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Jonah Goldberg’s column:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443364/never-trump-administation-cabinet-2016-election-character?utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt%2012/28/2016&utm_term=Jolt
Rodin’s post:
http://ricochet.com/399406/i-dont-forgive-you-jonah-goldberg/
At comment # 13, member PHenry provided a comment that was so much on target that it bears repeating here:
“Mr Goldberg, it doesn’t mean you were wrong about the man in full. It also doesn’t mean you were right about the man otherwise. It means YOU DIDN’T HAVE A CLUE.”
The book Liberal Fascism has been repeatedly recommended here at Ricochet:
https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189
I think you also don’t understand where Jonah or most NeverTrump people were coming from. Rodin hits this squarely on the head in the comments of his post.
Jonah is one of the Nevers that it will be difficult if not impossible to forgive. His attitude towards those of us who reluctantly got behind our nominee as the best chance to stop HRC was so nasty at times and so condescending, that it was hard to not take it as a personal insult. This election has blown the smoke away from so many revered institutions, and deservedly so. From polling to the press to the talking-head pundits at the various news outlet “round-tables”, they’ve all been exposed as:
The part that vexes so many of us is the arrogance to not humbly admit just how wrong you really were. I saw this coming, so many of us did, and I am no professional pundit. If I got paid for it and was this wrong, not only would I be embarrassed, I would like to think I’d show some humility. Jonah still doesn’t get it, and if he won’t change he’ll only keep getting it wrong, and risk being ignored as the crazy man screaming at the sky how bad Trump is. Frankly he’s on my list of authors to ignore and move past.
I might take this more seriously if I didn’t see first hand how Trump supporters treated myself and others for their unwillingness to support Trump. If there weren’t still so much vitriol leveled at me personally for continuing to have the audacity to criticize anything Trump does.
We’ve all got something to atone for. It’s well past time to stop pointing fingers.
During the campaign and still today the NT elites avoided or denied that what they were doing was helping Hillary. This is a big lie. They WERE helping Hillary. They easily saved her some money on ads and they leveraged their own media profile to even be more effective than the ads she was running against Trump.
We should not be bullied by these people. They are lying when they say they were not helping Hillary.
In the Ricochet podcast with Victor Davis Hanson he says that what amazed him was the howls of protest that erupted from the columnists at NR and other conservative elites when it was pointed out that they were helping Hillary. He says this made them act in a very nasty way to their critics while complaining about how badly they were being treated by the Trumpists.
@mjbubba, as you know, the fact that you thought Trump might be a good president was one of the thin strands of hope I was clinging to during the horrible campaign season.
I was completely wrong about this election. Wrong, of course, about what the outcome was going to be, but also wrong about what it meant for the future and wrong about what it would say about the character of the country. I didn’t expect Trump to win, didn’t expect the left to go berserk, and definitely didn’t expect…to be happy. I expected to enter the New Year filled with grim dread, no matter who won. Surprise!
What I don’t understand is why you were right… that is, I don’t know what it is that you saw that I didn’t see?
This.
I saw fear. I was afraid of a Hillary Administration. I follow several religious networks and blog sites, and I saw that all traditionalist believers, including traditionalist Jews, shared my fear to some degree or another.
Fear is a powerful motivator.
When the Supreme Court ruled that the California Prop 8 voters, who were recognized as generally motivated by religious beliefs, were “irrational” and primarily motivated by “hateful bigotry,” that went largely unnoticed by the media. It took a long time for the implications of that ruling to sink in with the faithful.
I saw fear.
J. Goldberg missed it.
I did not mind if you made a foolish decision to not support Trump, on account of most NeverTrump people live on the Coasts, and your votes were going to be overwhelmed.
I was highly distressed that “center-right” thought leaders were leading us in the direction of disaster. When I tried to take issue with the NeverTrump pundits, I got called out, mis-quoted, insulted and slandered by NeverTrump fellow travelers.
America had a narrow escape. I am just trying to help clueless NeverTrump pundits and members gain an understanding. Y’all missed the call on the polls, the vote, and the likely tone of likely Trump senior management. None of that is distressing. What is distressing is your lack of fear of Hillary and the crushing of individual liberties that would have been likely under a Hillary Administration.
Get a clue.
And you persist, without a thought for how you treat your fellow conservative, all the while whining when someone casts an aspersion or two in your direction.
MJ your opinion is duly noted and I kindly ask you to treat me with the respect I treat you. Calling us clueless in no way helps the discussion on this site and only serves to reinforce Spin’s point – Trump supporters whether reluctant or otherwise are acting like the sorest winners in the history of politics.
This is an ignorant thing to say. Wait, why am I even having this discussion, again? Good bye…
Ha ha ha….oh…wait. You are serious, aren’t you?
I persist in trying to explain to NeverTrump members, just why we got so distressed about NeverTrump pundits. I persist in trying to untangle mischaracterizations and conflations of my positions. I persist in trying to defend myself from unfair allegations of ill will. I do also persist in whining about the cluelessness of the NeverTrump Partizans, but that is only because there are a small handful of new members who missed the year just past, and are wondering why there is so much tension remaining this long after the election. I persist also in criticizing NeverTrump pundits when they publish meanspirited gratuitous slurs like “Usay and Qusay.” I persist in defending this criticism from unfair accusations made about the motives for such criticism.
I persist in participation in the “conversation on the “center-right,”” and I hope to provide some positive insight.
I am unhappy at the level of emotional tension. I am not putting any faith in Trump. But Trump has already exceeded my expectations, and has given me reason to hope for the future of America.
This is not where my faith lies, but I am still feeling relieved.
He who has ears, let him hear.
I humbly suggest that your misunderstanding of us is as large as what you perceive to be our misunderstanding of you. You would be hard-pressed to find a single NeverTrump member of this site that has not admitted publicly on these pages to rethinking things in light of Trump’s post-election maneuvers, and yet you persist in this desire to label us and dismiss our criticisms prima facia. You are creating the rancor on this site by your very words and I see no end to it.
He wrote a column in October, “Bursting Beltway Bubbles” that was totally exasperating. How he “gets it” but that we don’t get it. To read it again, reminds me just how much of a bubble he lived in. Lighten up, Francis seems to be their favorite kiss off. When Trump started baiting and fighting with the press and was still in the race, I knew we had a chance. When he cracked a joke that horrified other Republicans, but made the audiences cheer, I knew we had a chance. (Megyn Kelly’s question about women and his crack about Rosie O’Donnell). When he never gave up in the face of the progressive and media onslaught, I knew we had a chance. Yes, Jonah, there was a “silent super-majority of like-minded people out there who will carry Trump to victory if only they are sufficiently roused.” And, yes, I think you still don’t get it. The frustration at political correctness, frustration at endless rules and regulations, being fined for NOT buying a product and being put in the cross hairs of the IRS, ridicule for being patriotic, and being tired of not being able to speak because the consequences could be severe. Trump may fall on his arse, but he is no Hillary.
MJ, this post is just a long winded version of the “election outcomes are binary” meme that’s been repeated on Ricochet ad nauseam for the last year. Snooze.
I understand where the NT pundits came from exactly. From comfortable billets in the swamp, where HRC is no threat, not as perceived in the country in any case.
Thanks for proving my point.
I find this rich, because during the election Jonah continually correctly placed his influence in the proper perspective – as very little. You over inflated Jonah’s and the entire NeverTrump movement’s influence and then only forgive him because he was right about his minimal influence on the election.
I’m here to serve, Jamie! I did edit my comment slightly to ensure that I was only referring to pundits, as that was the concern of the post.
As civil conversation on this topic does not appear to be possible at present, the Editors and Moderators urge everyone to take a breather and reflect on how best to engage fellow members in ways that are civil and productive. We suggest that, in the meantime, everyone explore some of the other excellent conversations on the site.
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I almost voted for Trump. I voted for Evan McMullin. My vote was basically a shrug. I certainly didn’t want Hillary to be president, but I also was very worried, and still am worried, about the Republican Party turning into something not much better than the Democratic Party. I really wasn’t sure which danger was more likely, or more damaging, so I basically shrugged and voted for McMullin. My main motive was hoping we could get a better candidate in 2020. I worried about the long term consequences of President Trump. I still am. I’m also hopeful. To me taking him “seriously, but not literally” means I have no idea what he really intends to do, or will actually do. Maybe he will start a new era of American exceptionalism. Or, maybe he will turn the Republican Party into a second Democratic Party, trading influence for favors. I think that’s how most democracies in the world work, with two corrupt major political parties just fighting over power and turf. I can imagine either of those two things happening.
That’s Rush Limbaugh; we seem to expect all our pundits to be Rush, and they’re not.
Take Jonah Goldberg:
He was a big part of what made NRO interesting in its early days. A snarky 29 year old with a big appetite for pop culture and a fresh viewpoint can be a lot of fun to read, especially when the snark is directed at people and ideas you don’t like.
Liberal Fascism showcased Jonah’s skill at constructing a well informed polemic. It is an important book.
He’s past 45 now, ongoing snark signals a certain ossification (not to mention that annoying snigger.) Did he lose intellectual scope and flexibility? Never had it and I was wrong to see it in him?
Either way, he’s no Rush.
But is he the guy who says: “Loyal readers write that what I’m doing is (was) helping Hillary. She would be a terrible president. Is it true? Am I helping her?” Or: “If they’re smart enough to read me, maybe they’re smart enough to have a valid opinion.”
Unfortunately, apparently not.
Could the hostility be due to realizing we’ve let ourselves be played for suckers, or anyway are disappointed in Jonah when we had our noses rubbed in the fact that he’s not what we thought?
Fairly good analysis. He lacked a certain depth of experience outside the circle of writers and thinkers. He is a creation of the bubble who writes about the bubble. Without a foundation of hard fought effort at something else, all you get after a while if self referential references to self.
This right here is what made me so distressed over the NeverRight pundits.
Fearmongering over what Trump might to the conservative movement, or to the GOP, was elevated by our professional “center-right” chattering class to be a worry, equivalent to the worry of what to expect from Hillary. Anyone who had read their work previous to mid-2015 rightly anticipated that four years of Hillary would mean a crushing blow to individual rights and rule by law. Though he had correctly described the Left, J.Goldberg brushed aside the real threat that we faced under a Hillary Administration. I think a majority of the McMullin vote came directly as a result of the NeverTrump campaign by professional “center-right” pundits.
Which is the point of my Original Post. J. Goldberg never correctly assessed the threat posed by another four years of Leftist rule, and still does not understand that a majority of the Trump vote was inspired by fear of Hillary.
Clueless.
A civil conversation was in progress on two posts that were taking issue with Clueless Jonah when the heavy boot of the Editors stomped on our fun.
Binary.
I don’t think I mentioned binary.
Clueless Jonah and his NeverTrump brethren, for all their understanding of politics, spent most of the past year pursuing an illusory potential outcome in which the election would go to the House of Representatives. Nobody but them thought there was any substance to that mirage. They fooled themselves.
Now they are fooling themselves into thinking that they were not quite so far off the mark as we are telling them.
Clueless.
Before the election I had sworn off of engaging in this particular argument, because I thought it was both futile and fatuous. But after seeing that this argument is still raging, and emotional to the point of shutting down threads, I am going to offer a couple of thoughts.
First, it is entirely possible for one to have an argument that other people don’t understand. It is even possible to have a well-founded belief that while other people don’t understand you, you understand them better than they understand themselves. It is rare, but it is possible. However, if your argument is as simplistic as, “If Trump doesn’t win, then Hillary wins,” then the chances that your argument is going over the heads of other people are slim and none, and slim just left town. So if that is your conviction, maybe you should consider alternative explanations.
Second, I think Jonah is one of the smartest, wittiest, and most knowledgeable pundits out there. You don’t have to read or listen to him, but I sure will. However, if you happen to think that you are waaaaay smarter than Jonah, then go ahead and get yourself a gig writing for a conservative magazine. Or, if you think that all of the conservative magazines are waaaaay out of touch with the conservative base, and therefore won’t hire you, start your own magazine. If you’re right, you’ll make a fortune for yourself.
Binary