This Ross Douthat column attempting to explain How Donald Trump Happened is an almost-comical look into a delusional conservative movement that does not, even now, understand How Donald Trump Happened. Behold, as "serious" conservatism earnestly explains how t'was all the fault of the base voters doing base voter things while the conservative upper crust, the ones that write columns and advise presidents and appear on the news channels say serious conservative things and insist to viewers that conservatism is the only True Path, evidence be damned, stood too much by and too much silent.
And it's the first few bars of the song we're going to be hearing for the next four years or more.
Every political movement in a democracy is shaped like a pyramid — elite actors on the top, the masses underneath. But the pyramid that is modern American conservatism has always been misshapen, with a wide, squat base that tapers far too quickly at its peak. [...]
The peak is small because conservatives have always had a relatively weak presence within what James Burnham, one of modern conservatism’s intellectual godfathers, called the “managerial class” — the largely liberal meritocrats who staff our legal establishment, our bureaucracy, our culture industries, our universities. Whether as provincial critics of this class or dissidents within it, conservative intellectuals have long depended on populism to win the power that the managerial elite’s liberal tilt would otherwise deny them.
This is a damn flowery way to say that conservative base does not respect or see value in intellectualism, and that conservatives branding themselves as such must suckle at raw populism's teat in order to gain so much as a scrap of attention from their would-be underclass. It's also a lovely brush-aside of an intellectual conservative movement that continues to make no headway into the "managerial class" of industry and eduction due not to conspiracy or bias against them but due to their own intellectual weakness and a base misunderstanding of what "intellectualism" is. Holding an ideological preference in opposition to prevailing evidence is not intellectualism, it is demagoguery; rejection of your ideological pronouncement is not bias against you, but a demand for more rigor than you have provided.
George Will is, in the conservative mind, an intellectual. George Will is also a newspaper columnist whose printed musings are so badly pockmarked with misinformation and fudged figures that he can be taken seriously by approximately no one in any of the various fields he regularly opines on.
But now, in the age of Donald Trump, the populists have seemingly decided that they can get along just fine without any elite direction whatsoever.
“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti, the editor of The Washington Free Beacon, in a long essay tracing how the highbrow conservatism of Burnham and William F. Buckley sought to work with and through the anti-establishment impulses of the Middle American right.
So then, the conservative underclass has decided that intellectualism is bad, after only mere decades of conservative elites proclaiming the intellectual class to be a malevolent force? The conservative base has determined that the likes of Sarah Palin are more valid figureheads for the people than the goddamn historians or scientists or lifelong public servants that, all of conservatism can agree, are malevolent forces? Do tell.
And William F. Buckley, let us remember, was a segregationist whose legacy to this day is a magazine obsessed with white-splaining the faults of black America and whose writers continue to get in scrapes over their dalliances with white supremacist notions and theories. William F. Buckley is indeed a conservative poster child, not for working with the anti-establishment impulses of the base but in affixing important-sounding words to the right's worst instincts in an effort to justify and defend them.
But what we are to take from this essay is that populism, of the frothing nationalistic kind that needs no more than Donald J. Trump, Blowhard, to coalesce into driving conservative force, has gotten away from conservatives. How did that happen? What caused that? Oh, you know … just a few oopsie-poopsie indiscretions that the conservative elites should have seen happening, if they were half as politically astute as the movement forever insists it was.
The first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under George W. Bush and in the years that followed. Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly.
This is stupidity. We cannot wish away the entire history of the Bush administration's gargantuan blunders as a failure of Bush and his advisers; his advisers were the movement. The entire collected might of neoconservatism was bent on the notion of deconstruction and reconstruction by military force as ideological principle; the choice to go into Iraq was not a Bushian notion, but the very essence of neoconservative foreign policy; the reshaping of our own military and its operations by figures such as Rumsfeld and Cheney were not ideological surprises, but ideological requirements; There were not weapons of mass destruction—but the decision to roll the dice and hope they were found was considered good enough justification to drain a swamp that, in neoconservative parlance, long needed draining; the war would be inexpensive and successful, we were told as matter of ideological conviction; the result would be a reconfigured, more peaceful Middle East that was more compliant and more closely allied to this nation than before.
None of these things can be written off as failure of execution; it was executed precisely as the strong majority conservative elites suggested it ought to be. It was not a failure of wisdom; it was the so-called wise men of the movement that staked themselves to it, not ancillary movement rubes.
Then it went to Hell, and the conservative movement wondered what George W. Bush had done to muck up such a riskless plan, and right-wing populists whose families bore the brunt of the bloody adventure indeed lost patience with a conservative intellectual class who Even Fucking Now insist it would have worked out fine, if only this or that functionary had been replaced with another, or if the United Nations had not done some unspecified untoward thing, or if only Obama had doubled down yet again on the grand conservative bet because all it needed was another year or ten or twenty.
The movement to occupy Iraq was entirely a neoconservative planned and plotted operation. It was not a failure of governance or wisdom; it was a failure of movement ideology, a blood-soaked functional test of movement principles that was put into practice. The movement has long considered military force to be a potent tool for expanding national influence; the movement has long dismissed the notion that the targeted populations, whether in southeast Asia or in the Middle East, may disagree.
The second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right’s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before Sean Hannity swooned for Donald Trump. What the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that Fox News and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism more powerful, relative to conservatism’s small elite, than it had been during the Nixon or Reagan eras, without necessarily making it more serious or sober than its Bircher-era antecedents.
This, too, is horseshit. Any supposed intellectual who could not see the debasement of the movement into an overtly populist, nationalist, anti-intellectual anti-government froth in which the various hysterias peddled incessantly by Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity and O'Reilly and countless others were used as the prime motivating tool for rallying the conservative base, like clockwork, to each individual conservative battle of the moment—any supposed intellectual who claims now not to have seen the thing happen is a liar or a fool. It was a bargain to be made; fake tapes about ACORN were used as political tool to dismantle the advocacy organization even as the fraudulent nature of those tapes became plainly apparent. Similarly fake tapes targeting Planned Parenthood were easily slotted into the conservative slot that earlier saw a doctor marked as especially malevolent by Bill O'Reilly, decider of such things, shot to death in his church. Cliven Bundy was not a cheating crank attempting to annex federal lands as his own personal fiefdom, but was to Fox News a symbol of a government gone out of control for not letting him do it. Each singular instance of someone seemingly living too well on government assistance was evidence that the entire system was rigged to produce just that.
Climate change is controversial because it was intentionally made controversial by a phalanx of paid professional shills claiming expertise above those of the scientists who did the actual work. Conservative legislators to this day defund the non-existent ACORN because shit-addled minds throughout the nation are truly convinced it still exists in underground, unspecified form.
The racist birtherism against the nation's first non-white president was given a national stage, not only in Fox News but in the House of Representatives. There was never a shred of truth to any of it; it was from the beginning racist, and only racist.
It is not a bend towards populism that stains the conservative movement, but a bend towards fraud and hucksterism. The various hysterias peddled by Fox News became, long before Trump, the sole strength of the conservative movement. The movement saw the manufacturing of false information as convenient; Fox News became Drudge with cameras; House Republicans used the conspiracies peddled as tools for both elections and policy itself. Conservatism moved from distrust for intellectualism to open contempt for factual argument at all.
It put a man onstage in a pimp costume to tell a tale he had simply made up, and to this very day more of the conservative movement believes that to be "journalism" than do not.
Others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation.
Indeed, that was the contemptuous bargain made. And indeed, it turned out that in an anti-intellectual, anti-truth movement those that rose to the top were poor excuses for intellectuals and not terribly concerned with any movement goal save opportunism. Those that were not willing to commit intellectual fraud were treated with suspicion; those willing to work across the aisle to keep the gears of government turning were considered traitors. Those that rose through the ranks were adept at telling their extremist populist base extremist populist things.
Both of these errors were linked to the most important failure of the right’s intellectuals: The failure to translate the power accrued through their alliance with populists into a revolution within the managerial class — one that would have ultimately made conservatism less dependent on the vagaries and venom of populism, made the right-leaning intelligentsia less of a wobbly peak and more of a sturdy spire.
And here we have the core problem. Who would hold that banner? Which voices are available to elevate? What, aside from the populism, would those intellectuals even do?
Tout a new militarism, identical to the old? Vow that tax cuts would fix things right up, regardless of a half-century of plain failure of that model? Government service cuts, again, no doubt—a privatization of Social Security, perhaps, in order to gain from Wall Street that famous Wall Street stability that could not possibly leave tomorrow's seniors in a lurch? What conservative academics exist that still recognize the role of federalism at all, now that it has been so thoroughly debased as effect of wars against desegregation and environmental oversight? Where is this hidden bunker of intellectuals untainted by virulent white-nationalist-tinged populism and anti-academic bent?
Partial revolutions there were. Free-market ideas were absorbed into the managerial consensus after the stagflation of the 1970s. The fall of Communism lent a retrospective luster to Reaganism within the foreign policy establishment. There was even a period in the 1990s — and again, briefly, after Sept. 11 — when a soft sort of social conservatism seemed to be making headway among Atlantic-reading, center-left mandarins.
And some of those free-market ideas proved successful while others proved catastrophic; an intellectual approach would recognize both. The luster of Reaganism continues to be cipher, a harkening back to a simpler time in which, as the Reaganites would have it, giving bold speeches were the final gust against which the crumbling Soviet empire could not stand. And after 9/11 a great deal of the country lost its mind and more than a few people changed their values—if this is a core mechanism by which conservative values are to advance themselves in the future, I am not certain the nation could survive the strain.
So then: Conservatism is at a low point. A very low point. Its actions over decades have rendered it such, and the credibility of the movement is minimal, and the "mass media" is still arrayed against conservatives, despite the lot of them personally hand-delivering Trump to the national ticket, and still the right's "idease" cannot seem to catch a break.
Reflecting on this harsh reality has confirmed some conservatives in their belief that the managerial order is inherently left wing, and that the goal of a conservative politics should be to sweep the managerial class away entirely. This is part of the appeal of Trump to a small cohort within the right’s intelligentsia, who imagine that his strongman approach can unweave the administrative state and strip the overclass of all its powers.
Yes, that is indeed where we are. A lets-call-it-small cohort has embraced strongman Trump as path to stripping the government of its powers by force, Shock and Awe style, and replacing it with a government by and for the conservative class. The nation will greet Strongman Trump and his conservative toadies as liberators.
Or, you know, maybe the intellectuals could not do that.
But is there an alternative? Continetti’s essay hints at one: to make intellectual conservatism a more elite-focused project, to seek “a conservative tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.” [...] But is it any more plausible? To begin anew, at such steep disadvantages, what amounts to missionary work?
Ah-ha! This is indeed a valid path; retreat to the conservative faux-ivory tower and wait for the Bad Shit to die down as conservative elites figure out, among themselves, just how to put Humpty Dumpty together again. That is the best idea I have ever heard, and reasonable, and all it requires is a collection of conservatives willing to strip themselves from race-infused populism and conspiracy theories and start contemplating how to sell conservative ideas without the toxic wrapper. Or, what the hell, the opposite:
Or, as another alternative, conservative elites might simply try to build a more intellectually serious populism out of the Trumpian wreckage and wait for a less toxic backlash against liberal overreach to ride back into power. But can the populist right actually be de-Hannitized, de-Trumpified, rendered 100 percent Breitbart-free?
Strip out the lying parts, you mean? Strip out the lying parts, and the racists, and the conspiracy-addled, and the stupid, stupid men peddling Cliven Bundy as hero and Donald Trump as just the kind of protofascist strongman that could legally-or-maybe-not bend America to a less "liberal" place?
It could be done. But it would require calling all those unpleasant people to account. It would require pointing out when they lie, when they peddle faked stories, and when they use anecdote as sole substitute for evidence. It would require the media to call them out on their frauds—but for decades, conservatism has condemned those that do precisely that. (This is, incidentally, why Facebook now publishes fraudulent stories itself. Because the conservative establishment insisted "fairness" required them to do so.)
It would require the assistance of academics who had spent time knowing what the true facts were. Whether, say, voter fraud was common or not, or whether there really was a conspiracy to turn American golf courses over to the United Nations. But for decades, conservatives have told the populace that those information-knowers could not be trusted, because those information-knowers were all conspiring against them.
It would require a conservatism that did not equate fact-checking with bias, and did not insist that conservative academics be conservatives first, and academics second, and did not suppose that every time a conservative theory was cast doubt upon by non-liberal institutions it was not due to malevolence but due to the investigated facts leading in another, non-ideological direction.
Could that be done? Yes. Will it be? Even by the conservative intellectuals gnashing their teeth over the devastation wrought by a movement that systemically turned itself into petty, paranoid cult?
There's no chance. No such inner circle exists; no base exists to support them. There is no money to devote to the cause; the wealthy themselves have bent conservatism to this place and defunded the rest.
So we will play this little game, and there will be much moaning and woe, and Trump will lose the election and the base will be more convinced than ever that the elites are all in it together. And Hannity will go on television and tell them so. And if any of the conservative intellectuals want to go on television and argue the point, they will do so at his leisure, and only with his permission.