CHAPTER NINE 
Pitchforks, Torches, and Conservative, Inc.
The Elite is largely out and proud liberal—typically, they make no excuses and rarely deny it—except when trying to seize the moral high ground that comes with being disinterested and neutral. When they are posing as disinterested and neutral, they deny being liberal. Why, they are merely using “common sense” in a “pragmatic search for solutions.”
What they call “common sense” and “pragmatism,” of course, always lead to liberal solutions. Amazing how that works out so well for them.
But there is another branch of the Elite, a portion of the establishment that is arguably much, much more annoying to the Normals. Those are the conservatives—often alleged conservatives—who look on the people who they are supposed to defend and represent with horror and contempt.
They are the members of Conservative, Inc. And they are terrible.
Conservative, Inc., is the intertwined web of donors, intellectuals, media personalities, activists, and politicians who used to be the face of conservatism in opposition before Trump came along and derailed their gravy train. They are also members of the Elite, and many are quite proud of that. They deny that their Elite status turns them toward liberalism—instead, they see themselves as the torchbearers of True Conservativism™ and the Keepers of the Sacred Principles.
But they have a big problem, the same problem that caused the Normals to revolt against the Elite in general. They did a terrible job. They are now marginalized by the people who used to care what they had to say because they never managed to actually conserve anything, and because their vaunted principles never seemed to include actually winning.
The loudest and whiniest voices of Never Trump come from inside Conservative, Inc. And that should be no surprise. By choosing Trump, the Normals expressly rejected the conservative Elite. Worse, they disrespected the conservative Elite. And still worse, they exposed the scam that is Conservative, Inc.
With Trump in the Oval Office, who’s going to sign up for one of Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard voyages? Bill’s not a player anymore. He’s a drunk in the stands hooting at the guys actually out on the field. But instead of Budweiser, he’s buzzed on white wine spritzers and his own former middling glory.
After all, there’s not a lot of alpha male action in Conservative, Inc., which is one of its many flaws.
Conservative, Inc., was not always useless. Actually, that’s not quite fair, because it’s not entirely useless today, either. It’s just largely useless, because it’s less concerned with conservatism than with filling the troughs of professional conservatives. Its limited usefulness is merely a side effect. Conservative, Inc., you must understand, is about maintaining sinecures for professional conservatives who identify with the Elite over the Normals.
Go back in time to the fifties, when conservatism as an ideology was at its nadir. The communists looked ascendant around the world, and here at home everyone who was anyone—that is, everyone in the Elite—was embracing the kind of can-do liberalism that hung in the air after the New Deal. Even the Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a career government employee. While he certainly respected the kind of yeoman farmers and small businesspeople he had grown up around, he was also a believer in top-down solutions, of planning and central organizing. After all, he had been a general, and planning and central organizing is what generals do. No wonder big corporations found a friend in the White House.
What was good for General Motors was good for America.
But then William F. Buckley showed up and gathered the scattered remnants of conservatism together by founding National Review in 1955 with a promise that the publication “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”1
William F. Buckley was not a Normal. Not even close, nor would he ever pretend to be. Instead, he wore his Elitism on his chest like a medal, both in his attitude and in his boundless vocabulary—you didn’t read a Buckley column without a dictionary handy. And the National Review itself was openly Elitist—that was part of its charm, part of why it was so dangerous. It was of the Elite and inside the Elite, and the Elite could not ignore it. Buckley came from Yale—one of their Ivy League meccas—and if you were Elite, you might well hate and despise what he had to say, but you had to take him seriously. After all, he had your credentials.
But Buckley was also “obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”2
He also wrote, in Up from Liberalism (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), “I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit.”
Buckley, a man no one could deny was actually elite as well as a member of the Elite, probably summed up the Normal mindset more than anyone before or since. He had boundless faith in Normal Americans to capably exercise the rights God endowed them with.
And Conservative, Inc., today? Not so much.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater tried to put those ideas into effect and got trounced by Lyndon B. Johnson. There were many reasons for Normals not rallying around him, most of them not in play today. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a unique factor. Some of it was sympathy. Some of it was Goldwater’s personality. Conservatives adored his stridency (“But he fights!” is a recurring theme among successful conservatives), yet that also turned off many Normals. A lot of them had served in the Big One, and when Goldwater talked about war, they saw he meant a war their kids would have to fight. Of course, their kids did end up having to fight one—it just wasn’t Barry’s war.
Yet those were not the most important factors.
At that point, liberalism had not utterly failed. We had just won the greatest war in the history of mankind, and the United States was the unchallenged economic superpower. The depression of a quarter century before was not a history lesson or a tale told by elderly grandparents but still a fresh memory for millions of Americans who understood deprivation—and credited Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrat Party with pulling them out of it. In 1964, you looked around your neighborhood and people had cars, refrigerators, television sets, and hope for the future. Sure, there were warnings that liberalism was a house of cards that would have to collapse eventually, but that had not happened yet. Liberalism was riding high, though not for long.
We had not yet seen the growth of the welfare state, the destruction of the cities under the blue state model, and the explosion of crime that was coming. It was still a time when liberals would still call themselves “liberals” instead of trying to find some euphemism to cover up who they really were.
You also had a media united behind LBJ, with just as much lock-step unity as it had in 2016 behind Hillary. Except back then there were no alternative outlets—except a few fringe magazines like National Review—and there was certainly no internet or social media where non-Elite voices could articulate and promulgate a conservative counternarrative. Moreover, the media had something then it does not have now—trust. People generally trusted the media, just as the people generally trusted all of America’s institutions. The turmoil of the late 1960s and the 1970s were off in the future, and the media had not yet completely disgraced itself by casting off its pose of objectivity. When the evening news hinted darkly that Barry Goldwater was nuts—that was the beginning of the hoary tradition of liberal shrinks offering long-distance diagnoses of Republican figures as mentally ill—people took notice. Heck, if Cronkite said it, it had to be true. Right?
But the biggest reason Lyndon Johnson won is that he did not alienate the Normals. In fact, he cultivated them. In 1964, unlike 2016, the Democrats did not come across as despising Normal people. Quite the opposite—the Democrat Party aimed most of its efforts directly at the working man. Private-sector unions were much bigger and more powerful, and the Democrats partnered with them. Those guys in Wisconsin who handed the election to Trump in 2016 would have all lined up behind LBJ in 1964. In 2016, they went for Trump in no small part because they saw clearly that Hillary hated their guts.
The voters gave the White House to LBJ in 1964, but the conservative movement got a not inconsiderable consolation prize in the form of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was the ultimate Normal, and the Normals justly revere him even if today they would strongly reject some of his specific policy positions—amnesty and, later, guns, though that may have been under the heavy-handed guidance of Nancy while he was in decline. He was never destined for the Elite, and no matter how high his talents took him, he never made the decision to become a member.
He was born in a small town in Illinois in a second-floor apartment over a tavern—hardly auspicious. He grew up in a variety of small Midwestern towns and eventually went to Eureka College—again, hardly an invitation to join the Elite. During the War, he served stateside due to bad eyesight and hearing. Afterward, he went back to Hollywood and fought against communist infiltration of the industry—that taught him all he needed to know about the commies. But it was self-study, combined with an instinctive love of country and its Constitution, that developed him into what he became—perhaps the greatest advocate for Normal Americans in history.
The Elite, for its part, hated him. And so did many in Conservative, Inc.
Much of the Republican establishment hated Reagan from early on. His anti-Elitism gnawed at them, and the fact that he was (by then) from California further demonstrated that he just was not fit to have a leadership position in the Republican Party. Of course, many of them also detested Richard Nixon, but in his case it was because Nixon so obviously wished to be accepted as one of the Elite. They put up with Nixon because Nixon won (until he stopped winning, and then they deserted him). And they put up with Reagan because he won, then claimed his mantle as their own even as they ignored everything he did.
Remember that it was the Republican Elite, the best and brightest minds of the Grand Old Party, who thought the guy to beat Jimmy Carter in 1976 was Gerald Ford. Ford was already walking wounded after pardoning Nixon. The loudly and tiresomely born-again Christian Carter was still benefitting from the Democrat Party’s temporary refocusing on the working man after the disaster in 1972, where a new generation of Democrats followed their tiny, shriveled hearts and nominated George McGovern on a platform of acid, amnesty (for draft dodgers), and abortion. In their wisdom, the GOP geniuses chose the quintessential insider after a shocking scandal had rocked Washington. It was the culmination of a seemingly endless series of earthquakes that had shaken the citizenry’s faith in America’s institutions, and the last thing the GOP needed was to nominate Mr. Institutions.
Of course, today a president pulling on the levers of executive power to spy on political opponents is the height of patriotism—assuming it’s a Democrat doing it to a Republican.
Not for the last time had the Republican Elite utterly misread the very people it was expecting to vote them back into office. When Reagan finally got a crack at Carter four years later—no thanks to the GOP Elite—he kicked that sanctimonious incompetent’s peanut-farming ass.
But it was under Reagan that Conservative, Inc., truly began to flourish. In the twelve years of Republican rule that followed, donors began to take notice, and conservative entrepreneurs began to build a right-wing extragovernmental infrastructure of think tanks and activist organizations. Back in the day, for most conservatism was just a hobby (even Buckley wrote a series of best-selling, largely apolitical spy novels). Now, it was a living, and for many, a lifestyle.
We began to see the rise of the professional conservatives. These were the pundits, the thinkers, and the talkers, and they were determined to continue the National Review’s work of building an intellectual framework for conservatism. But it was only a nascent campaign in the 1980s. For those conservatives outside the Beltway, their conservative fix only came every couple weeks when the postman delivered a copy of National Review, or maybe the more feisty and irreverent American Spectator.
However, the movement had learned from the left that you gotta get ’em young, and money and support began to pour into college campuses to fund conservative papers like the Dartmouth Review and the University of California, San Diego’s California Review. These papers had the advantage of creating a farm team for talent; both Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham started their activism at the Dartmouth paper.
Then Reagan left office and George H. W. Bush took office and everything started turning to shit.
The Bush family was the definition of elite, even if George W. Bush would later cultivate a connection with the Normals that was big on talk and short on actual connection. Bush 41 had run against Reagan in 1980, and you always got the idea that he was gritting his teeth waiting for Reagan to clear out of the Oval Office that was his by right. Bush 41 was a patriot and a legitimate war hero, but he was no Normal and he had no desire to cater to them. A lifelong “public servant,” Bush 41 was most comfortable with those who shared his moderate, sensible conservatism—which translated to “liberal conservatism,” which of course made absolutely no sense.
He came into office promising a “kinder, gentler nation.” Of course, that meant that the Normal agenda that Ronald Reagan had been carrying out was anything but “kind” and “gentle.” Bush 41 was determined to steer the ship of state back in the kind of sensible direction that the sensible people that he met at his sensible functions felt comfortable with.
He just didn’t get it. In fact, it appeared that he was a bit ashamed of the kind of demands the Normals pressed on him. But then, he had absolutely zero idea, having been at or near the pinnacle of society all his life except when he was flying dive bombers in the Pacific, what a Normal life entailed. Nor did the majority of the people he was listening to.
He got America into Operation Desert Storm, which was not a bad thing in and of itself. Normals are not antiwar in any meaningful sense. What they are is anti–their sons and daughters dying in indecisive battles where America seems to have no real interest at stake and the people in charge don’t have the guts to win. That was the problem in Vietnam—Normals had no problem killing commies. They liked the idea of killing commies, and most were perfectly happy to join in that laudable effort. But they didn’t understand why they could smoke Charlie on one side of a line on the map of Southwest Asia, but when he crossed it, Charlie could sit there on the other side and make faces at the Americans and not get smoked. And then there was Hanoi and the ships in Haiphong harbor, just sitting there, unloading the bullets killing American boys down south. In World War II, they knew what to do with enemy cities—you leveled them, and the Japanese and the Nazis surrendered. But in North Vietnam, they were off-limits—why?
Why did our Elite betters—the “Best and the Brightest” and Robert McNamara’s “Whiz Kids”—get us into a war they didn’t feel was worth doing what was necessary to win? Of course, when Richard Nixon finally unleashed the B-52s over Christmas 1972, the North Vietnamese couldn’t scramble back to the table at the Paris peace talks fast enough to make the pounding stop.
So, Americans were okay with going in and kicking Saddam’s sorry ass out of Kuwait and leaving his formerly feared army in smoking heaps across the southern Iraqi desert. And they rewarded Bush 41 with Gallup approval ratings of 89 percent (the record) after the war ended.3 But there was the nagging thought that this wasn’t over, that it wasn’t a final victory because the dictator was still feeding opponents into industrial shredders instead of swinging from a lamppost.
We all know how that worked out. And we all know who supplied the blood and sweat to finish what Bush 41 left undone.
Leave it to a member of the conservative Elite to take an 89 percent approval rating and lose, less than two years later, to a skeevy serial adulterer who had weaseled out of the draft.
Normals understood both that they were already taxed too much, and that Washington’s money problems were not the result of hardworking Americans keeping too much of their own money but a consequence of an out-of-touch ruling class back in the capital spending too much damn money. And making it worse, the money was too often going to people who didn’t work. Entitlements—even the name is obnoxious, since it presupposes that someone has a right to the fruits of another’s labor—were the problem. Not a lack of kindness or gentleness. Not greed by Normal Americans.
George H. W. Bush decided to lie, right to the Normals’ collective face. He had promised “No new taxes.” And when he said it, he had even invited Americans to “Read my lips.” But the Washington consensus was that the people were keeping too much of their own money, so the heck with that. The Normals surely wouldn’t remember some throwaway line from a speech, would they?
Oh, they remembered.
And they remembered hard. The GOP wing of the Elite had decided to try to shaft the people who sent them to Washington, and George H. W. Bush paid the price.
But gosh, all the smart people said it was a good idea to raise taxes.
Conservative, Inc., entered the Clinton years and found out something that would inform its behavior in the decades that followed. It was a lot easier—and profitable—to be in opposition.
The thing about being in opposition—about working against the Democrats holding power—is that you don’t even have to fake accountability. Under Reagan and Bush, the Senate had been on and off Republican, but the House had been a Democrat lock for decades. Conservative, Inc., could generate all sorts of swell ideas, but as long as Tip O’Neill and his successors were opposed, nothing was happening on the legislative side. With Bill and Hillary, his scheming, striver wife, holding down the executive branch, America would not change course.
Not only was there no accountability, but there was a really good excuse for no accountability. Conservative, Inc., could fulminate and screech and rake in donations all day long and shrug when asked what it was accomplishing.
The Democrats made us not do it!
What changed when Newt Gingrich and his rebels took the House in 1994 was that at least there was a political pulpit for their views, and there were some victories. Bill Clinton was forced into accepting welfare reform. That was something. Yet between the Clinton permanent campaign model and the rise of conservative media, like Rush Limbaugh’s show and the new Fox News cable network, the political struggle began taking on a new urgency. Eventually, once social media came online, politics would embrace the modern 24/7 news cycle model.
The razor-thin victory of George W. Bush over global warming huckster Al Gore revealed a problem for Conservative, Inc. The think tanks and the media outlets that had prospered during the pitched battles with the Clinton cabal provided a wealth of recruits for the thousands of newly opened posts in the federal government. And the conservative pundit community now included Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, which prided itself as an idea incubator for some amorphous new kind of conservatism for the modern age. But the problem was that the conservatism of Conservative, Inc., was still at odds with the conservatism of Normal Americans.
Obviously, Bush 43 had 9/11 thrust upon him, and the Normal consensus was to hunt down and kill everyone who had anything to do with it, as well as all their pals and their goats. But Iraq was a war of choice, and it turned out to be a bad choice since all those chemical weapons we were promised were never found. Still, Americans were none too broken up about marching on Baghdad and booting that dirtbag out of power. It’s just that when the insurgency started, there seemed to be no sense of urgency about ending it. Veterans began trickling home—those not on stretchers or in body bags—with dire reports of rules of engagement that tied our troops’ hands. And on television, there was an endless series of commentators explaining “counterinsurgency strategy” and how it would take time to win over the Iraqi people’s hearts and minds.
To which sensible Normals like the guy from Fontana wondered, why, instead of winning these jihadi freaks’ hearts and minds, we don’t just put bullets in them? Kaden would have been horrified by the thought, but then Kaden never saw the jihadis up close like the guy from Fontana and his brothers-in-arms.
Normals will tolerate a war. They will tolerate their sons and daughters—and it was the Normals’ sons and daughters—coming home in boxes. What they refuse to tolerate is those lives being squandered on poorly thought through wars fought for no discernable purpose and that the genius architects refused to win.
But that is how the Elite rolls, even the Republican wing of the Elite.
Actually, their roll is much worse than that.
Bush 43’s thing was “compassionate conservatism,” a conservatism that flatters the advocate by allowing him to adopt the mantle of caring. This is in opposition, of course, to those conservatives who aren’t compassionate—you know, the ones who are actually conservative.
Guess who foots the bill for all that compassion?
Compassionate conservatism is the perfect vehicle for Elite Republicans because, like everything else the Elite does, there is no cost or accountability. You adopt the mantle and you get the credit. Who picks up the tab for this compassion? The Elite? Of course not. They have already done their bit. They are compassionate because they call themselves compassionate.
It’s the Normals who pick up the tab, the Normals who have to work that much harder to pay that much more, either now or down the road when the tab for all this compassionate deficit spending comes due. When Warren Buffett complains that his secretary gets taxed at a higher rate than him and therefore people should be taxed more,4 remember that if he’s taxed another $10 million that means he’s still got the other $90 million he made. The guy making $50,000 now has $45,000. The $10 million to Warren is nothing, but that $5,000 is everything to the guy from Fontana.
And when Kaden offsets his 787 flight to his vacation in Tuscany using carbon credits he got on a website by paying twenty dollars for someone to plant a banana tree in Ghana, that’s not sacrifice. It’s posing. The Elite has mastered the art of signaling their noblesse oblige without actually being obligated to do anything noble themselves.
And the GOP establishment did it hand in hand with the Democrats, who had to be pinching themselves at their good fortune to have such an eager sucker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No Child Left Behind? Didn’t that just give even more power to the education Elite that had already screwed up the schools so badly in the first place? Normals wanted more control over their kids’ education, and compassionate conservatism—with significant support from the Conservative, Inc., intellectual wing—handed even more over to the bureaucrats. After all, it was an institution, and everyone in it was by definition an expert—no matter how remarkably unbroken a track record of failure they had managed to assemble over the years.
But gosh, we’re helping the children! And it’s bipartisan! Look, Ted Kennedy is positively beaming!
This was about the time that Governor Mitt Romney was passing Obamacare in Massachusetts using ideas generated by the Elite conservative brain trust.
But nothing showed the stubborn tone deafness of the Elite better than their inexplicable fetish for giving amnesty to lawbreaking illegal aliens. And Conservative, Inc., largely cheered it.
Imagine yourself a Normal, if you are not one. Imagine yourself breaking the law. You go out, and you commit a crime. What happens? You get arrested. You get put in a cell, at least until you bail out. You have to spend money on a lawyer. Maybe you lose your job. You certainly lose face in the sight of your community. You might have to pay a fine or even go to jail for a while. Say it’s a DUI. You’ll lose your license. You’ll be out ten grand minimum.
Now imagine you are an illegal alien. You’re not even an invited guest, much less an actual citizen. You shouldn’t be here—you should be back in what Donald Trump memorably—because it was true—referred to as some “shithole” country. You’ve violated the law—our law. The one that our elected representatives went to Washington and voted on, and the president signed, just like you learned in civics class or from that “I’m Just a Bill” cartoon on Schoolhouse Rock back in the 1970s.
Our democratically passed law says that you can’t be here.
A law.
Passed by our representatives.
To ignore it is to ignore… us. The Normals. The very people who ceded the Elite their managerial authority in the first place.
And it’s not as if our immigration laws are arbitrary or irrational either. This is not one of those obsolete regulations you see gathered into an article on wacky statutes that remain forgotten on the books, like some 1906 provision of the Muncie Municipal Code prohibiting walnut gathering on St. Swithin’s Day.
These are real laws with real effects. Immigration changes the culture, our culture. Remember the now-disfavored melting pot metaphor? It may be unfashionable, but it’s true. Don’t Normals have a right to control how that cultural change happens? Didn’t they already exercise that right through their representatives?
What other laws will the Elite effectively repeal by choosing not to enforce them?
Isn’t it called “tyranny” when the people have no say in their own governance?
Compounding the injustice is the fact that it is a gut punch to Normals, not the Elites. The Third World is not shipping over movie producers, college presidents, and CEOs. Illegal immigrants—oh right, undocumented workers—affect the job market for the less glamorous gigs Normals generally take. Since these “undocumented workers” are workers and all, a worker by definition takes up a job that could have gone to—wait for it—an American citizen.
“But but but,” objects the Wall Street Journal editorial page. “These wonderful people do the jobs Americans don’t want to do!”
Well, that’s sort of true, because the companies whose water the WSJ carries can get away with paying illegals a fraction of what an American would demand, depressing the wages in those industries. Apparently, the law of supply and demand no longer applies when it comes to importing a workforce of eager serfs.
So what happens to you, an illegal alien, for breaking this law? What are the consequences for committing this crime?
The Elite wants the consequence to be nothing. Oh wait, maybe you pay a fine. And maybe you wait a couple years before you can become a citizen and start electing Democrats. But you get to break the law and get the greatest award imaginable—American citizenship.
All because the Elite likes you, because it needs you, you get a special pass. Normal Americans, not so much.
And they wonder why the Normals got militant.
Was Conservative, Inc., making this case for Normal Americans? Nah. But it was sure pretending to have Normals’ backs, especially around election time. Every election year, the politicians of Conservative, Inc., are out there conservativing it up for the Normals, and every off year they go back to Washington and do just the opposite.
The Weekly Standard was a particularly interesting example of the Conservative, Inc., syndrome. Bill Kristol founded it. His father was a well-known conservative intellectual. Bill got a gig as chief of staff to Dan Quayle, so winning is in his blood, and then bopped around riding the conserva-cash wave until he started the magazine as a sort of hipper, more practical National Review. He ran it largely on donations and subscriptions from eager suckers hoping for a glimpse of the inside. And, of course, there were cruises—the Weekly Standard cruises are absolutely legendary. Kristol live and in concert? You can’t pass that up!
It used to brag about being the idea factory for the conservative movement. It was, but many of them were terrible, terrible ideas. Bill is famous for his dedication to going to war again with Iraq. He has yet to apologize. The Standard also pushed other ambitious domestic programs that always, always seemed to involve the government doing more and more in the name of empowering the people.
Message: We in the conservative Elite got this.
Truth: Those guys in the conservative Elite totally did not have this.
Bush left office with Conservative, Inc., wiping its collective brow, relieved that the Normals would be asked to fund a giant bailout for the very same Wall Street jokers who had risked sending everything down the tubes with their antics. Everyone in Washington, New York, and the other important places had gotten together and decided that it only made sense to make other people pay for the mistakes of fellow members of the Elite.
Remember, class always trumps ideology. And since the dominant ideology of the Elite class is liberalism, guess what we always move toward?
Go ahead. Guess.
Conservative, Inc., as always, sought to surf the zeitgeist when the Tea Party movement arose. The conservative Elite liked its energy, meaning they liked its ability to drum up voters and donors. But the Tea Party’s insistence on specific prescriptions that moved power out of the Elite’s hands—now, that was a problem. And the problem threatened to grow out of control.
The Tea Party was the first whiff of danger for Conservative, Inc. For almost twenty years before that, it had not really been a target of the Normals’ ire, not since a bunch of Normals had gone over and supported that screechy Keebler elf, billionaire Ross Perot. Perot had many faults, including being a nut, but his greatest sin was subjecting Vice Admiral James Stockdale to ridicule as a result of the 1992 vice presidential debate. Admiral Stockdale was a true American hero of unwavering courage and integrity, and he deserved far better than to be a punchline served up by lesser men. But the Perot insurrection passed, and Conservative, Inc., got back to the business of conservativing.
That is, until about the moment Rick Santelli launched his famous rant in the midst of the bailouts on February 19, 2009. All of a sudden, rallies started happening—spontaneous ones, all over the country. And the target of the protests was the Elite.
Pretty quickly, the members of Conservative, Inc., figured out that the Normals of that most Normal of movements, the Tea Party, despised them as much as they did the Democrats.
Maybe more.
After all, many people asked of the professional conservatives exactly what they had conserved. But the pros had no good answer.
The Tea Party became utterly intolerable when it began doing the unthinkable—demanding that candidates actually support the same policies in Washington, DC, as they did back home on the stump every election year.
You mean these yahoos out in Hooterville actually want us to do the stuff we say we’re going to do? Yikes!
Worse, these people were actually reading the Constitution and talking about governing in terms of the Constitution. They fetishized the Constitution, while the establishment fetishized pragmatism. Wait, Obamacare is bad because the Constitution doesn’t provide for the government paying for your doctor? Huh? Sure, the Constitution is something you talk about when complaining about liberal activist judges, but using it as a guide to delineate the proper role of government?
Wait, what?
That’s crazy talk.
There was a lot of crazy talk with the Tea Party, including some legitimately crazy talk. It was a reaction to a status quo that had to change, and sometimes the partygoers made tactical errors. Mike Castle, a timeserving Republican squish in Congress, would have made a perfectly adequate senator for Delaware. He would have won. He was a moderate, but then again it was Delaware, and a moderate was about the best one could ever expect from a state that kept sending Touchy Joe Biden back to Capitol Hill. Instead, the Republicans nominated Christine McDonnell, who ended up having to go on television to dispute the notion that she was a witch.
Clearly a problematic candidate, despite her cross-over appeal to the growing Wiccan community.
But while the Tea Party movement picked some losers, it also got Ted Cruz and Mike Lee into office, both of whom beat gooey moderates. They both proceeded to raise hell, making Conservative, Inc., even more unhappy about the campaigns the Tea Party won than the campaigns it lost.
Conservative, Inc.’s media and its political wings moved to distance themselves from the Tea Party, allowing the media and the Democrats to attempt to bomb it into submission. The Elite—conservative and otherwise—hoped that this would end the insanity and that the Normals would return to their slumber and allow the Elite to get on with business as usual. Except, they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the phenomenon they called the Tea Party.
There was no Tea Party.
Sure, there were rallies with the words Tea Party on their banners, and certainly when grifters moved in—as they inevitably do in any movement—the words Tea Party got stamped on innumerable mailings targeted at conservative-leaning shut-ins. But “Tea Party” was merely a convenient label to paste on the public manifestations of a deeper dissatisfaction among America’s Normals.
The Elite did not see it, because the Elite did not want to see it. That is true for both the right and the left. They still can’t, or won’t, though it has manifestly bit them on their collective ass.
The attack on the “Tea Party” was an attack on a conservative insurgency, but it was a rebellion that was totally decentralized. Where was the Tea Party? What building did it reside in, so that if you wished to drop the Mother of All Bombs upon it you would take out the Tea Party leadership?
There was not one.
They wanted to cut the heads off the hydra, and whenever they chopped one a couple more noggins popped out in its place. The fundamental misunderstanding by the Elite was that the Tea Party did not need (and did not want) its own Elite guiding and controlling it. The Elite could not fathom that notion.
The underlying movement was, and remains, an un-Elite movement. Sure, there were big names who grew associated with it. Take Andrew Breitbart. He was held up as a leader, even an instigator of the movement, but that’s a flawed understanding of his role. Sure, through his pre–Steve Bannon Breitbart.com websites and his media appearances, Breitbart publicized the movement, but he didn’t organize it. When he spoke at a Tea Party rally, it was because he was asked to be there. He didn’t organize it. He didn’t create it. The local people thought it up, set it up, and got it up and running. Andrew just showed up to get the crowd on its feet.
The Tea Party movement was the kind of movement people like the Normals would inevitably create—a bottom-up movement with little in the way of hierarchy. The Elite, both conservative and liberal, misunderstood the Tea Party because it could not imagine a great movement developing and actually influencing the course of events without the Elite pulling the strings.
The Normals created the manifestations of the Tea Party—the rallies and such—all by themselves. They were used to doing that sort of organizing. They had founded and operated their own small businesses. They had run their own sports leagues in their communities. They were often managers or military vets who knew how to make things happen. Putting together a rally? No big deal. With social media to help them—Twitter and Facebook became ways to communicate and spread the word—they did not need any help from their alleged betters.
That was the scariest part. The liberal Elite could not conceive of a real grassroots movement. They were so used to astroturfing—trying to make centrally organized demonstrations and protests seem spontaneous—that they could not recognize an authentic popular movement if it bit them on the ass, which it did.
They wanted, desperately, to believe that some mysterious, sketchy force was behind the Tea Party. Maybe it was the Koch brothers! But while some money did flow in for activist training later—it has since dried up almost completely—that was well after the main event.
But here was the thing—the rallies and so forth were only what was seen above the surface. Like the iceberg that took out that monument to expertise, the RMS Titanic, what lurked below was much bigger and more dangerous to the Elite. Attending a rally was a public declaration, and only a small percentage of Normals ever made it. The rest of the activated masses—some of whom would tell you then and still today that they opposed the Tea Party—made their dissatisfaction known only in the voting booth.
When the Tea Party faded away, Conservative, Inc., expected to resume its rightful place as the shepherds of their center-right flock. Yet, troubling signs remained. Speaker of the House John Boehner seemed to be drawing an awful lot of flak from the GOP base. With his clinky bourbon tumbler vibe and notorious affection for the K Street Crew, the Speaker seemed to embody the worst stereotypes of the kind of conservative of convenience Normals had grown weary of. And he just gave off the vibe that he thought you and your petty personal concerns were a giant pain in the ass interfering with his truly important work, securing the sinecures of his pals.
But Conservative, Inc., loved Boehner. He was the adult in the room—though usually it was a barroom—and he knew how the game was played. You see, out there in the hinterlands they don’t know how the sausage gets made, how you have to compromise, how you can’t let yourself be constrained by ideology. All these radicals the voters keep sending to Congress—they are just getting in the way of the kind of compromise we need to make real progress!
Maybe.
But maybe keeping John Boehner and his henchmen in wine, women, and song wasn’t the Normals’ priority. Maybe Normals wanted some relief. After all, real wages for Normal Americans had been stagnant for years. Companies—including the big companies the Republican Elite seemed so concerned with—were shipping good jobs overseas. Illegal aliens were a problem. Welfare rolls were growing. The system seemed rigged against the very people who built the country, fed it, and defended it.
And all the John Boehners seemed interested in was partying with their Elite pals on the other side of the velvet rope that no Normal could cross.
“Do you hear us now?” the Normals asked when they sent Eric Cantor packing.
Conservative, Inc., did not. Instead, it had its own answer to a question the base was not asking: Jeb Bush—wait, Jeb! Bush, with the exclamation point that symbolized the excitement he generated.
What freaking question did they think they were being asked?
In 2012, Conservative, Inc., managed to nominate Mitt Romney, a guy who was, by all accounts, honest and decent and completely out of touch. The conservative wing of the Elite imagined that the best guy to embody the spirit of the age was a dude who seemed more like a mousier version of Judge Smails in Caddyshack (1980), without the laughs or the human touch.
You just knew that Mitt had never, ever seen Caddyshack. And if he had, he would think Rodney Dangerfield was the bad guy.
Mitt had another problem, besides being the guy who looks like the guy who tells the guy who tells the guy who tells the guy who tells your direct supervisor to eliminate your job in the interests of “efficiency.” And also besides being for Obamacare before he was against it. Mitt Romney was a gentleman.
In the sense that gentleman is synonymous with wuss.
This was a theme with Elite conservatives. George W. Bush had taken a hurricane of unmitigated shit from the left during his eight years in office. Not just run-of-the-mill shit either—ultra, mega shit, right up to and including calls for his assassination. They had called him “Hitler,” said he was “racist,” accused him of getting thousands of Americans killed over “lies,” and worse. Throughout it all, he was a gentleman. He maintained the quiet, solemn dignity of the office by refusing to lower himself to respond.
That was stupid.
His decorum was taken as weakness by his enemies. And not just his enemies. Among those not truly involved in politics, these unanswered claims do what unanswered claims do. They make an impact, fair or not, right or wrong. If you have a chorus screaming at you 24/7 that you are worse than herpes, and you don’t respond, at best you’re going to eventually be associated with herpes.
It’s bad to be associated with herpes. And also with Hitler, racism, 9/11 conspiracies, and committing mass murder to enrich your Halliburton buddies.
Bush 43 never fought back while in office, or when Obama was sliming him afterward, though he finally found his voice again when the guy who crushed his brother was inaugurated. It is hard to overestimate the damage his choice to sit there and be pummeled did to the morale of the GOP base. He left it to his supporters to try to do the heavy lifting, negating the power of the bully pulpit they had handed him. There is a huge, natural inclination for human beings to hit back, and by allowing himself to be a punching bag, Bush 43 left the lasting impression that establishment Republicans not only would not fight, but could not.
If you won’t fight for yourself, they reasonably concluded, you sure as hell won’t fight for us.
Enter Mitt Romney, who like John McCain four years earlier, seemed to be convinced that conservatives had a moral obligation to lose. McCain was pro-amnesty through and through, so his nomination was an insult to the base. Mitt? He went hard the other way, caught heat from the media and… treaded water. He just could not deal with the disapproval of his fellow members of the Elite. And while he was a conservative within the Elite, in the end Elite opinion mattered more than sticking up for the Normals. He went wobbly, and Barack Obama beat him to a pulp.
When Candy Crowley corrected Mitt with false information at one of the debates with Obama, he did the deer/headlights thing and froze up. He could have gone for her jugular and left her a tubby, quivering heap on the stage—and maybe won the election. But he was a nice guy. A gentleman. And gosh—she was a serious reporter, the elite of the Elite—so maybe she was right.
She was not right. She was shilling for Obama, and he let her get away with it. And he lost.
It was this mindset that decreed that, naturally, the answer to the GOP’s troubles as it faced 2016 and Hillary Clinton was Jeb! Bush.
Another Bush—exactly what American Normals yearned for. The first one had been booted out of office after lying to the people, and the last one had left office with the economy about to go into a tailspin, but this Bush—well, this Bush was going to get it right. Hey, the Bushes were due.
You look at Jeb!mania and you wonder, “What the hell were these people thinking?” What was the thought process that led the conservative Elite to think this chunky, condescending doofus was the right man for the job?
He was the scion of an American dynasty, and that was bad. America, the Roosevelts aside, has a lousy history with dynasties. Look at the Kennedys—Jack was a tramp who got us into Vietnam and almost into a nuclear war, Robert was a tramp who turned hard left, and Teddy was a tramp with a confirmed kill with his Oldsmobile.
And the Clintons? Hillary’s primary qualification for getting the senate seat in New York, where she had never lived, was sleeping with Bill at least once. She got the secretary of state job as a consolation prize for losing to unaccomplished uber-Elite candidate Barack Obama in 2008. Yet Jeb! was the one guy in the entire world the GOP could nominate who would immunize her from those weaknesses.
Jeb! was the conservative liberals loved—a clueless one with a unique ability to infuriate the very people he imagined would vote for him. As the chairman of some donor-fueled boondoggle called the National Constitution Center, he presented Clinton with its 2013 Liberty Medal. He gave his ultraliberal opponent Hillary Clinton a freaking medal for her dedication to the Constitution. And he did it on purpose!
Oddly, it apparently never occurred to anyone within the conservative Elite that this might make it a little awkward for Jeb! when attacking her for the Constitution-defiling pinkos she was dying to put on the Supreme Court.
Nice of Jeb! to provide his opponent with ready-made campaign ads. Please clap, indeed.
Oh, and amnesty reared its ugly head again. Of course Jeb! was for it. And he was not only for it, despite the clear and unequivocal position of the very people he thought were stupid enough to vote for him. He had called violating American law “an act of love.”
No. The “act of love” was when Jamiel Shaw’s heartbroken family said good-bye to the son murdered by some illegal immigrant scumbag.5
If you want to know the Elite consensus at any given time, you can consult Jeb! Conversely, the opposite of whatever he says—he keeps talking because, for some reason, he thinks people care what he has to say—is a pretty good indicator of what Normal people think.
The priorities of Jeb! and his ilk were absolutely clear—which is why he was so decisively defeated in the primary despite spending the combined GDP of several “shithole” nations on his windmill jousting campaign. Unsurprisingly, Jeb! later chose to weigh in with some sanctimonious nonsense during the faux outrage over Trump’s accurate remarks regarding certain shitty countries.
In the end, the Normals put Jeb! out of their misery. But more than that, they knocked much of the conservative Elite on its collective heels. Yet the Elite, of both ideologies, was not done. It was not going to go that easily. It resolved to resist the Normals, though it did not put it quite that way. Instead, the Elite decided to resist Donald Trump.