Just what is Trump a symptom of?

 I just read Victor Davis Hanson's lastest NRO piece and it has me thinking. His overall point is this: That Trump is just a symptom of a larger phenomenon. And he goes on to say that the good stuff coming out of the administration, initiatives any conservative can applaud - defanging the EPA, pulling out of the Paris Accord, Gorsuch and lower-court appointments, forthright support for Israel, sharp criticism of the JCPOA - would probably be the fruits of any actual conservative we could have elected.

 So far, so good, but consider Hanson's last paragraph: "Meanwhile, the administrative state expands, the debt is headed for $21 trillion, crass identity politics tear the nation apart, the effort to restore deterrence abroad grows ever more dangerous, and the campuses, Hollywood, the NFL, and the media are reminding us that progressive politics are now our culture’s orthodoxy, vital for success in nearly all fields. And dealing with all that is the only conservative fight that counts." We're still disastrously deep in debt, and the cultural rot continues unabated. A guy with no consistent set of principles is ill-equipped to address that.

And, if Trump is just a symptom of a much broader and deeper frustration, why has this cult of personality sprung up around him? "GO TRUMP!" and all of that. Why do his slavish devotees in the pundit class - Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Wayne Allen Root, Bill Mitchell, Conrad Black - personally thank him for the stock market numbers? That's the kind of adulation we saw among lefties for Obama.

Then I read Jim Jamitis's latest at Red State and he, too, uses the word "symptom," but in a somewhat different way:

Like Obama before him, Trump is just a symptom, not the underlying pathology which is, in part, the human tendency to outsource their thinking to the loudest person in the room.

His specific substantiation for what he's talking about is well-expressed:

Their limited, binary view of the political landscape seems to equate criticism of Trump with support for the dead wood Republicans in Congress or even the Democrats. That the whole thing is a train wreck isn’t on their list of possibilities.

He says that Trumpist tribalists engage in the same kind of horn-tooting that Obama's water-carriers made their stock in trade:

When Obama claimed success based on the performance of the stock market, analysts on the right explained how that wasn’t a good measure of overall economic health. Trump routinely touts the stock market as an indicator of his success and the same pundits applaud.

Unemployment numbers under Obama were always rightly treated with skepticism by conservatives because of the terrible state of the overall labor participation rate. The labor force hasn’t grown significantly since Trump’s inauguration but pundits on the right seldom mention it when Trump claims responsibility for reducing the unemployment rate. 

I saw a tweet yesterday from Laura Ingraham thanking DJT for the current stock market numbers. It perfectly makes Jamitis's point.

This is kind of a digression, but I found this paragraph humbling. It was a bracing call for us opinion-mongers to put our activity in perspective:

To people who think this way, I say: Calm down, Sparky, you write for a website most of America doesn’t read, or you talk on a radio show most of America doesn’t listen to. And that applies to even the top people in the political commentary business. We work in a bubble for people who are entertained by political discussion. It’s not a large bubble. Get over yourselves.

The main point here is the one that the post immediately under this one also makes. (I first saw the HuffPost piece linked in a Facebook post by a big-time lefty - a political-science professor at a large university. He felt compelled to call out his own side for reckless banner-carrying.) Raw tribalism has infected every nook and cranny of our public discourse.

That's why I repeat the Three Pillars of Conservatism so often here at LITD. I hope doesn't become tiresome. But if one doesn't have a polestar, one is merely adrift, and no amount of attempted self-convincing otherwise is going to make it so.