Why Are Conservatives In Despair?

Why Are Conservatives In Despair?

Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti

 

 

ROD DREHER

The American Conservative

APRIL 23, 2021

 

 

As many of you know, David Brooks and I are friends. I can tell you that it’s hard to find a more generous and decent man anywhere. That’s really true, and that, besides my innate loyalty to friends, is why I ball up my internal fist whenever I hear people criticize him harshly. And it’s why I’m not going to publish any comments on this blog that criticize him personally (as distinct from criticizing his ideas). But I also recognize that David is dispositionally and convictionally more liberal an I am, and far more optimist about the way of the world. This is a preface to say that his column today is halfway about me and people like me.

 

It starts like this:

 

Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

 

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

 

This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.

 

“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”

 

Here’s why it’s “halfway” about me.

 

As you know, I was never a Trumper, but also not a Never Trumper — and Brooks’s column today illustrates why. I did not and utterly do not share the sense among the Never Trumpers (Republican or Democrat) that the system is basically okay, and the country is basically okay. Neither did I share the view that Donald Trump was any kind of solution.

 

My book Live Not By Liescame out on September 29 last year, but the manuscript was completed in March 2020, before Covid became the catastrophe is has been, and before George Floyd was killed. When the paperback is eventually published, those two tectonic events will be in an additional chapter, but so too will be the rise of QAnon on the Right, and the insane behavior of many on the Right in the post-election period. I had not seen that Kerwick quote before Brooks’s column, but that is the kind of logic that one uses to steel oneself to behave like Bosnian Serb militia at Srebrenica. I want no part of it.

(That said, read the whole Kerwick column; the quote Brooks uses is much less offensive in context. Berwick is not talking about going on the offense. He’s talking about being defensive against rioters and Antifa. He’s saying if you want to protect yourself, your property, and your neighborhood from these bullies, you have to be prepared to be violent in response to violence. I actually agree with that. Some Christians are pacifists; most are not. I am not. If Berwick had not written the odious paragraph Brooks cited, I would have agreed with his column.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, Brooks goes on:

Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side. This is no longer just about Trump the man, it’s about how you are going to look at reality — as the muddle its always been, or as an apocalyptic hellscape. It’s about how you pursue change — through the conversation and compromise of politics, or through intimidations of macho display.

I can tell a story in which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.

OK, let’s get to work.

 

Here’s the one good thing I can say about this analysis: “macho display” is a real problem on the Right. Yesterday here in Budapest, I was talking with some political-minded Hungarians about the situation in the US. I told them that we conservatives hurt ourselves by falling for loudmouth grifters who are good at being performative, but don’t actually get anything done. “Owning the libs” is fine, I guess, but it’s not the same thing as accomplishing real change. I have zero interest in lib-owners who separate the gullible from their money, and who rage impotently (but profitably) while the Left consolidates its victories.

That said, the column is the kind of thing you’d have expected to see in a liberal St. Petersburg newspaper in 1915. I don’t say that to be insulting. I say it descriptively. It is the opinion of an intelligent, cultivated liberal observer who cannot see how bad things have become. The fact that Donald Trump was no kind of realistic solution does not mean that the conditions that led to his rise are false, or that the Republicans who see things apocalyptically are wrong. I too would have been one of the 51 percent of conservatives in that poll who said that politics is primarily about “ensuring the survival of the country,” though I emphatically do not believe the threat to us comes from terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants. The threat to us comes primarily from the elite leadership class in government, academia, corporate America, media, and other institutions.

It is true that conservatives are badly led, and that those who think things will be okay if we just cling tighter to Trump are only making things worse, if only because they have chosen a false solution. But I genuinely don’t understand how any non-progressive person can think things are basically fine. Let me put a fine point on it: I don’t understand how any non-progressive person can be anything just short of apocalyptic, given the state of things.