CHAPTER ELEVEN 
Never Trump and the Surrender Caucus
The liberal Elite was never going to truly accept Donald Trump. His money, sure. That was always welcome. Remember, the Elite is not necessarily rich, nor the Normals poor. Elite is an attitude. You can be living off kale scraps from the co-op down the street in Brooklyn and be Elite, or flying in your $65 million G6 to your own island in the Caribbean and be Normal—though that’s not exactly normal Normality.
But was the liberal Elite ever going to truly accept Donald Trump himself? Oh, hell no. That’s crazy talk. They would let him pick up the tab, but he was never going to be one of them. And that bothered him not a bit.
Which raises the question of whether Trump is a Normal. He certainly shares at least a superficial reverence for the values of the Normals. He definitely admires them, both the hardhat types who worked with their hands that he grew up around on work sites as well as the military guys he could never be like after he attended a military high school. He had bone spurs, which disqualify one from service, not that the issue of military service would have ever been a possibility for the vast majority of Elite dorks giggling about his diagnoses. It is difficult to conceive of a better example of hypocrisy than the liberal Elite who spit on our troops returning from Vietnam lashing out at Trump for being medically disqualified from service. But apparently entry into the Elite includes the surgical removal of one’s capacity for shame.
Trump was Trump, and he chose to ally with the Normals. This is also true of his partisan leanings. Trump was Trump, but he chose to run as a Republican this time. In fact, he was best understood as a third-party candidate infiltrating the party apparatus and taking it over for his own purposes like some sort of political virus. That’s why so many Republicans hated him. They absolutely knew he was not one of them. That was a big part of the genesis of the conservative wing of Never Trump.
But Trump didn’t care about them, either.
Some conservatives are Elite. Not all, of course, not by a long shot. But some are. While American Elitism is predominantly liberal in outlook—American liberal, not classical liberal—there is a conservative element within it. Except for specific policies and politics, at least until Trump got elected, their outlook was absolutely Elite. Many lived in the DC region or New York. They fetishized credentials—where you went to school mattered a whole lot.
Harvard, oh yes. Quite so.
Utah State, uh, well how very nice for you. Were you the first in your family to be educated?
And your background was crucial, too.
Oh, you wrote for Foreign Policy? Bravo. I adored that recent article on the Botswana question. It really deserves more attention.
Oh, you were in the Marine Corps? That’s nice. I believe Great-Grandfather Wellington Fairweather III was in the Coast Guard.
The conservative Elite holds that some people are suited to govern, and others are suited to be governed. Want to guess who deserves to be governed?
Well, it wasn’t the people they crossed paths with at Commentary mixers and the Alexandria Trader Joe’s. They did not spend a lot of time away from the coasts and at restaurants that failed to cater to the gluten intolerant.
You rarely saw these Elite conservatives out in the hinterlands. Instead, they gathered in think tanks in DC or Manhattan writing unread white papers while trying to get their intricate plans for reforming health care or education or whatever published in the marquee conservative magazines.
They were the guys who got the proverbial Georgetown cocktail party invitations. And when you mentioned “Georgetown cocktail party invitations” they would get all huffy and start up with how they never, ever went to cocktail parties, and certainly not in Georgetown. Okay, fine, in Adams Morgan.
The fact is that the people they lived around, talked to, attended their kids’ soccer games with, and partied with were other members of the Elite.
And Trump laughed at them all.
Now, there were other conservatives with some pull who were not Elite, not even remotely. They detested the presumption and the snotty attitude of the liberal Elite as much as any other Normal. But they were ideological. Hardcore ideological. They were the kind of people who listened to Hugh Hewitt talk to Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn in excruciating detail about how the Articles of Confederation morphed into the Constitution. And they hated the fact that this is the last thing anyone would imagine Trump doing.
Trump didn’t do the ideology thing.
And what’s more, he was going off the reservation. He spoke heresy on free trade. Wait, make trade deals work for Normal Americans? But but but Milton Friedman said…
“Screw Milton Friedman,” Trump seemed to say. “Tell this Milton Friedman guy to come on out to explain to these guys I just met in Michigan why the light bulbs they used to make in Ypsilanti are now getting made in Peking and shipped back here to be sold to us.”
“But but but first, it’s ‘Beijing,’ and second, Milton Friedman is deceased.”
“Pipe down, Poindexter, the men are talking.”
“What?”
And the guy from Fontana nodded, while Kaden turned even paler.
The real challenge to the Elite occurred when Trump decided to ask some foreign policy questions the experts had neglected to ask. Questions like, “What is in it for us to bomb the hell out of every foreigner who looked at his neighbor cross-eyed?” Sure, Americans were good-to-go on blowing away foreigners who got uppity—oh yeah, if they threaten us then let’s get our Genghis Khan on. But spend money and the lives of guys from Nebraska and Ohio to teach seventh-century savages who still wipe their asses with their left paws how to live like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison suggested? Pass.
And NATO? Was that still even a thing? You had America footing the defense bill for all these European countries who hesitated to pull their own weight, but they never hesitated to give the United States a ration of shit when their socialist rulers got their Euro panties wadded up about the US of A looking out for itself.
If Germany doesn’t think Germany is worth German euros and German boys’ lives to defend, how the hell is it worth American dollars and American boys’ lives?
But but but … postwar consensus!
The war was seventy years ago. The Cold War twenty-five years ago. And the Elite, including the conservative Elite, had not bothered to update their consensus. When Trump pointed that out, the Normals nodded.
They got it.
Now, these simply were not traditional conservative views. Plus, there was the whole social conservatism thing. While many evangelicals could tolerate Trump’s personal moral choices because they recognized Hillary as an existential threat to their religious liberty, not all of them could. To the extent Trump affirmed conservative social views—like opposition to abortion—they doubted him. To the extent he shrugged when confronted with his colorful past, they hated him.
So, these were the two wings of conservative Never Trump—the conservative Elite who hated him because he wasn’t Elite, and the conservative Normals who hated him because they thought he wasn’t conservative.
The Elite conservatives are much, much more annoying. After all, they put “Elite” before “conservative.” But you can understand, and even sympathize with, the conservative Normals of Never Trump. They were ideological conservatives. They lived and breathed the ideas and the ideology. They cared about policy. They cared about faith. They took it all seriously. But this guy seemed like he put all sorts of random ideas in a blender and poured out some sort of populist smoothie.
Not wanting to focus on cutting entitlements? What the hell? Paul Ryan had dedicated his life to the cause of entitlement reform.
Think of Paul Ryan, damn it!
But Trump’s secret was thinking of—and talking about—what actual voters wanted, thought, and talked about. The conservative movement had a lot of great ideas over the years. It loved its ideas. But those ideas stopped being the ideas of the base and started being the ideas of those inside Conservative, Inc. Elite or not, conservatives were all about free trade because free trade is awesome. But Normals, who were more conservative in temperament and in terms of tradition than ideology, were the ones paying the price of free trade. And they were complaining.
Who was listening?
Not the Elite. And not the conservative activists. Imagine yourself a Normal American, if you aren’t. You loved your country and obeyed the laws and paid your taxes and showed up for jury duty, and one day, some guy who you would swear was Mitt Romney’s cousin rolls into the factory where you’ve made forklifts for eighteen years and announces that Acme Forklift is picking up and moving to Tijuana and thanks for the memories. When that happens, you are going to have some questions for the people who are supposed to represent you. And if their answer is, “Well, as Milton Friedman explained, you’re inefficient and therefore you and the family you support are expendable,” you are probably not going to continue to vote for those people.
As Normal Americans, the base of the Republican Party, were watching their wages stagnate, their jobs depart, their small businesses crushed by big corporations, and their kids slaughtered in wars we refused to win, the Elite and the conservatives did nothing.
Nothing.
Across America, Main Street was a boarded-up wasteland as the kind of small shops and businesses that Normal Republicans founded, built, and operated closed. Yet the conservative Elite could not be bothered. Instead, they catered to the big corporations who pretended to be center right (that is, they positioned themselves as “pro-business”) while engaging in policies that seemed more akin to the Elite whims of their CEOs’ much younger, liberal second wives.
It’s probably wrong to say that the conservative Elite didn’t care—they did, in the abstract—but they sure as hell were not going to review their beliefs in light of the current crisis. There were seventeen Republican candidates in 2016, and just one talked about the issues the voters cared about. And he won, which should not be a surprise but still was.
The conservative Normals were the ones who began to rethink the whole Trump question about a year into his presidency when they figured out that this guy was the most conservative president since Ronald Reagan. Some took yes for an answer. Sure, he may spark a media lynch mob with a fiery tweet every seventy-two hours, and he might be a bit, well, Trumpy, but he’s actually delivering. At the end of the day, you can’t be a conservative and be sad that Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court.
But you can be a member of the conservative Elite. Remember, it’s always class first, ideology second.
Take David Brooks of the New York Times. He spent a lot of years writing in the various conservative outlets, earning a reputation as… one of the guys who writes for the various conservative outlets. He was hardly a bomb thrower. In fact, the only bombs he was for throwing were at overseas enemies that other people who were not his sons or daughters would go fight. He was the kind of writer about whom no one ever said, “Hey, did you see the David Brooks column today,” at least until he got to the Times and you wanted to read him out of morbid curiosity. He’s the guy who famously deciphered the creases on Barack Obama’s slacks and decreed that the Lightbringer would one day be a very good president. Such omen cryptology made him the perfect conservative for the Times’s Elite readership—a pliable, agreeable, passive reactionary who wouldn’t scare the women or the horses or the liberal men, in that order.
And Brooks has the common touch. He once took a Normal acquaintance out for lunch and wrote about how his sad companion had been baffled by the menu at an upscale sandwich shop. More likely, the Normal was looking for an excuse to duck out on a Bataan Death March meal with that snooty panini-con.1
It goes without saying that Brooks was not a Trump fan. Trump just would not do at all. But Jeb!? Oh, now there was a sensible choice—though it probably did not help when Brooks went on Face the Nation on November 1, 2015, and recommended Jeb! brand himself the “laxative” candidate.2
Still, Jeb! embraced all the Elite positions on all the issues Normals cared about, and above all Jeb! understood that his job was to lose. Losing was his moral obligation, as it was all the conservanerds’ moral obligation.
Since Brooks arrived at the Times, it is unclear whether he had ever again supported anything conservative except in the most tepid and inoffensive sense. And Brooks’s powerful words accomplished exactly what they were meant to accomplish: zip. He’s still on that rag’s op-ed page.
Or how about Bret Stephens? He came to the Times from the Wall Street Journal, and he loathed Trump, too. That’s called knowing your audience. But he didn’t know his audience perfectly. Early on at the Gray Lady, he wrote a piece casting the gentlest of doubts upon the giant, cynical scam that is the climate change hysteria. He didn’t deny it—he merely sort of hinted it was a tad overblown. And for that he was blown away in a hurricane of hate from the Elite readers of his new rag.3
He learned. His next big splash was when this voice of conservatism came out against the Second Amendment because the Second Amendment is totally not at all important to conservatives.4
Let’s review. The New York Times’s two big conservative commentators are a guy who chooses to make lunch condescending and a guy telling us to turn in our AR-15s. And yet the New York Times was stunned when Donald Trump beat the woman their brain trust assured its Elite readership was a shoo-in.
Another pile of smoldering wreckage is George Will, the quintessential bow-tie conservative whose fussy wrath knew no bounds when the Normals dared to defy him. George always liked to flirt with Normality, especially by his tiresome inability to stop yapping about baseball.
“Look at me,” he seemed to say. “I am eating a delicacy known as a hot dog. Perhaps I will wash it down with a stout ale like Miller’s in the manner of the hearty workingmen who lurk in the bleachers far, far, far from my box seat.”
George was the Washington Post’s domesticated conservative, and since he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977, it was clear the Elite did not consider him a threat but an ally. He was certainly born to it. Though he grew up in Illinois, his father was a professor of philosophy, and George collected all the credentials that made him Intellectual and Serious and Elite. In 1991, he earned the recognition all conservatives seek by winning whatever the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism is, because every conservative yearns to be spoken of in the same breath as Walter Freaking Cronkite.
Reagan came along and gave George and the rest everything they said they wanted, but what they really wanted was the increased status they would receive within the Elite. It was the effeminacy of the conservanerds like George that rubbed Normals wrong at first, but he seemed to be on the side of the angels even if he was an utter dork, so there was no real problem with him. Live and let live, even if he chose to live as an openly wimpy man.
But for years it had become clear where George’s loyalties lay, and those loyalties were not to the Normals. In 2009, for instance, he took on the abomination that is denim in a Washington Post column5 titled “America’s Bad Jeans.” Get it? Among his insights was: “This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don’t wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.” Will confessed to owning one pair of jeans, which he wore once, to former senator John (Will calls him “Jack”) Danforth’s country music–themed seventieth birthday party. One can imagine Will spending the entire soiree worried that one of other denim-clad partygoers would consume too much Budweiser and decide to give him a wedgie for laughs. Since he never wore his jeans again, it is safe to assume he was not invited back for Danforth’s seventy-first.
Will is a man of the people, all right—but only the right people. As always, class trumps ideology. Conservatism was his job, but Elite status was his identity. For all his nattering about baseball, the closest he would ever get to Normality was being passive-aggressively peeved about guys who could do a chin-up.
Imagine George Will venturing outside the Beltway. He’d come back home in tears with his glasses broken and his lunch money taken.
This is a guy who wrote books with titles like Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). Not only was the title so awesomely pretentious that only someone of his caste might hear it and not burst into laughter, but the concept was deeply, deeply unconservative. Conservatism, the default mode of the Normals, was not about using government to create a race of intellectual ubermensch who all worshipped the same fake idols. That was liberalism’s jam.
But George’s focus was never on the Normals. It was about indoctrinating the Elite in Elite mores and values—soulcrafting, something that would be the job of religion for an actual conservative. Instead, it was a plea for the reproduction and training of the future conservative Elite not to pursue the goals of conservatism, which generally aligned with the goals of Normals, but to perpetuate itself.
It was about making more Elites, and their label would be “conservative.” Conservative was who they were in that world, not what they did.
The rise of the Normals horrified George. You could see it in his columns and his increasingly frustrated vibe. Sarah Palin’s nomination sent him through the roof—he was horrified that someone from Wasilla, Alaska, who had totally not attended Oxford might be considered for the vice presidency.
He also established himself as a helpful counterrevolutionary, taking on bomb throwers like Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter apparently because Newt and Ann did not understand that their role should mirror George’s—make some statements of alleged principle and lose. But the question really was why he was so very upset about the unseemly nature of the resistance to liberal overreach when he allegedly sought the same ends.
Oh, and did he detest Trump? Of course he did—the rise of Trump devalued the puny, ineffective intellectualism that the conservative Elite had been dining out on for decades.
Trump was crude and vulgar and nailed supermodels, and that bothered conservamonk George. Trump was everything George and his ilk weren’t. Most of all, Trump was a man of action—not just with supermodels but in terms of results. George talked and wrote. But Trump built things, then slapped his name on them, and then built some more things and slapped his name on those, too. Then he went and had a hit television show. Will wrote books no one between I-5 and I-95 had ever heard of.
Trump never gave a moment’s thought to the intellectuals, the theoreticians, the talkers. He was a doer. And he was doing. He was beating all the approved candidates—not just beating them but crushing them. Who the hell was this Queens loudmouth to be on his way to taking the GOP nomination without the permission of people like George Will?
But then, there was that nagging question—what the hell had the conservative Elite actually conserved over the last several decades?
Not much. But then, there is nothing the Elite hates more than accountability and having to answer for their shitty metrics that demonstrate their utter inability to perform. George Will was granted status as one of the intellectual forces within conservatism because he purported to provide some modern intellectual framework for the ideology. But the conservatism of the Normals was instinctive, not something that required an advanced degree. It did not require any George Wills.
And when the Normals embraced their own natural conservatism, out of necessity because intellectual conservatism was leading them to a progressive Hades, they didn’t need the George Wills and other True Conservatives of Conservatism anymore.
George Will went from a highly regarded elder statesman of the conservative movement to a guy who couldn’t get his calls returned by any of the yahoos ensconced in the White House and Congress. And it grated on him.
Who the hell were they, anyway? What right did they have to… to… to take what was his!
In his December 13, 2017, Washington Post column,6 Will called Trump the worst president ever. “He completed his remarkably swift—it has taken less than 11 months—rescue of the 17th, Andrew Johnson, from the ignominy of ranking as the nation’s worst president.” Not James Buchanan, either. Not even Jimmy Carter. Trump.
In response to his fuming, the Normals replied, “George Who?”
Which only made it worse. George Will ostentatiously left the Republican Party because it had ceased to meet his exacting standards, which apparently consisted of providing George Will with prestige and reverence while he was sheepishly losing every policy battle. He also signed on to MSNBC as a commentator because Fox dumped him, perhaps to make room for Tomi Lahren.
Fox News always has its finger on the pulse of the people, and what Tomi lacked in advanced degrees and Cronkite Awards she more than made up for by not being a boring, shriveled has-been.
“Boring, shriveled has-been” status became all the rage in the build-up to the Trump election and its aftermath. There were a lot of other big names who had traded on their long-standing sinecures in the conservative Elite for a long time who were suddenly put to a difficult question: “What good are you?”
That’s a tough question when you rose in your career focused on climbing the ladder up through the schools and think tanks and government gigs and magazines to the heights of a regular column and a book and maybe some on-camera contributorship and perhaps even a gig where you can rake in some of that sweet, sweet donor conservacash for yourself. Your entire purpose and mandate is to write write write and talk talk talk, and if you do that in a clever and coherent enough way, well, that’s sufficient.
That’s what you did in Conservative, Inc.—you wrote and you talked and you made a living and got some fame, though it was DC fame, which is to real fame what DC attractive is to real attractive.
But what you never, ever did was have to explain why, despite all your talking and writing and collecting money, nothing ever seemed to get conserved.
What the hell has George Will, who has been writing his column since 1974, ever done for conservatism? This is the cue for the sniffing and the huffing and asking, “How dare you,” and then the social justice warrior pivoting back to the questioner, “Well, what have you ever done for conservatism?”
But that’s a distraction—one of the least attractive tactics of the conservative Elite lately is their copping of the liberal Elite tactic of turning every debate into a referendum on the dissident’s personal qualities.
What’s the answer?
What did George Will ever do for conservatism and the people it is supposed to serve, the Normals?
Ronald Reagan liked him—he was close to Nancy Reagan especially, providing further evidence that conservative Elitism is about prestige and position. But did Reagan need him? Reagan was instinctively conservative in the way Normals are. That is not to say that the intellectual foundations were foreign to him. They weren’t—he read and studied and learned, as many Normals did and do. But he didn’t need George Will to explain to him that the damn commies were bad and why giving freeloaders handouts taken from the pockets of people who actually worked for a living was wrong.
Will jumped on George H. W. Bush over the “Read my lips, no new taxes” lie. That was something, though it is unclear whether it was personal animus that motivated it. Will had had a Nelson Rockefeller vibe in the pre-Reagan years, and you might have expected him to harken to President Kinder and Gentler. Maybe they got sideways with each other while sipping spritzers at the club. But again, what was essential about George Will?
There he was during the Clinton years, bemoaning the Clintons and in full ineffectual mode. The guys running up the score against Clinton weren’t the pearl-clutchers. They were the insurgents. In the House, Newt Gingrich and his cronies had plotted to outmaneuver both the stale GOP leadership and the Democrats to snatch away the majority for the first time in decades via the Contract with America. The American Spectator was using its donors’ cash for something constructive for once, investigating the Arkansas Dynamic Duo’s antics. Sadly, that gave a start to the career of turncoat David Brock, a weirdo who would go on his knees begging forgiveness from Her Highness Hillary for telling the truth about her and devoting himself to her service in perpetuity via Media Matters.
George Will was there, writing and talking. He wrote and talked during the years of Bush 43, too, and then during the years of Barack Obama. George spent a lot of time trashing John McCain and his running mate, but they did not need his help. They were perfectly capable of losing without him.
Trump was the curtain on his career. Now, age was going to slow him down anyway (he was seventy-five when Trump was inaugurated), but what were the chances he would come back post-Trump even if he was younger? In what world is anyone asking, “Say, where’s George Will, because we really need him right now?”
In fact, the fate of George Will is a microcosm of the fate of a whole host of conservative Elite personalities who grew to sort of prominence and then found themselves locked out of influence when Donald Trump swept into office. They did not like that much, to be sure. And these people, deeply affiliated with Conservative, Inc., formed the nucleus of Never Trump.
There was money in Conservative, Inc., once upon a time. Not big money, not real money by the standard of those outside that world, but big and real money to those in it. Of course, money was just one kind of currency. The other was prestige, that amalgamation of position and prestige and influence that was, in many ways, sweeter than cash. It was nice to be able to upgrade your ride from a Honda to an Acura, but if you could get on the round table with Chuck Todd over at Meet the Press, well, you were a player.
And these players most definitely did not hate the game.
You could make a career in Conservative, Inc., leaving only for short periods to get another degree or to take a government job when a conservative was in office—one of the useful functions of Conservative, Inc., was to provide a farm team for these kinds of functionaries. In fact, this network of politicians and think tanks and foundations and publications did create a framework that allowed conservatives to develop and, vitally, to communicate to conservatives outside DC and New York City that there was some sort of conservative beachhead in enemy territory.
At its best, Conservative, Inc., provides a brain trust that could both observe and illuminate the activities of the progressive enemy while coming up with ideas and tactics to be implemented when (if) a real conservative should take power. A fine example of Conservative, Inc., providing a useful function is the Federalist Society, which grooms reliably conservative judges for eventual appointment. The imprimatur of the Federalist Society is a near solid guarantee that once he slips on his robe he’s not going to morph into David Souter and “grow” and “mature” and become yet another liberal. According to the Washington Post,7 Trump White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II “said it is ‘completely false’ that the White House has ‘outsourced’ the selection of federal judges to the organization…‘It’s not even necessary,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school—still am,’ he said. ‘So frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.’”
Nor is everyone involved with Conservative, Inc., some sort of ineffectual, timeserving striver hack. Conservative, Inc., is the arena—to be an active conservative, you have to be in it. But you can be in it without dedicating yourself to maintaining and increasing your position in it to the exclusion of fighting for conservative progress.
That “conservative progress” can even be a thing demonstrates the necessary change that many old-school conservatives were not ready for. Traditional conservatism eschewed the idea of “progress” as a retreat from traditional, time-proven principles in the pursuit of some sort of inevitably left-wing, arrogant ideology that seeks to disregard human nature and the dictates of God in an effort to recreate Man in the Elite’s own image. But that premise assumes there is something left to conserve, that civilization has not yet moved past those time-proven principles and changed into something new and horrible. But it has. Conservatism today is not the ideology of maintaining the status quo that our hack high school civics teachers described.
Conservatism today means change. It means revolution. And a lot of purported conservatives can’t get that through their heads.
So, we had a movement that considered itself dedicated to defending the status quo when it had not realized (or would not accept the fact that) the status quo had changed. Then it was further handicapped because a hefty chunk of its members were perfectly comfortable in that status quo—the conservative Elite was allowed to exist within the Elite, only it was denied any real power. But then, if you take the potential for actually doing anything off the table, you can focus on position and prestige.
Conservative, Inc., was subject to all the problems inherent in any human endeavor, the key one being its pursuit of its own unenlightened self-interest in place of the goal it was created to pursue. Conservative, Inc., was rejected—and make no mistake, 2016 was a rejection—because it appeared to everyone outside the DC fishbowl that it was in it for itself.
It used to be about the conservatism. Now it was about making sure John Boehner had some lobbyist to buy him a well-done bone-in rib eye and half dozen Jack and Cokes.
Destroying the Speaker’s liver may have been a worthy goal in the abstract, but it was not the goal of the people who actually sent him and his minions to Washington and who subscribed to the magazines, took the cruises, and wrote the donation checks. The Normals wanted change, and the conservative Elite wanted business as usual. The notion that conservatives were still supposed to conserve in a society where the progressives’ long march through the institutions had already changed everything became an all-purpose excuse for avoiding accountability.
Essentially, it went: “You Normals want a revolution, but we are conservatives. We conserve. So stop trying to hold us accountable for not doing anything because the underlying premise of conservatism is that we don’t do anything.”
Super-convenient—it justified the conservative Elite’s utter failure to stop the liberals over recent decades. Except the fundamental premise of the excuse was wrong. The Normals were not seeking a revolution. They were seeking a counterrevolution. They had no intention of creating some new type of leftism-informed New Socialist Human (“Man” being sexist and excluding those who identified in one of the 189,257 brand-new non-cisnormative gender identities).
They wanted things to go back to—wait for it—normal.
And that would take fighters.
People like George Will were not fighters. It’s doubtful they were lovers, either, but that’s a tangent we need not explore.
Trump was definitely a fighter, and that’s what the people wanted. In fact, the people had been making it clear for years and the conservative Elite had responded by shoving their booger hooks into their ear canals and shouting. “LALALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
The Tea Party was a demand for a counterrevolution, and Conservative, Inc., tried to have it both ways by attempting to co-opt the energy and the cash to its own purposes while dampening down that terrifyingly implied demand for results. A lot of folks got elected thanks to the Tea Party, not just real insurgents like Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul (who all knocked off GOP establishment-approved opponents). But once most of them got to DC, they wiped their brows and thought, “Phew, that was a close one—now that the election is done I can get down to business, and my business is being a senator. Summon my pages and have them bring me mutton and ale, for I hunger!”
The troublesome Normals demanding an aggressive response to Obama’s hope and change were a real headache. Folks like Boehner and the rest of the Adults in the Smoke-Filled Room had a pretty good idea of what needed to happen. Money had to be squeezed out of the big donors—that was job one. And the way to get the big donors writing checks was to make sure the big donors were kept happy.
Amnesty made them happy, and those peons out in Peonland were harshing that buzz. Letting them all stay would be ideal, but the best that could be done was simply to shrug and moan that Obama would not enforce the law. But maybe they could slip something through while the hicks weren’t looking…
And on Obamacare, who really wanted to relieve Obama of that albatross? Now, with the House and then the Senate back in GOP hands, there was nothing stopping the GOP from cutting off the cash. The Congress had the power of the purse, after all, and all the pens and phones at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue couldn’t drum up the dough to keep that abomination alive if the GOP legislature didn’t write the check.
But that would take a big, ugly fight, and it might not work out, and it was hard, and really, did we want to give up that evergreen outrage? Every member of the GOP loved to fulminate and thunder about the abomination of Obamacare on the campaign trail.
Nah. Let’s keep it. Because conservatism demanded pragmatism, and pragmatism meant whatever is useful for the conservative Elite.
And when the Normals complained, it was just more proof that they didn’t understand, that they were just too dumb to actually get the nuances and the stratagems behind a conservative Elite that refused to do what it had promised.
And the Normals fumed.
Their real wages were stagnant at best, and the conservatives they had sent to Washington did not seem to care.
Their culture and religion were under attack, and the people they had sent to Washington did not seem to care.
Their kids were getting killed in wars no one seemed interested in winning, and the people they had sent to Washington did not seem to care.
The people they had sent to Washington did not seem to care about anything important to the Normals. No wonder the Normals were pissed.
But the hell with the Normals. The hell with them, because they were stupid and shortsighted and selfish and refused to see beyond their narrow self-interest to what was truly important—the Elite’s self-interest.
They could never be forgiven for betraying their leaders. And many prominent members of the caste attempted to apply the cat-o’-nine-tails to the recalcitrant nobodies.
David Frum started long before most. He was Canadian by birth, giving him the kind of Middle American sensibility the conservative Elite preferred—an absent one. He attended Yale and Harvard, because of course he did. Then he worked at a variety of the kind of jobs any striving Conservative, Inc., functionary would seek out until he joined the Bush 43 administration as a speechwriter. There is some controversy over whether he coined the phrase “Axis of Evil,” but there is no doubt he was a big supporter of the Iraq War until it became hard.
Frum, as is customary among his caste, enlisted in the military for no years of service before advocating sending other people’s kids off to fight. Then when it went sour, well, oops: “US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever West’s mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.”8
This Frum guy knows his audience. He left the Bush White House, wrote for and then left National Review, and then started some boondoggle called NewMajority.com, which was one of those “purple” scams that portray themselves as beyond mere ideology.
Naturally, when someone promotes himself as being “beyond ideology,” it means he’s trending liberal. Frum was no exception. His big thing was guns. He decided he hated them—oh, not in the hands of soldiers sent off to impose his vision of international order in shitholes across the globe, but in the hands of Normal Americans.
Every time some criminal or leftist or Islamic radical weirdo decided to go on a shooting spree, Frum snatched the Elite’s banner and carried it forward. See, the real problem wasn’t criminals or leftists or Islamic radical weirdos with guns murdering people, but the folks who were not criminals or leftists or Islamic radical weirdos and who kept guns in large part to protect themselves from criminals or leftists or Islamic radical weirdos.
You have to hand it to Frum—he knows the script. The NRA is terrible, awful, unspeakable, even though none of these monsters were ever members of it. Why all the hatin’? Probably because it has several million members, and they’re pretty much all Normals. And it therefore constitutes a rare institutional power base far outside the control of the liberal Elite.
That is the NRA’s real crime, and it is unforgiveable.
Frum hated Trump, and he was one of those True Conservatives of Conservatism warning that Trump would be the death of conservatism. To which most Normals, had they ever heard of David Frum, would have responded, “So what?”
Frum was also one of those intellectuals who never actually made an argument for what he was for, only against people who put his power and prestige at risk. And even then he did not argue. He just declared them bad people, and that was it. That was his argument against Trump—“HE’S HORRIBLE!”—and it has never changed. Facts, schmacts. Trump created the most conservative administration in decades, but that doesn’t matter. Trump is so… so… oh well, I never! That’s enough to condemn him.
Frum, and others, were so concerned with Trump’s failure to be conservative that he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s almost as if the priority for the conservative Elite was the Elite, not the conservatism.
Actually, it’s precisely that.
The hoary hack cliché about those supporting Donald Trump is that it somehow “reveals” them as terrible people for some reason. You see the conservanerds wag their fingers and cluck their tongues at how Trump support makes clear the conservative apostates, but they never seem to grapple with the conservatism Trump has displayed since his election and how that’s exactly what he promised during the election cycle.
They are wrong, as they have been about everything. The truth is that Never Trumpism reveals the truth about its own membership. These members of the conservative Elite were always about the Elitism, with the conservatism just their pose. In fact, Never Trumpism among alleged conservatism always seems to degenerate into outright liberalism—probably as a way for the Elite to let them stay in the club after their usefulness as domesticated conservatives has been so diminished.
Jennifer Rubin writes for the Washington Post, and she’s billed as one of its resident conservatives. Understand that a conservative writing in a major newspaper is defined as a conservative based not on actually being conservative, but on not claiming to be an outright leftist. But that has not stopped her from trying to go full liberal. In the wake of the Trump movement, she just basically flipped a U-turn on everything she once allegedly believed.
Pre-Trump: Move Israel’s capital to Jerusalem!
Post-Trump: Trump moving Israel’s capital to Jerusalem is the worst thing ever for some reason!
Ditto the climate change scam. If Normals want it—if they want to back up our ally Israel, if they don’t want to be impoverished because of weather paranoia—well, then those things are now wrong because they put a guy in the White House she finds icky.
And of course she now hates guns in the hands of citizens. She sided with the AstroTurf moppet puppets of the March for Our Lives (Except of Babies) because of course a conservative backs up a campaign to eliminate civil rights sponsored by Planned Parenthood and Move On. The headline read, “They came, they marched, they inspired.”9 All true, especially Normals, who were inspired to join the NRA and go get themselves another AR-15 and a few more boxes of 5.56 mm before the aspiring Red Guards that people like Rubin thinks will arrest her last get their American cultural revolution ramped up.
But while Rubin hates Normals, she focuses her unreasoning hate on the Normals’ White House avatar. Trump grates at her; he gnaws at her; he drives her into gibbering madness. And most of it is probably because she knows there is no way that he picks up the Post and reads her silly column.
So much of Never Trump is status anxiety. But maybe a move to the left can salvage some semblance of prestige…
Maybe she won’t get tarred with the Trump brush and be thought of as one of those, those Normals by the smart set…
Maybe, if she holds her breath long enough, he and his Neanderthal followers will go away, and things will come back to normal, and she can again start gently doubting some aspects of the global warming scam… but not too many.
But the king of the Never Trumpers has to be Bill Kristol, the guy behind the Weekly Standard, the Captain Stubing10 of conservatism, and another guy who never met a war he didn’t like. Trump’s doubts about the wisdom of trying to remake the world in our image rubbed Kristol the wrong way, as did Trump’s limited subscription to conservative doctrine. In the March 28, 2011, issue of the Weekly Standard, he wrote a piece called “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: President Obama’s Unapologetic, Freedom-Agenda-Embracing, Not-Shrinking-from-the-Use-of-Force Speech.”11 Three guesses as to who the folks were who were supposed to do the not shrinking from the use of force.
But what really sent him over was Trump’s utter lack of concern about what professional conservatives like Bill Kristol think.
Kristol was a self-made man, if by “self” you mean his father, Irving Kristol, who gave this dull and unimaginative writer a foot in the door to the Elite. The senior, interesting Kristol was one of the original neo-conservatives, before that term was co-opted and rendered meaningless by the slack-jawed morons of the alt-right who tried to attach themselves to the Trump movement like human ticks. The real neo-conservatives were liberals, sometimes even light leftists, who understood the threat of communism and who understood that perhaps the United States was not morally disqualified from fighting for its own interests. They came over from the Democrats but were never entirely comfortable in conservatism. Bill, though, was very comfortable in conservatism—as long as it was Elite conservatism.
He got funders for his magazine and went full Conservative, Inc. He pushed subscriptions and the inevitable cruises and gatherings, with scintillating panels and the opportunity to mingle over plastic cups of second-tier Pinot Grigio with the Monsters of Conservative Lite Rock.
It was a good gig. He had influence on folks like his pal John McCain. Getting along with tiresome maverick John McCain gives you some idea of Bill’s dedication to actual conservatism. Still, Bill did push McCain to pick Sarah Palin, proving at least that at one point he was Normal-curious.
But Normals were never his motivation. They were a means to an end, sheep to be sheared, a way to leverage himself more prestige within the Elite. It got him on television, where he mouthed unremarkable things in an unremarkable manner, and it created the impression that he mattered.
Trump demonstrated that he didn’t matter.
He unleashed upon Trump and those who supported him with a ferocity he would never deploy against fellow Elitists. At one point, after the election and as the mind-numbing stupidity of the Trump/Russian foolishness was spinning up, he suggested that he would have the liberal pseudo-patriots’ “Deep State” rise and cast out the elected president of the United States.12
Never Trump was a gateway drug to liberalism, which Kristol confirmed when he discovered that tax cuts were unconservative if they happened with Trump in the Oval Office. Who knew?
The only metamorphosis more astounding, and hilarious, was that of Max Boot. Known foremost as perhaps the world’s most stereotypical Caucasian and secondarily as someone who writes about what other people did in the military, Boot breathlessly announced to a waiting world that he had, because of Donald Trump, recently become aware of his “white privilege.” He revealed his remarkable epiphany in the pages of the December 27, 2017, edition of Foreign Policy magazine.13
Those whom Trump would destroy, he makes mad.