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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
The kid that quit the Lincoln Project and wrote the article for the Washington Examiner sent it to me on a direct message. I found it really weird that he didn’t know who they were. One organization is a helicopter service in Montana and then the other one is a generic political organization in Arizona. Who knows where they got the money.
It’s the perfect useful idiot group.
I wasn’t disagreeing. Just venting.
Every damn day is like this. These guys think they are brilliant and reasonable.
This guy is a big-time conservative columnist in Australia.
Mayo is a useful idiot.
https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/ccp-news-outlets-fawn-over-lincoln-project/
Should probably post this here too, especially considering the title of the OP.
Agreed.
And yet Gary remains convinced he’s doing the right thing…
At some point what he does speaks louder than what he says he is.
Gary is a fool
If you look at his second to the last interview with reason Magazine he sounds like a libertarian, but he’s really in the ruling class. Angelo Codivilla he’s right about everything.
Are we supposed to care for whom George Will is voting?
I find it very interesting that he talked like this six years ago with Nick Gillespie and now he’s voting Democrat. There is a ruling class and people need to vote accordingly. Angelo Codivilla is right about everything.
I never would have thought of this, but it’s obviously true.
Is Codevilla the one who coined the term “protected class?” Because that’s spot on. They don’t suffer the consequences of their noxious ideas — or their votes.
No, liberals are, so they can say, “SEE? SEE? even conservatives hate Trump!”
I believe that was… someone who is a card-carrying member of the “protected class” the Irish wordsmith Peggy Noonan herself, garnering the 2018 prize for self awareness. That essay was remarkable.
So, they kinda know. They just don’t really care. We are the little people, ultimately.
Yeah, this is normal, but here’s how it’s countered best as I can tell:
So let me get this straight. Will was wrong about Reagan, both Bushes, all of his conservative advocacy, Supreme Court Justices , tax policies social policies, but since you find agreement with him about Trump he’s all-of-a-sudden a great sage!
Has he renounced these other views?
So he’s only worth listening to when he agrees with you and we just forget his – according to you – decades long record of supporting thinks you find ridiculous and abhorrent?
Watch as the recipient of this message changes the subject, moves the goal posts, throws a fit….Whatever
I believe the campaign should turn that whole narrative back in their faces and force the political wedge.
Call out the Never Trump faction. Expose them. Not their nefarious underpinnings, the weird ideological split. They split because Trump wants out of Afghanistan, wants out of trade deals that handicap the United States, the culture of American companies exploitation of foreign labor especially within our own borders. This is what these Republicans want and they have decided they’re more likely to get it from Joe Biden. And they are correct.
The progressive left are fully aware of this and they hate Trump, but they ( like some of us) hold higher contempt for their near enemies, those who they perceive as pretending to represent them the corporatist Democrats.
Trump can elevate them and fight the whole neo-con cadre in public during the campaign. Just a 5 or 10 minute diversion during a one hour rally.
The Democrat media will not know how or be able to spin this. When these people’s past writings (good and bad) are elevated it will cause bedlam in their minds.
Trump speech fantasy….
So there’s this guy Kasich, a Republican all his life, Governor of Ohio, one of my rivals for the nomination. Nice guy. But now he’s a Democrat, or at least he’s speaking at their convention.
All because of me. What is it that I’m doing that’s so bad?
There are several of these people. The Lincoln Project. Look it up. These are men and women who have some things in common. Not one of these people want to leave Afghanistan. I understand there’s a debate about that, which I think I could win – we’ve been there 19 years, it’s about as far away from the USA geographically as you can get… . It has noble, wonderful people but for whatever reason , possibly foreign interference, I don’t know… is not exactly on the forefront of economic or technological innovation. So I think that debate has already been won. Didn’t Barack Obama run on getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan? But somehow that didn’t happen…
Democrats don’t want to leave. Why? I know it’s a difficult decision, but is this just kicking the can down the road? Using our men and women as policemen in a very different culture in a faraway land? Our military resources, our credibility as a world power that does not seek to occupy other countries? Let’s have that debate.
So what’s going on? Look into these people’s past writing, especially about Iraq and Afghanistan. I know these people have said some things over the years I agree with, but they also seem to all agree on trade. They also have opposition to my immigration policies in common. So I am asking Democrats how smart do you think these guys are? Just because they
I just don’t believe this is about my personality. It’s really about other things. We are not in high school anymore.
If Democrats want to take these people endorsement of Joe Biden as a sign of something , they also have to be aware these people were staunch supporters of George WBush, and other major policies they’ve disagreed with over the years.
I’m going to stop now because I’m not getting paid for this.
I’ll keep going back to the fact that George Will was the guy who labeled George H.W. Bush as a lapdog 34 years ago, in his column attacking Bush for having the temerity to use language against Geraldine Ferraro and Mario Cuomo that Will found to violate the laws of decency for Republican politicians.
Not Democrats. Republicans. And only Republicans, because George Will sees the GOP as his party.
Will tut-tutted the statue-topplers and the other angry Antifa types and hyper-woke college professors and student at the start of July. But it was a perfunctory chiding compared to the hatred he has for Donald Trump’s style and that of his supporters, and much of #NeverTrump is made up of people equally obsessed with style-over-substance. Trump’s the great orange whale they’ve focused on with Ahab-like obsession, to where defeating him is all-consuming, and any concerns they might have with Joe Biden and the Democrats agenda — or with the decorum of Biden’s Democratic supporters — take a seat so far in the back it might as well not even be in the same building, let alone the same room as their anger over what they think Trump as done to ‘their’ political party.
The most maniacal of that faction in places like The Lincoln Project, wouldn’t have even gone as far as Will did in his July 2 column taking the anarchists to task (even if he now seeks to enable that behavior by supporting Biden). Anything Trump opposes they support, and anyone who is not opposed to Trump must be eliminated from the Republican Party, as the WaPo reported on Tuesday:
They want as much Democrat money as they can get so they can repair their financial situations. These people are truly disgusting.
This is excellent. Short.
What is this “great man” nonsense regarding Will? He’s always been a self-regarding self-designated patrician who does not produce anything. GW is a persuader, not a producer.
Same could be said of our entire pundit class.
Load them onto the B Ark. First ones tossed out of the lifeboat. America is better off without them.
This is from @Jon1979 fyi not me.
You really could sub “Trump” for “Bush” and modernize a few other names in Will’s 1/30/86 column (Cuomo can stay Cuomo there), and does what he’s saying about Bush 41 really sound any different from what Will is complaining about in 2020?
Flip all this to the current Trump/Biden dispute about defunding the police, and Will’s on the same side of the argument now as then, primarily for decorum purposes.