A tale of three takes (on the effect of the Trump phenomenon on the Republican Party)

The first two, a piece by Jay Cost at NRO, and a post by Joe Cunningham at RedState, are pretty much in alignment with each other. The third, today's Townhall column by Kurt Schlichter, is the outlier. (Sorry, no linky-love for MAGA-Kool-Aid-besotted Kurt.)

The whole business about objections to Trump on the right side of the spectrum is getting sticky. All three of these pieces deal with the faction that has indeed gone off the rails, advocating the obliteration of the Republican Party and starting over in the quest for a political repository for conservative values, ideas and principles. Some within this camp are even exhorting voters to go Dem this fall. That is indeed just plain nuts by any standards.

But a noteworthy aspect of the first two is that they distinguish between this faction and the still-viable and vibrant object-to-Trump-but-understand-that-he-has-to-be-reckoned-with faction - the faction that includes LITD.

Schlichter engages in the sleight-of-hand that goes back to the 2015 and 2016 days, when the scurrilous Laura Ingraham tried to frame a 16-strong primary field as a dichotomy between Trump and Jeb Bush, who never got out of single digits in polling. He couches his position on the illusion that the Bret Stephens / Jennifer Rubin / George Will types typify conservative objection to Trump.

It's a red herring, as the first two pieces clearly demonstrate.

Cost:

  . . . if the Republican party “burns to the ground,” the Democratic party wins by default. I cannot believe the following needs to be said, but here we are: This would be a very bad outcome for conservatism! As we all saw during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats will not hesitate to use their majorities to enact sweeping changes. And as we have seen lately, Democrats are moving further left, away from Clintonian third-way triangulation, toward the social democracies of northern Europe. And as the experience of the failed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare has surely demonstrated, it is much easier to prevent the Left from implementing policies than to undo or reform those policies once they are in place.

Additionally, we must reckon with the fact that the Trump administration has succeeded in important ways. The president has exceeded nearly everybody’s expectations when it comes to the quantity and quality of judicial nominees — to date in his first term, he has had double the number of appellate nominations confirmed than those Obama or George W. Bush had confirmed by this point in their terms. A lot of the praise goes to Mitch McConnell, who has expertly shepherded nominees through the Senate, as well as think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, which has done excellent work in vetting potential candidates. But that still leaves a lot of credit for the president. And his administration, along with congressional Republicans, has used the Congressional Review Act to an impressive extent, rolling back the regulatory overreach of the Obama administration. While I have frequently lamented the low tone that Trump has brought to the office, these policy victories have to count for something.

A realistic view. As I said the moment I got done voting in November 2016 (for neither the Very Stable Genius nor Madame Bleachbit), I was in a position to sleep well at night, knowing I hadn't endorsed tyranny, decline and decadence, but also had not signed on to the cult of personality that was further degrading post-American civic life. I could applaud good moves - either of the executive-order variety, or presidential signatures on good legislation that made its way to the Oval Office - and still forthrightly deplore the clown show that constitutes much of what DJT is about.

Cunningham employs the medieval practice of leeching to illustrate what needs to happen to the Republican Party, and, while it works as a writing device, strikes me as detracting a bit from the point about which he wants to be adamant, and rightly so - namely, no conservative should ever vote for a Democrat. He does plausibly tie it all together in his summing-up:

Going back to our history lesson, the practice of leeching still continues today. The saliva certain species of leech is actually an anti-coagulant. It stops inflammation and can restore circulation to blocked veins. There is evidence that leeching has some benefits.

In truth, there is a certain amount of leeching that can be done to fix the Republican Party. To get rid of the Chris Collins types, who seek to expand their personal wealth and power. Or the Jeff Flake types, who use it to increase their own spotlight at the expense of their colleagues. Even the “own the libs” types, and the Republicans who have vowed to sacrifice their credibility in order to curry favor with the President’s office.

This is the type of leeching we could use. Principled conservatism isn’t dead, and pragmatic conservatism needs to make a comeback. However, under no circumstances will I or anyone at RedState ever endorse a Democrat, nor will we endorse the idea of supporting them in an attempt to curtail Trump. We are not in the business of allowing a pro-socialist agenda to worm its way into power in an effort to stick it to a man we don’t like.

Speaking of writing devices, Schlichter recently has been reduced to trotting out his limited supply of self-coined terms and means of mockery in column after column, giving them a phoned-in feeling. I know he is actually passionate (and, of course, dead wrong) about his position, but my sense is he has more fun expressing it in his tweets and, most importantly, his books, which he never fails to getting around to advertising in his columns. (He has used the phrase "oh, well, I never!" to depict supposedly effete conservatives - the ones he has christened "Fredocons" - and who, in his lexicon, embody "Conservatism, Inc." so often that he how inserts hyphens between the words, making them an extended adjective. I wonder if he's monitoring how well - or not - his phrase for his own bunch - "militant normals" is catching on.)

Look, Schlichter is not wrong about his very most basic point: The Left is waging war on Western civilization - in particular, America. But his nemeses, the big conservative magazines and think tanks, are in complete agreement about that. He just tries to dismiss their conferences and cruises as ineffectual little pow-wows that keep the Right locked in self-flattery as the Left runs the table.

That's not what's going on. For one thing, those magazines and think tanks pay great heed to the intellectual lineage from which their worldview bloomed. Trumpists? What intellectual lineage can they point to? Trump may have heard the names Edmund Burke and Frederic Bastiat mentioned in passing at some point, but they don't inform anything he does or says.

As I say, it gets increasingly tricky to keep the hand on the tiller and stay the course. Socialists and mutants to the left, Trumpists to the right.

As I've also said before, though, in a certain sense I'm optimistic. The hollow core of Trumpism will be shown to be inadequate to defeat the Left, and its disillusioned adherents will return to the well of ideas and principles that are our only hope of making this desolate political-cultural landscape at least minimally hospitable.