How and when conservatism's intellectual death throes began

How did we come to such a low state of affairs hustled by the lowest and least deserving among us, America's netherworld of loutish leadership — like this:

"The Bill is GREAT. The Golden Age of America will soon be upon us." Words from the most loutish of all on his Orwellian-named website, Truth Social. (He posted this a week ago, presumably to open up more time to share even deeper thoughts, such as: "Has anyone noticed that, since I said 'I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,' she’s no longer 'HOT?'")

The GREAT tax bill, as you know, is now coursing its way through "The People's House," dressed in that lower chamber's most irony-laden, shall we say, "creativity." A key passage from The NY Times' legislative coverage, based on "the latest assessment [Friday] from the Penn Wharton Budget Model":

People making between about $51,000 and $17,000 could lose about $700 on average in after-tax income beginning in 2026 ... when factoring in both wages and federal aid. That reduction would worsen over the next eight years. People reporting less than $17,000 in income would see a reduction closer to $1,000, on average, also increasing over time. By contrast, the top 0.1 percent ... would gain on average more than $389,000 in after-tax income in 2026. The Penn Wharton estimate sought to analyze the full scope of the Republican tax package, computing the effects of the tax cuts as well as the plan to pay for them by slashing federal spending on other programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Combined, those policies could fall disproportionately on the poorest, including those near or below the poverty line.

Such is the coming of "The Golden Age of America." The evil clown who wrote that also wrote in January: "The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our country. Then we switched over to income tax.... Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!" In those words, his earlier insidiousness converted into the mere stupidity of the far right's unrelentingly pursued ignorance.

This needs no saying to anyone familiar with the basic history of the United States, but I'll say it anyway. The above history is mostly bunk; linking Trump's reference to America's 19th-century industrialization to high tariffs is what one economics paper calls "a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning," i.e., after this, therefore because of this. What steep tariff rates largely produced were rent-seeking, the bribing of Congress for favorable rates, and more costly consumer goods. Hence, by 1913, the 16th Amendment's federal income tax. No elaboration whatsoever is needed regarding Trump's further idiocy of "tariffs will pay off our debt."

I return to the opening question, How did we come to such a low state of affairs, one in which the least cerebral and almost inconceivably inept are in terrifying charge of leading this nation? To that I offer another brief history.

Political historians began noticing as early as the 1970s that conservative intellectualism was in systemic, qualitative decline. The shallowest of "movement" luminaries such as Phyllis Schlafly became respectable among Republicans; neoconservatism, whose socially liberal origins lay in the mid-1960s, became incoherently hawkish in foreign affairs; and textbook macroeconomics was suddenly contaminated by deficit-exploding, trickle-down Laffer Curve humbug.

The intellectually corrupted descent of what, curiously, continued calling itself conservativism mushroomed even more discernibly after President Reagan's economic "innovations" of deep national harm. Facts, reality, empirical evidence — all were dispensable when encountering ideologically pseudoconservative needs. Worse, the right's public mendacity rapidly took the form of an indispensable political weapon.

Here's one economist commenting on the "conservative mind-set," pardon said set's long-outdated adjective: "It turns out that many conservatives, for all their anti-totalitarian rhetoric, have Orwellian instincts: if the record doesn't say what you wish it did, hide it or fudge it."

The economist was Paul Krugman, recognizing not recently but 33 years ago the right's entrenched Orwellianism, as recited in this post's second paragraph. And powerfully entrenched it is. Today's tax bill? They're still at it, hammering away at perhaps their most cherished, repeatedly debunked howler. From the Times story: "Republicans have vigorously rejected any assertion that their bill is better for the richest Americans, arguing that it would generate substantial economic returns and deliver new jobs and rising wages in the process."

When your party retains a position that's either deliberately wrong or just cretinously embraced and proceeds as well to elevate, not once but twice, this country's most conspicuously corrupt imbecile to its highest office, then you the supportive voter have cooperated in historical conservatism's titanic intellectual degradation. Let me reword that. Its death.

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