way they see it, our job is volunteer our time, donate our money, accept their lies to motivate us, reliably vote GOP and SHUT THE HELL UP AND NEVER QUESTION THERE ACTIONS OR MOTIVES!!!!
RINOs think that liberals are just doing their thing and not a dire threat to the republic. Coexistence is possible. Meanwhile MAGA is being persecuted by a police state. They think that the gator will eat them last.
This man needs to be hit repeatedly in the mouth for uttering that lie.
I believe liars need to get hit in the mouth for lying.
The election *WAS* stolen in the swing states through corrupt practices which we are still discovering. Only an idiot or a liar could say it wasn't stolen.
They still seem to think they’re the majority of the party and can turn back the clock.
We’ve moved on...but find ourselves lacking representation outside Trump and a few others.
The first problem here is:
There is no conservative establishment.
There is only ...the establishment.
Anyone who can no see the difference is a mmbf of the Three Blind Monkeys” club.
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