Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Useless Useful Idiots: Whither The Bulwark and The Dispatch After Trump?
Ever since Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign began to look like it was more than a promotional stunt for his reality show and began to take on the shape of a real run at the White House, there were voices on the Right condemning the whole idea of a Trump presidency. The Right’s most concerted effort took the form of National Review’s “Against Trump” issue, and most on the Right remain critical of the President’s failings even if they support him generally. (This is a marked difference from the last Democrat president, who received virtually no significant criticism from members of his party while in office.) But a sizable group of Republicans (excuse me, “former Republicans”) abandoned their party and became “Never Trumpers” – they were so exorcized by the idea of Donald Trump personally that they could no longer support their party. Some, like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, completely altered their beliefs and values because they hated Trump so much.
And from this sprang a whole new cottage industry of Republican-hating Conservatives. A niche craft that once belonged only to David Brooks and David Frum suddenly burst open with a whole field of carpetbaggers toting elephant guns: Charles Sykes, Mona Charen, Jonah Goldberg, George Will, Noah Rothman, Joe Scarborough, just to name a few. And with it has come two political websites to challenge the likes of NationalReview.com, CommentaryMagazine.com, and Ricochet.com: TheBulwark.com and TheDispatch.com.
The Bulwark clearly is staffed by people who have been marinating in the full-bore culture of the Coastal Left far too long. Even the graphics have that overprocessed, graphic design school sheen to them that looks like something off early 2000s Slate.com. As of this writing, there is a graphic of Trump with a crown that is clearly inspired by the works of 1980s neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat – an artist whose works were explicitly political in their examination of wealth, class, and colonialism. This is not something one would see in, say, The Weekly Standard, but it is something the Lefties who buy New York magazine would lap up. It instantly transmits the message, “Hey, we’re worldly Coastal Elites just like you. We go to the Whitney and the Guggenheim. We’re down with Bob Iger and Margaret Atwood and Oprah Winfrey. We’re one of you!” Honestly, it reeks of a desperation to be accepted by the cool kids.
That likely also explains why the columns go overboard in their criticism of Trump:
“The president of the United States, ladies and gentlemen, was in full Mad King mode, rambling, confused, disjointed, parading his grievances with barely a wave from afar at coherence.”
Of course, one could just go to the “trending” article, “100 Reasons Trump Is Unfit to Be President.” Written just on June 26, 2020, one would think this would have been the first article produced by the site. Finding any criticism of Democrats on TheBulwark.com is pretty much impossible: Currently, the home page of the site lionizes Alexander Vindman, an army officer who was insubordinate because his partisan beliefs ran counter to the Commander-in-Chief’s. But by in large, the majority of the articles just seem stale:
“Trump is not interested in the actual job of the presidency. He’s interested in the attention the presidency affords him.”
Really? This is a new insight? I seem to recall Never Trumpers harping on this in 2016. Why would anyone subscribe to The Bulwark if the contributors are so low on fresh material?
Just the article titles alone on The Bulwark are enough to make one’s eyes pop when one considers this site is supposed to cater to “Conservatives”:
Actually, Virtue Signaling Is Good
We could use less celebration of vice and more signaling of virtue.
Racial Injustice Remains the Great Weakness of American Democracy
If America is to lead the free world, first it must lead itself.
Crises and Competence (complete with a graphic of Ronald Reagan)
How the decades-long gutting of government—worsened by Trump’s failings—exacerbated the pandemic, the protests, and more.
America’s Underlying Injustice Won’t Just Disappear
We have all failed. Now we have to fix it.
Now is the Time to Stand with Dreamers
Evangelicals want Dreamers to be allowed to stay lawfully in the United States. The President should listen to them.
Florida’s Idiocracy
Come and witness the wisdom of The People.
(One usually has to tune into Last Week Tonight or The Daily Show to find the kind of snarling, sneering condescension and gleeful ridicule for non-elite types in which shamelessly Charles Sykes wallows in that last article.)
What’s most glaringly missing for the site? Any critique whatsoever for the behavior of any Democrat lawmaker. Andrew Cuomo’s killing thousands of people by ordering COVID patients into nursing homes? Not a peep. Gretchen Whitmer’s high-handed assaults on liberty in Michigan? Never heard of it. Anything Nancy Pelosi has done ever? Nancy who?
In short, almost the entire output of TheBulwark.com can be summed up in one line from the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman:
The Dispatch is somewhat better – in the way that being shot in the arm is better than being shot in the face. At least there is an acknowledgement that the real final boss at the end of the game is, in fact, the Democrats and not just more Bad, Nasty Republicans as The Bulwark now crew seems to believe. The problem with The Dispatch mostly seems to lie in the idea that the rules of political discourse have remained roughly the same as they were in 1985, where all politicians understood there was a balance of power and respected the fundamental layout of the system of checks and balances laid out in the Constitution. Anyone paying a lick of attention over the last decade will know that one party long ago abandoned anything like partisan comity when they rammed through ObamaCare with budget reconciliation and abandoned the filibuster in the Senate. And that party was not the Republicans. And yet Conservatives should still play by gentlemanly rules and the most prim and proper of etiquette and morality according to the thinker who most represents The Dispatch’s ethos, David French. French is the sort of man who would insist on fighting a duel with a flintlock pistol according to the rules, even when he clearly sees his opponent is carrying an AK-47. As the Democrats make loud noises about court packing and move to create an unconstitutional fifty-first state simply to consolidate a permanent hold on the Senate, French and The Dispatch gang seem less and less like standard bearers for old guard Conservatism than a gang of fusty old Don Quixotes tilting at windmills.
If TheDispatch.com folks were a Waiting for Guffman line, they would be this:
It’s difficult not to look at these sites – especially The Bulwark – and not think of the old phrase “useful idiots”: As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, “useful idiot” is “a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals, and who is cynically used by the cause’s leaders.” If there was ever a group of people spouting the propaganda of a group (the Democrats) whose goals they cannot fully comprehend, it must be the Never Trumpers. After all, the best recompense people like George Will and Steve Hayes could hope to get from the Left is (metaphorically) getting shot last.
So what if Trump is disposed of in this election? What do these groups do next? When Trump is gone, what is the purpose of the Never Trump brand? Are they just going to become Never Republican? There’s a name for that: Democrats. And there are plenty of those around: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, PBS, NPR, HBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Vox, HuffPo, BuzzFeed, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Deutsche Welle, The Economist, etc. When there’s no longer a need for a supposed “inside” voice to undermine the Right, why would the Left continue to give these Useful Idiots succor? And why would the Right want to have anything to do with speakers who will be seen as having happily played a role in their downfall from power? Pundits like William Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charles Sykes are more likely to be viewed as treasonous Clytemnestras than tragic Cassandras.
So with that said, then, what will the Useful Idiots who have been bolstering the Democrat cause against Trump do if Joe Biden becomes president and the Democrats take control? Who will be their audience? If Trump is gone, can they sustain more than just a small echo chamber of Inside-the-Beltway types congratulating themselves on how smart they were while everything goes to hell?
For the future of their investments and careers, I suspect there are actually quite a few people working at both sites secretly praying Trump pulls out a win this November…
Published in General
French really is insufferable.
He gets pummeled like that at least every two or three weeks. It’s been that way for a long time.
If you have the time
I’m getting a strong deja vu. It’s almost as if he’s here sometimes.
I get what you’re saying, but nobody messes up actual hard facts like David French. It’s unreal.
Start at 36:20. They discuss the Lincoln project and never trump.
http://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/the-three-whisky-happy-hour-flight-3/
This is so weird.
The emotionalism should be your first clue this is a form of derangement. It’s really hard to be clear-thinking and to learn anything when you’re on the verge of tears over a presidential nomination.
Here’s another one
The title is great coming from CNN.
Been meaning to listen to that. I am two whiskys behind at the moment.
I really like those guys. Steve is always great.
I might shell out for the actual proprietary one from the blog. They kind of keep it a secret of what it costs and how much you get. Those guys are really smart.
If it’s too over the top to believe, then it’s fake. But an emo pig like Kristol is so self involved that the acting out is who he is – it’s real, in that context. Or as real as a beat down cast out Never Trumper can realistically get, I guess.
After seeing his picture, I’m reminded of a talk he gave many years ago about climate change, where I first heard him say, “people of affluence don’t live in effluence.” Just so. Smart man.
Sounds like we all need to sign up for Restoration PAC and First Right Podcast.
This guy is in the same orbit. He always talks like this. It’s all very ordinary pablum. He leads Principles First.
I kind of get pundits and politicians being never Trumpers. They have professional and financial interests to consider. But I do stumble across more than a few low follower Twitter accounts who are particularly nasty. They don’t just say Trump himself is bad and he will hurt conservative goals by his bungling and unpopularity, which is a valid viewpoint even if I disagree. Instead, they continually go on about purging the Trumpists after Trump loses. How they’re the real conservatives and will restore a more conservative Republican party. They tend to call other conservatives racist a lot. I don’t quite get what their political objectives are. What are the policy positions that they think make them more conservative than Trump? How would a ruthlessly detrumpified Republican party win elections or achieve policy goals? How would it distinguish itself from the Democrat party? Really, these guys just seem like moderate swing voters with a weird chip on their shoulder.
This is exactly what it’s like. Perfect.
Likely created for the sole purpose of sowing division.
The usual litany of vague objections without specifics.
So vote Biden, because that is conservatism?
Exactly. Every single word. That guy is an Ivy League lawyer. He always talks like that.
I would say conservatives should have better rhetoric.
This is a wild thread.
Heh. That was the group that put on the “Summit on Principled Conservatism” that featured speakers such as Bill Kristol, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, . . . all the usual NeverTrumpers. And if I recall, their summit was widely mocked.
But then, given these people are all left-wingers pretending to be conservatives, mockery is deserved.
They love Heath Mayo and Principles First in Minnesota. The speaker lineup for that thing was ridiculous given what their objectives are. I just don’t get it. Banal observations all day long.
In case anybody’s interested, Principles First was seeded with $90,000 from two dark organizations. I don’t really know where the money came from. They have basically just spent a little money on travel and renting conference rooms.
It’s much worse than that. They lie about Trump and especially about us. Trump’s election was us telling these people we care about illegal immigration and what it’s doing to our society (filling it with people who’ve only known socialism and who undermine the rule of law and compete unfairly for low skill wages). We care about globalism and the despair economy it created here for vast swaths of the heartland.
It was decidedly NOT about us endorsing a policy of grabbing women (a comment Trump made in private about what women will LET rich and powerful men do to them. Fact check: True). It wasn’t a “cult of personality” as they so frequently claim. It’s that, for the first time since Reagan, someone pursuing power seemed to have our interests at heart and was hearing us!! Unlike these Bulwankers and Loser Projectors.
A thousand likes!
And now I am seeing the game change. They tried to separate Trump supporters from Trump and they’ve been, as usual, unsuccessful in their efforts. They never had a connection with voters. They never understood what was bubbling under the surface, and when it manifested again after the Tea Party was quashed, they were again unprepared. Then they misdiagnosed. Then they miscalculated (again!)
Now they are are all over left wing media believing every Democrat talking point and misapprehension, and have determined that those who still support Trump are the deplorable rubes they had tried to persuade.
We are no longer arguing about Trump. We are standing up for ourselves and taking their insults personally.
They are digging their own political graves.
I can’t find that information either.
What I mean is Principles First always sounds like a seventh grade civics class that barely keeps up with the news.
Having said that you are right about what comes from that area of politics which Principles First is in.