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Late Night Excellent Reads: More on NR's Jihad Against Trump

Late Night Excellent Reads: More on NR's Jihad Against Trump
By Anne Laurie

Jeb Lund, in the Guardian:

National Review, a Thurston Howell impression on print and with staples in it, published a special edition yesterday titled Against Trump. Not Stop Trump, or Dump Trump or even Chump Trump. "Against Trump." Toward a Normative Understanding of Trump Negation. Whatever.

I'm sure it will be very effective with all 5,000 subscribers who are not conservative thinktanks. There is definitely no way that the snob mouthpiece of the Republican party rolling out a coordinated attack on Donald Trump will backfire…

What makes this especially fun is that everything that makes Donald Trump a runaway success is a creation of conservatism. He is their Be Careful What You Wish For candidate…National Review can stand athwart history and yell stop, but they're standing in front of a snowball they've been pushing down a hill for the last half-century. Even the hand-wringing that Donald Trump is such an ugly and hateful candidate is hilarious from a rag that started out defending liberty and segregation…

The number-one rule of conservative mass politics and virality is always punch down. If that's not possible, weigh the value of punching sideways. You don't even have to get into some abstract discussion of the Southern Strategy to know that constantly pwning noobs, enemies and the teeming Other in the Republican field gets you clickthrough. If the National Review is going to be mad at Trump for this, they should at least be honest and admit they're mad because he's so much better at it….

Tom Scocca, for Gawker — “The National Review Makes Its Case Against the Republican Party”:

… There are, at this point, two fairly straightforward thoughtful arguments that a conservative publication could make against the rise of Donald Trump. One would be a pragmatic or tactical one: Despite his theatrical contempt for liberal elites, Trump is unpredictable and insufficiently committed to the conservative movement's plans and goals. Where a President Ted Cruz would fill the federal bench with names from a Federalist Society spreadsheet (or a spreadsheet Cruz himself had prepared for the Federalist Society), for all anyone knows, a President Trump might appoint Nancy Grace to the Supreme Court. That would surely make liberals mad, but it wouldn't get the big job done.

The other argument that a conservative publication could make against the rise of Donald Trump would be an unsparing self-examination and self-criticism, reckoning with the currents of brutish populism that have run from Nixon through Reagan through George W. Bush to the present-day circus, and humbly apologizing for its role in creating them. Any real attempt to write Donald Trump out of the Republican Party needs to engage, head on, with the fact that Donald Trump is currently polling far ahead of the field with people who identify as Republican voters. What is the conservative movement if it is not the way that voters who identify as conservative are moving?

Instead, the National Review's anti-Trump contributors offer a wishful litany of things that they would like to hold that conservatism means, and they refer to the established practice of conservative politics as merely a regrettable series of failures to live up to its principles…

The National Review may be upset enough by Trump to challenge him, but it's not upset enough to challenge the National Review…

Finally, for the flashing red cherry atop the NR‘s shite sundae…

A Biblical quotation for Erick Erickson, theological student, to contemplate: By their fruits ye shall know them. (Matthew 7:16-20)





January 23, 2016 at 01:03AM
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