Matt Lewis is a long-time conservative pundit and writer and you may run across his stuff in the DailyBeast from time to time. Yesterday he asked a poignant question all Republicans should be asking themselves: Did I Join a Movement That Naturally Attracts Extremists and Kooks?. He did and he wants to understand why. "Politics," he wrote, has always attracted eccentric opportunists, but people in this administration are especially weird." He may detest everything about Omarosa but he's savvy enough to understand that "she's just the latest example of the motley crew Trump has made famous." For a guy who believed, as a very, very, very young man that Reagan's movement had "intellectual heft," he sees the Trump Regime as "an aberration" rather than as the inevitable outcome.
Take, for example, the president’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who is currently on trial for tax and bank fraud and reportedly paid more than $18,000 for a python jacket. Or Trump’s former senior adviser, Steve Bannon, who studies obscure Italian fascists and insists on wearing multiple layers of clothing yet doesn’t seem to own a comb or a razor.And let’s not forget Rob Porter, the straight-looking Trump staffer who (allegedly) beat the hell out of two of his ex-wives before dating Hope Hicks. Seb Gorka was the Hungarian fugitive who was a villain straight out of central casting. Scott Pruitt was the former head of the EPA with a penchant for French cuisine and Ritz Carlton hand lotion. Only the best people?Clearly, Trump likes casting people who are not just interesting characters, but who are also cartoon caricatures. There’s Rudy Giuliani, the bulging-eyed former “Mayor of America” who has become a parody of himself. There’s Mooch (Anthony Scaramucci), who is essentially a caricature of a fast-talking Italian businessman.And Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer who watched Goodfellas one too many times. And Corey Lewandowski, the erstwhile campaign manager who probably still has a poster of Lee Atwater hanging on his bedroom wall. And even Stephen Miller’s own uncle thinks he’s a schmuck. I could go on.It’s almost as if Trump visited the far corners of the universe to bring together a collection of supervillains....Normal Americans find ourselves asking... How many people do you know who have (allegedly) beaten the hell out of two ex-wives? How many people do you know who worked for Russian oligarchs? How many people do you know who have been indicted? Any members of your family own a python jacket? ... Think of it this way: Even if you prefer the implementation of conservative public policy (as I do), on the micro level, who would you trust alone to watch your children? Donald Trump? Rudy? Gorka? Or Barack Obama? I have to say, I’d trust Obama in a minute....In recent years, the worst trends seem to have disproportionately hit the American right. It’s unclear why the right was more susceptible to forces that ultimately gave us Donald Trump’s “legion of doom,” but my guess is that conservatives felt like they had to create alternative media outlets to distribute their message. Along the way, those alternative media outlets (most famously, talk radio and Fox News), metastasized from alternate outlets into alternate realities. Liberals, still wedded to mainstream media outlets, are (for now) more moored to reality.If I were coming of age today and my example for conservatism was based on Donald Trump, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, would I sign up? I can’t imagine that I would join that cause. Should this trend continue, it’s going to be increasingly hard for Republicans to attract thoughtful, compassionate, and even sane supporters. If that happens, not only will the GOP become progressively whiter, older, more rural, and more male, it will also become... weirder.
How could anyone possibly disagree? Another rightist writer, this time at the National Review, Jay Nordlinger, was whining yesterday that Rubio seemed to be embracing what Barack Obama used to say when he was deriding and caricaturing conservative philosophy: You’re on your own!" Rubio denounced "the radical you’re-on-your-own individualism promoted by our government and by our society in the last 30 years." From some kind of tower of unreality, Nordlinger, has persuaded himself that Republican emphasis on "limited government, civil society, and personal responsibility" was not all about "dog-eat-dog individualism" (it was) and not social Darwinism (it is).
Currently, there is a critique of the Right that goes something like this:For years, conservatives had a message for the down and out in inner cities: Quit blaming others for your problems. Take responsibility for your lives. Drop the mantras of “systemic racism” and “the legacy of slavery.” Reject the victim mentality. Turn down your music, hitch up your pants, lay off drugs, stop having babies out of wedlock, get a job.And now? The Right talks differently, when it comes to the down and out-- the down and out in places other than inner cities. They do a lot of scapegoating: of foreigners, immigrants, banks-- the whole populist arsenal.If this critique stings, it may be because there is truth in it. I think of Donald Trump’s closing ad in the 2016 campaign, his “final argument.”...Name calling has apparently become a Republican trait-- a sine qua non. The Trump style has trickled down to the Republican party and the conservative movement at large. This is something hard to measure in the usual balls-and-strikes approach to Trump.According to polls, a startling percentage of Republicans have a favorable view of Putin; and a startling percentage wish Trump had the authority to shut down media outlets he dislikes. How do you measure that in balls and strikes?
