Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Peter Rustin's avatar

Charlie, as a liberal Democrat, I was surprised to find your and the Bulwark's work absolutely mandatory. Thank you for striking a note of wry sanity and humor. I wish you the best and hope to still find your voice in the darkness ahead.

Expand full comment
Shawn's avatar

Two things. One, I'll certainly miss your morning shots, even if we didn't always agree. I have always liked reading your rundowns of things in the morning.

Two, I think we have to admit that George Will's idea, that Trump was a response to progressives, is part of the reason that the GOP and conservatism became what it is today. That response to something being bad in your own party being 'actually, it's not us, it's them that did this' means that you're never culpable for what happens on your watch.

The GOP spent the better part of thirty years creating alternate institutions, alternate news sources, cultivating anti-government and anti-intellectual sentiment, and the result was that when someone came in and took over, the machine they built kept right on running as normal. There's a pretty big line between reagan saying that the worst words were 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help' and Trump claiming that the government is actively evil and must be destroyed. There's a pretty direct line between guys like O'Reilly and Beck railing about conspiracies and crime families and Trump and his followers taking that literally.

Progressives, such as they are, did not turn conservatives into paranoid, insular, xenophobic nutjobs. They did that themselves. They deliberately decided to disengage from the wider culture in the 1980s, gained setbacks in the 1990s when they failed to impeach Bill Clinton and pass their agenda during W. Bush's term, and when they finally looked around again during the Obama years, gazed upon a world that they didn't recognize.

It's not unlike the British Brexit movement, where British conservatives expected to leave the EU, and that the EU would beg them to stay. Only, that's not what happened. They left, the EU shrugged, and Britain sputtered in confusion. Conservatives in America had a similar situation. They disengaged, separated their states economically as much as possible, which meant relying overwhelmingly on blue state tax money, and then when blue states kept right on humming, they suddenly had a crisis of self. 'What if we're not actually that important?' they asked, and that simply couldn't be.

In the mind of the Trumpian conservative, going back at least to 2010, it is inconceivable that Kansas' economic plan failed and California's works. It is impossible that Florida is mired in endless problems and New York hasn't collapsed yet. They are told, and believe, that blue states are apocalyptic hellscapes where blue haired karens lecture the population on gender theory, but this doesn't gel with the fact that these places are, somehow, still around.

In other words, George Will is one of the conservatives who didn't understand his own voters or his own party. I knew that the GOP was doomed in 2008 when McCain had to tell a voter that no, Obama wasn't a secret muslim bent on destroying America because he was black. How anyone saw that and went 'I'm sure this party is going to be fine' is absurd. The progressive movement has problems, big ones in some cases, but the Democratic party is a functional institution with lots of interest groups. The GOP is a monolithic, cult like entity that believes that the apocolypse for liberals is tomorrow, and they are gleefully waiting for it to happen.

Expand full comment
1112 more comments...