The Bulwark is utterly worthless - and I say this as a conservative who finds Trump deeply objectionable

The regrouping of a number of Weekly Standard writers and editors under a new banner provided me with a hope-against-hope moment. I was uneasy with the involvement of Bill Kristol, who had already been showing signs of loopiness. I probably don't need to point out the most egregious of these to you: his March 2016 statement that he'd rather see Madame Bleachbit as president than the Very Stable Genius. Still, Charlie Sykes, who at that point had not demonstrate anything like that degree of coziness with the enemy, was another cofounder, and writers like Jonathan V. Last and Andrew Eggar, who had made cogent arguments for a position not far from my own were on board.

But things started getting really shaky with the hiring of Molly Jong-Fast, granddaughter of blacklisted Communist Howard Fast and daughter of Erica Jong, from whom she picked up the penchant for writing smirky autobiographical accounts of hedonistic episodes.

I have to say, though, that what bothers me even more is the frequent appearance of former Common Cause chairman Richard North Patterson (who also sits on the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which counts among its leadership Kristol, as well as such flakes / Democrats as Max Boot, Heidi Heitkamp and Anne Applebaum).

A while back, he wrote a piece on the virtues of reparations, if that gives you a clue.

Currently, on The Bulwark's front page, he has a lengthy argument for "progressive capitalism" that is pure silliness dressed up as erudition.

He  characterizes the Gilded Age, a period of astounding advancement and invention, in the worst possible light, quotes Michael ban-the-20-ounce-soda-pops Bloomberg, and lets loose with this disparagement of the ethos of the period from 1970 to the present:

This distemper was not inevitable. The quarter-century after World War II featured an implicit corporate compact with society: fair wages, a secure retirement, proportionate executive compensation, vigorous unions, and curbs on the size and power of big business. Rising opportunity and diminishing income inequality followed.

Four decades ago, this balance began shifting. Faced with increasing global competition and a flattening stock market, CEOs began practicing a “shareholder capitalism” which prioritized investor returns. This often required using government to help achieve a radical transformation in how capitalism worked. This gave rise to a new corporate agenda rooted in spurring deregulation, reducing taxes, fighting unionization, slashing benefits, vitiating antitrust enforcement, pursuing corporate consolidation, transferring the workforce overseas or into nonunion jobs, and incentivizing CEOs for maximizing shareholder value—if necessary, by suppressing wages or firing workers.

The stock market rose; CEOs and Wall Street dealmakers became celebrities; corporations amassed economic and political power; American capitalism dominated the world economy. As distilled by [Steven] Pearlstein, this sea change reflected three basic principles:

• That government regulation and taxation prevented corporate America from competing;
• That the sole purpose of public corporations was to optimize returns to investors;
• That moral or societal concerns about income inequality, worker insecurity, and the maldistribution of wealth were antithetical to economic growth.

Writes Pearlstein: “[A]lmost everything people now find distasteful about [our economic system] can be traced to these three flawed ideas.” A crucial additive was the comforting mythology of supply-side economics: the promise that cutting taxes would pay for itself by spurring economic growth.

This neo-Randian theology transmuted our view of capitalism and free markets—eventually warping our social fabric, Pearlstein contends, while enshrining “a morally corrupting and self–defeating economic dogma which threatens the future of American capitalism.”

That "compact with society" formulation is a telling touch, is it not? No Adam Smith microeconomic view of how it transpired for him. The "corporate" world and "society" made a "compact." It wasn't individual sovereign human beings making life choices based on assessments of their array of options. No, these amorphous entities got together and put their John Hancocks on the dotted line.

And he lauds Pearlstein's description of the essence of the free market (the understanding that "government regulation and taxation prevented corporate America from competing" and that "the sole purpose of public corporations was to optimize returns to investors") as "flawed." Tell that to Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. I mean, really let this sink in. This guy is implicitly endorsing regulation, taxation and "corporate responsibility."

How's this tidbit?

As Thomas Edsall notes, many conservatives believe unions hamper corporate America in global competition, while liberals often place the concerns of the educated urban professional class over those of blue-collar workers. This mutually reinforcing admixture of antagonism and indifference, Pearlstein argues, helps fuel a decline in worker morale and productivity as, rather than sharing profits, workers fear losing their jobs.

Yes, indeed, Thomas Edsall, there's a conservative thinker if there ever was one.

It goes on. And on. The to-be-expected bromides about the gap between CEO and average-worker pay. Disparagement of the 2017 tax cuts. 'Government's role in protecting the environment [and] investing in infrastructure."

This isn't conservatism by any definition. This is New Republic stuff.

To be putting this kind of thing up at a sight that purports to be the actually conservative alternative to Trumpism renders the whole undertaking an exercise in absurdity.

Thank God there are a number of sites (this one, for instance) that are actually fulfilling that function.

The Bulwark came out of the gate robust, went about twenty yards and dropped in its tracks. And now its carcass is rotting in the sun.