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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
This seems like mission creep. French, who BTW served in the Middle East, made his rep mostly as a legal mind writing about religious freedom issues. He was good at that, but, having worked his way to a platform, now feels qualified to expound on other issues and complain about evangelicals. This happens a lot.
They go where the bucks are. Most of their connections are among Republicans, so their contacts for money are there as well, and they need to try to identify as such. There’s probably a whole bunch of Democratic consultant grifters like them who have used up the money on that side.
Do we welcome them back? There are many Conservatives/Republicans who don’t like Trump but who have not made a flashy display of denouncing the GOP outright and working against its electoral goals. When Bill Kristol put out that ludicrous “We’re all Democrats now” statement, he’s right – for his crew. I think that, as far as the vast, vast majority of the Right is concerned, Kristol, et al are Democrats now. There’s no welcoming them back after this, so they better get used to the non-gendered bathrooms over at their new home.
From what I can tell, The Dispatch looks like it was created out of three circumstances:
1. Steve Hayes needed a job after The Weekly Standard bit the dust.
2. Jonah Goldberg wanted better star billing than he was getting in the chorus line at National Review.
3. David French was under contract to NR at the time, so he missed joining the ship of fools over at The Bulwark.
Even more baffling to me is how pundits act as though every right leaning voter reads them, and that they also respect them enough to take their advice. What’s the circulation of NR again? What’s the membership here, up to 5,000?
So, rather than accepting that people actually vote their perceived interests and will, in the absence of a compelling alternative, vote for a guy like Trump, they berate other pundits and actual voters and speculate endlessly about woulda, shoulda, coulda, over things they have zero control over. Then they don’t educate themselves, or refuse to comprehend why these people didn’t vote for Rubio or Jeb or whoever, or what set up the environment such that people voted for Trump. They think we will “learn” by a Trump defeat. No we won’t – or we already did ( learn from two previous defeats) which is more like it.
They certainly haven’t learned, and they demonstrate that with every column and every podcast. Rather than accept the reality, they whine about how people aren’t as politically sophisticated as they and aren’t really activated by the cogent points made by the Rubio Debating Society.
You know I’d like to take a poll of these pundits to see how many follow any team sports. I bet 90% of them don’t. Every sports fan understands at some point that Monday morning quarterbacking is a fools game. If only the coach had gone for the field goal instead of the touchdown we would have won!
Then assigning blame to a single decision, by a coach or a player, or call by a referee as pivotal retrospectively. Stupid Jets fans over the age of 14 even understand how absurd that is. Or maybe these people just think we’re stupid.
Yes, we know, Nancy. ; )
Of course. French won’t let us forget it…
That was a Best of the Web Today/James Taranto/John Kerry homage.
Uh. All due respect to your continued appeals in the face of adversity to join the NT dark side, but I’m definitely not going to take your advice.
The Times has already fired Bill Kristol once — Ross Douthat replaced him as their other columnist along with David Brooks because (ironically in hindsight), Kristol was seen as too strident a conservative for the Times’ readership, who wanted a conservative columnist who’d fold like a cheap tent when pressured. Which explains Brooks’ two decades of employment at the paper.
Jonah denies there was a break with Rich Lowery, but going by their debate around the time he left NR and a few comments since then towards people like VDH or Henry Olson, he seemed to be concerned that Lowery was trying to find an accommodation with Trump’s brand of nationalism, and was looking for a middle ground that was less compromising towards Trump, but also not to the point of allowing Trump to control their ideological beliefs as the folks at The Bulwark have. The Dispatch doesn’t like Trump and has taken to the Bulwark-like snarking at his supporters at times, but they haven’t extrapolated out from that yet to claim that therefore all conservative positions are now bad, because they’re backed by Trump and/or people who back Trump.
While I do believe there is also ideological reasoning behind Goldberg’s leaving NR, I suspect that the “star factor” has something to do with his leaving, as well. After all, NR’s ranks have plenty of Trump-critical writers (Charlie Cooke, Jim Geraghty, Jay Nordingler, to name a few), and Goldberg had become the most visible of that magazine’s writers with regular appearances on Special Report and his Remnant podcast. I don’t think I’d lose money betting on the Norma Desmond, “I AM big – it’s National Review that got small!” factor being a motivation behind his finding a platform that could be more Jonah-centric.
Agree. I think it’s the equivalent of “going out on your own.” “I’ve paid my dues at the firm, now it’s time to hang out my own shingle with a few friends.”
About the “Lincoln Project”
Never-Trump Project Lincoln Co-Founder Had Contract With Russian Government
From Politico
“Weaver — a longtime Republican operative who continued advising Kasich after 2016 and is an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump — registered as a foreign agent after signing a contract last month to lobby on behalf of Tenam Corp., a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company.”
There is a lot to discuss here and I hope to have time to come back to this later this evening.
All I would like to say at the moment is that while you may not agree with the Bulwark or The Dispatch (and I have argued several times on here that I do have large disagreements with both…and Gary I am a paid subscriber to The Dispatch so I have listened) please let’s not turn the conservative movement into the left and begin trying to cancel eachother. There is a very vibrant debate on the right at the moment that is healthy even if I do not agree with some of it (the attack on the Enlightenment for example) but the ability of the right to allow these debates will be a way in which conservatism and defeat the new left.
I subscribe to The Dispatch and have listened to the Bulwark podcast/read a few articles. I will remain a subscriber to the first and avoid the latter in the future. I quite like David French’s Sunday newsletter.
It’s likely to be chilly. They should wear sweaters.
Welcome “them” back?
I’ll say this about True conservative Trump fans, they do not lack self-esteem.
The Bulwark and Dispatch are manifestations of what happens when conservatives, striving for careers in Washington punditry, become infected with status anxiety.
Since I’m the one quoted, I take it I’m the one being labeled a “True conservative Trump fan.” I take umbrage at this categorization: Nowhere here (or anywhere else) have I ever proclaimed my fandom for Trump. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – while I understand the appeal of Trump to many voters, most of his behavior and quite a few of his policy stances alarms me. That said, I also recognize the very real danger to this country in hoisting a white flag and voting Democrat.
So yes, I say “them” when I refer to those who have, as The Bulwark/Dispatch (The BulPatch?) crowd, publicly disavowed the Right. One does not have to swear personal allegiance to Trump to remain on the Right. But disavowing all of the Right because of one’s antipathy for Trump? Yeah – that makes those people a “them.”
Absolutely.
I call it “The Lincoln Chafee Project” – and given the history of the idiot in question, the name is very apt indeed.
Pretty sure their funding from Pierre Omidyar will dry up. They will have served their purpose.
These are the type of guys that were all upset when Newt Gingrich delivered them the house after 40 years in the minority.
It depends. Post-Trump would there still be a benefit to having a stealth Democrat organization selling itself as a Republican organization to a media anxious to have fake “Republicans” bad-mouth Republicans on the national stage?
Maybe, but if Republicans lose the White House, the Senate, and the House (as the Nevers seem to believe they should), I don’t think any supposed remnant of the party anywhere will be useful to the Left. It will have won permanent control.
That being said I still miss Bill Kristols and Steven Last’s newsletter for the Weekly Standard. Those were informative pieces of interest.
I learned lots of things especially about the world of Tennis from Lasts newsletters.
I still watch Bill’s interviews occasionnaly on Youtube. The loss of video is sad, he needs to learn how to Zoom.
You got Shannon’s attention:
Does she not understand how this site works?