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The Goldberg Rationalizations
“It may be that once Trump is no longer the commander in chief in the war against Blue America, the ardor of his troops will give way to a better understanding of the price the GOP paid on his watch.”
This is the last paragraph of Jonah Goldberg’s latest, edifying us with his crack understanding of history, wholly out-of-context. You can read it here. Most of it is written to advance his rationale for why Republicans are supporting Trump.
He deftly (he is a professional) inserts the idea that Trump is a wartime President, only the enemy this time is Blue America. Why is his popularity so high he asks? It’s because he’s a wartime President! See? You have to read the whole thing to understand, but it makes sense – as long as you don’t think about it too much.
There’s not one mention of the media’s hostile obsessions, their disingenuous – often wholly false – reporting, which is unprecedented in modern history, or Obama/Bush embeds in our intelligence agencies and Department of Justice who have been proven to be liars, leakers, framers, and rank partisans without a smidgeon of professional ethics. Very likely some of these people may be traitors. Certainly, they have worked to undermine the will of the American people. I think that qualifies. All of which predated Trump even taking office. If there’s some kind of war happening, as Jonah asserts, it might be important to mention who started it. (Some FBI agents did something?)
Almost as noteworthy, Goldberg makes no mention of Trump’s accomplishments on behalf of his voting bloc as possible reasons for the strong support, nor is there any reference to likely alternatives which might be animating Trump’s support, all of whom are somewhere on the socialism spectrum.
He’s a wartime President. That’s it.
According to Mr. Goldberg’s account, Trump started this “war” he speaks of. And he never really explains how Trump is warring against “Blue America” or who or what this Blue America is.
Taking issue with Jonah’s conclusion, I would say that Trump is the price the GOP paid for being weak, for being fraudulent, for being the party of perpetual war and globalism, and for misunderstanding and/or taking advantage of their base.
Mr. Goldberg is fantasizing that someday the ardor of his “troops” will better understand how wrong they were. On the contrary. The game Jonah, et al., have been playing is over for good. There will be no going back. It may well get a lot worse for the Nevers after Trump is gone. They will have to take refuge with Democrats. Some already have.
Now, for some real genius, edification and a palate-cleanser, I offer this:
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Published in General
What if your base is right?
I should clarify. When it comes to a politician stoking the base: If (hypothetically speaking) the base is right on all of the issues, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Reagan stoking base : Good. Obama stoking base: Bad.
I never thought of Trump as particularly angry. Countering BS attacks doesn’t mean one is angry only that one is willing to counter BS attacks. In fact, I think of Trump as a happy warrior, living for the fray instead of trying to avoid it at all costs, highlighting the differences instead of trying to make peace with them. As conservatives know, there is no making peace – there is only sliding farther down the slope
Who refuses to brook criticism of the president? I suppose much depends on the nature of the criticism. If it’s the obvious BS like racist, authoritarian, colluuuuuder, etc then that criticism shouldn’t be brooked. If it’s along the line of entirely speculative and probably sour grapes stuff like dumb, unfocused, narcissistic, uninterested, without direction then I also disagree with those but it’s more an annoying tic that I try to poke at (even when it’s directed at the left) than something to be debated to the death.
Heh. People were stoked long before Trump came along. Ricochet alone between 2011-2014 proves that. Trump was just the only one in the race willing to acknowledge it, that it was righteous to be so, and that we could do something other than engage fetal position.
Not just Jonah either. To me, it was clear early on that the criticisms weren’t just of Trump the man but of the causes he took up and by extension the Republican voters who viewed those causes as neglected at best.
I started out as being unsure but mostly thinking of Trump as a novelty candidate. As time went on, though, and I felt like I was put into the position of defending Trump against so much of the over the top fakeness (like l’affaire Fields, that Trump wanted to be a strongman authoritarian – hello Mr. Zubrin!) I also started listening to him more closely and finding him more appealing and conservative in some ways than any of the others on the Republicans’ deepest bench since forever. Truth is, though, the electorate had been primed for an alternative to the establishment that had been failing to fight for conservative issues under cover of elecatibility.
Agreed. I still recommend it. Even just a few months ago.
This is exactly correct. The President draws the fire, but it is absolutely aimed at the proles who dared vote for him.
They are Not Never Trump. They are Never You.
Orange Man is ok!
I missed that article when it came out. It definitely represents much of what I’ve been thinking and feeling the last few years (perhaps longer).
Pretty much everyone before Obama got something pretty major done where they had to bring people outside their core along. Then Obama came along and figured his base was so big, he didn’t really need to consider the GOP anymore. Then Trump followed the same template, but mostly because I think he knows that he doesn’t have the ability to persuade a skeptic, so he just keeps stoking the people that already love him.
Or, the Democrats are so ruled by the crazy progressives that they would never deal with Trump. That includes the establishment “moderates” like Biden and Schumer who are simply pretending (unconvincingly) to not be crazy progressives too or who are truly the malleable power seekers that will go along with craziness because they think it will extend their feeding time at the trough. I think Trump would work with anyone – he had made many overtures to that effect. Until full TDS set in an now people confidently proclaim him to be a white supremacists Russian stooge on respectable media outlets. In the cancel culture, #metoo, #that’snotfunny era of even banks morally auditing account holders there can be no bipartisanship or “ennablment” with someone so obviously and irredeemably bad as President Trump. “Resist” has been the watchword for a few years now, and it’s not President Trump’s watchword.
Yes, thank you GWB for No Child Left Behind, Medicare Expansion, and TARP. What would we do without bringing people from outside onboard? And we all remember the love GWB received for working with the other side on those major things.
Jonah sat down with Jane Coston, who preceded to call Republicans racist and he sat there thinking “she’s not talking about me, she talking about us in teh abstract” and didn’t think to push back in order to err on the side of being collegial.
Pod has literally said that the spying on the Trump campaign was the Obama campaign being genuinely concerned about a Russian asset in the White House (when it appears everyone in Democratic circles knew what the Fusion GPS dossier was) and goes out of his way to say the people in the MSNBC green room treat him nice so he doesn’t believe things are that contentious with his liberal friends.
The problem is they use our want for standards of civility and niceties as a cudgel, especially if people of faith, and when we “fight back” they grab pearls and say that discourse is becoming too coarse, while calling us Nazis and racists, their criticisms usually bolstered by someone like a David French saying “this bad person has a really good point and we really need to look at it”
Maybe stop thinking the outrage is performative and deep down these people saying these things mean them about you as well even if you have called balls and strikes and “I’ve been as anti-Trump as anyone.” That time has passed. You’re not going to be forgiven for being fair minded.
Romney sat there while they called him a racist, said he let a woman die of cancer and that 47 percent of people didn’t matter (untrue) and his lame campaign responded with “let’s talk about ideas and issues that matter, that’s mean” while he put on a pair of blue jeans he’s maybe worn once to play “blue collar solid.” His photo op quoting “Who let the Dogs Out” with a bunch of african american children to pander didn’t stop the comparisons to the Klan.
Average voter looks at these things and say “he’s a fraud” and “If he won’t stand up for himself, how is he going to do anything for me.” If we have another 2008 drubbing, my fear is those like Pod and Jonah will say “we need to make a better case and have better candidates” as if that’s some form of deep thinking because they’re in a class where it doesn’t matter who wins and loses, they have the status to survive.
May a thousand likes bloom.
But I was promised the dragon would eat me last!
Ok, this isn’t really an answer. What is “pretty major” and how much of these accomplishments were forced compromises or trade-offs rather than original intentions?
And the claim about hatred. No answer yet.
I’m not seeing this persuasion model of the Presidency you seem to hold.
It’s interesting, because I just realized that many people see politics in terms of persuasion, and I think the idea you can persuade partisan opponents or forces is a myth. There is no middle ground where enough people reside with open minds. This is largely a function of how the media became so partisan.
This persuasion, converting people over to the superior logic and ideals of conservatism, and literally educating people, seems to be the case with people like Jonah, who as another poster here recounted, was annoyed that Trump couldn’t articulate why Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were well-suited for the Supreme Court. To some extent in the old days ( like Reagan era) it was possible to incrementally move people ( having his personality helped) but today there’s no way a conservative can persuade anyone through the hostile media, the late night talk shows, etc. It’s pure Idiocracy.
Yes!
This is closer to the real world we are living in, and the kind of thing we are up against:
There is nothing wrong with that. Bach was a Baroque composer. The style was to cram as many notes as possible in each bar of music (just half-kidding.) Not everybody goes for that kind of thing.
It’s not just them. A good portion of the Left seems not to understand this when it comes to Trump, especially as they’ve absorbed a ludicrous parody of him as some sort dog-whistling white supremacist, and then assume his voters are all that writ large.
That’s the funny part – there was never a more roll-able President than Trump. If the Dems hadn’t been crazy, they could have gotten a lot of what they wanted.
That’s not it at all. People keep acting as if the GOP had some grand plan to court Trump voters. That’s absurd. Most mainstream GOP elites think they represent a middle to upper middle class party whose base is college-educated voters.
What happened is that Dems completely abandoned the white working class, spent twenty years ramping up social, economic and political pressure on them, and made America such a toxic living hell that it created an opening for a political entrepreneur like Trump to execute a hostile takeover of the GOP as a vehicle for their concerns.
If Democrats and Never Trumpers didn’t want this to happen, at the very least they shouldn’t have tolerated the center-left’s embrace of ethnic cleansing rhetoric after 2014. But they did, and the consequences are still playing out before us. Democracy isn’t possible when one side’s elites fantasizes about “cleansing” the other side’s voters.
See Jon’s original quote. I’ve bolded the relevant part.
The funniest part of Bach’s rise to acclaim is the story of his being appointed “Director of Music” by the city of Leipzig, Germany. If I remember right, the city’s archives still contain a written record of the comments by the city administrators on Bach’s appointment. The statement went something like this “We’ve tried to get the best, but I guess we will have to settle for the mediocre” (they had tried to get George Philipp Telemann for the post.)
Yep. I remember talking about that here right after the election — that Democrats might have found in Trump someone they could work with, which was the expressed fear of so many Nevers. But because Democrats dialed their hatred of Trump to 11 — not to mention the deep state coup they orchestrated against him — there was no way he’d ever work with them. I think he was shocked by the level of hate, derangement, and outright lies they descended to. And that only steeled his resolve to stand by the people who stood by him. Loyalty is an important virtue with the President. He’s even attacked by alleged conservatives for wanting loyal employees. But loyalty is sorely lacking in American society today. Certainly in Washington, but at all levels of society.
The parody of Trump as a “dog whistler” or speaking in “coded” language is so laughable as to be a joke. Trump doesn’t hide anything he wants to convey. When he wants to communicate something, he just opens his big mouth and shouts it from the rooftops. He couldn’t be more open.
I’m not acting as if he GOP had some grand plan to court Trump voters. That is absurd. I’m acting as if there was a sizable portion of the Republican electorate whose disaffection had been growing for years. Decades even – the Contract With America and the giddiness over the appearance of an outlet like Rush Limbaugh was a long time ago with so much double dealing water under the bridge by 2015.
I count myself in that disaffected group and 2012 sealed it. I voted for Romney in the general, but I was certainly stoked and primed for something different, and it was wan’t some active establishment plan stoking me: it was that timid, incompetent, and duplicitous seemed to be the SOP for Republicans since the late 90’s.
That happened too.
Yes, Skip, I saw it when I first commented.
I’ll be more specific although I think my comment applies whether Jon thinks Trump was sincerely angry or merely acting angry: I don’t think Trump was acting angry either. He didn’t project anger in my reading.
Here’s a relevant part of my original comment (bolded): “Countering BS attacks doesn’t mean one is angry only that one is willing to counter BS attacks. In fact, I think of Trump as a happy warrior, living for the fray instead of trying to avoid it at all costs, highlighting the differences instead of trying to make peace with them. As conservatives know, there is no making peace – there is only sliding farther down the slope.”