Friday … Friday morning … For me, it was once that most wonderful time of the year, 52 times a year, with the kids jingle-belling and Krauthammer crooning and Charles telling us to be of good cheer.
Alas, that's the way it was in the good old days — in the latter days of GOP daftness-ascendency. We had raindrops on rubes and whiskers on Mittens and bright copper crackpots and warm, psychotic, pseudoconservative kittens (by the names of Palin and Bachmann). We had brown-paper policy positions tied up in bling; these were but a few of our and Krauthammer's favorite things.
And yet something has gone wrong, or so Charles now suspects. He is gloomy these days, dismayingly gloomy, and therefore his gloom is ruining my Friday mornings, once those most wonderful times of the year when I arose to greet another Krauthammer column.
I have been waiting, rather anxiously, for Krauthammer to acknowledge that this — the GOP's psychic implosion and outward burlesque — is what a peasants' revolt looks like. For years they've been fed a venomous diet of xenophobia, homophobia, jingoism, moral superiority, preposterous American exceptionalism and yet general contempt for America — and throughout, their payoff in leadership has been one of predictably diminishing returns: stupid wars, squalid debt, a lobotomized Congress and, above all, demagoguery so vile, a Donald J. Trump was bound to happen.
Krauthammer, however, sees the Donald not as a symptom of all that Krauthammer & Friends has advocated over the years, but as a unique pathogen of fresh introduction. Charles concedes that bugaboo immigrants have been a top Republican obsession for some time: "building the Great Wall is not particularly new. (I, for one, have been advocating that in this space since 2006.)" But now comes the despicable Mr. Trump, groans Krauthammer, "Dominating the discussion [with his] his two policy innovations: (a) abolition of birthright citizenship and (b) mass deportation."
Whence Trump's domination? Is he some sort of Shakespearean Prospero, a political sorcerer able to independently conjure and thus dominate the GOP's discussion? Or is Trump but a product of what lies fetid in the GOP? — what has lain fetid for years, festering into the now-manifested boil of populist Trumpism, a true white peasants' revolt.
All of which, declares Krauthammer, would be "merely ridiculous if it weren’t morally obscene." I rarely write of morality or even give it much thought, since if the word ever had any meaning, morally superior modern conservatism made a farce of it long ago. At the theoretical heart of neoconservatism sits an extraordinary claim to a global morality sparked by a bloody, brutal American exceptionalism; and then there's the almost equal moral obscenity of Krauthammer's plutocratic supply-siding, which has wracked the American middle class. The man writes of moral obscenities as Torquemada did, and his blind hypocrisy merely leaves one in ridiculous awe.
Enough of digression. Back to Krauthammer's central complaint. "Because [mass deportations and the like are] the view of the Republican front-runner, every other candidate is now required to react. So instead of debating border security, guest-worker programs and sanctuary cities — where Republicans are on firm moral and political ground — they are forced into a debate about a repulsive fantasy."
Here, what Krauthammer is saying is that Trump's competitors are now excusably required to be as repulsive as Trump. For good reason, Charles uses the passive voice: competitors are being forced into a repulsive debate. Or, "mistakes are being made," to put it in contemporary Nixonian language that rather neatly distances the human agency of these competitors from their "moral" failings.
In short, Donald Trump is making them do it. But of course it's not Donald Trump at all; it is, rather, the accumulation and acute acceleration of all those years of feeding the pseudoconservative peasants a quite venomous diet of phobic hostilities and self-celebratory malice.
And, in the end, Krauthammer approves of (indeed he contradicts himself as to what he sees as a top-down Trump revolt) permitting the peasants to dictate the GOP "discussion": "I strongly oppose the idea of ostracizing anyone from the GOP or the conservative movement. On whose authority? Let the people decide. But that is not to say that [Trump] should be exempt from normal scrutiny or from consideration of the effect of his candidacy on conservatism’s future" (emphasis mine).
It would be more accurate to say that Trump's candidacy isn't so much effecting conservatism's future as it is the ghastly expression of conservatism's past and present. And Charles is looking for some one to blame. This has made him cranky — for his is an impossible task — and his self-satisfied crooning just isn't what it once was. One of my very favorite things — a Krauthammer column — is slipping away.