The 6th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

This journal expects little from Paul Krugman, whose writings seldom offer more than a predictable mash of remedial textbook Keynesianism and strident campus partisanship.  However, credit must be given where credit is due, and Mr. Krugman’s latest broadside against the Republican punditocracy, “Twilight of the Apparatchiks,” hits most of its marks.  Indeed, we regret not having written it first.

Perceptively explaining the conservative commentariat’s  fecklessness in the face of Trump, Krugman writes:

So what’s the source of this obliviousness? The answer, I’d suggest, is that in recent years — and, in fact, for the past couple of decades — becoming a conservative activist has actually been a low-risk, comfortable career choice. Most Republican officeholders hold safe seats, which they can count on keeping if they are sufficiently orthodox. Moreover, if they should stumble, they can fall back on “wingnut welfare,” the array of positions at right-wing media organizations, think tanks and so on that are always there for loyal spear carriers.

And loyalty is almost the only thing that matters. Does an economist at a right-wing think tank have a remarkable record of embarrassing mistakes? Does a pundit have an almost surreal history of bad calls? No matter, as long as they hew to the orthodox line.

Whatever one’s disagreements with Krugman, none of this can be denied.  In truth, the reality is much worse (and let us for the moment leave aside the extent to which this reality also prevails on the left).  The degeneration of conservative ideas is not simply a matter of partisan enthusiasms overwhelming detached scholarship, as Krugman implies.  It is not because of misplaced zeal that the party has come to rely on blind loyalty to old orthodoxy.  Quite the contrary.  The party insists on loyalty to orthodoxy because it has no new ideas.  And it has no new ideas because its intellectual leadership has allowed conservative thinking to ossify into little more than repeating the slogans of the 1980s and wondering why they don’t work anymore.  Of course the carried interest loophole is vital to economic health!  Of course free trade is beneficial always and everywhere!  Of course holding elections in Iraq and Egypt and Syria will transform those societies!  The calendars in conservative think tanks ended in 1983, or maybe 2003.

Why is this so?  Again, Krugman is mostly right.  Becoming a conservative intellectual in good standing today is all about finding a sinecure at the right donor-funded institution and writing for the right money-losing magazine.  Attend the right summer fellowship programs and get the right NRO internship and you, too, can become an up-and-coming conservative blogger!  And once established as a conservative luminary, you can be assured that the conservative media will never criticize the actual results of your work or proposals, as long as you obey the unwritten rule that the system must never be criticized.  Questioning the conservative intellectual consensus is costly; simply being wrong has no price.  It is the conservative equivalent of university tenure, and the system’s beneficiaries fight with equal relentlessness to preserve their prerogatives.  However admirable the origins of many conservative institutions, the result today is essentially a madrassah system in which scholars are judged on how perfectly they can recite the holy text, not on whether they can improve upon it.

We can hardly blame conservative intellectuals for seeking to propagate their doctrines.  But we do blame them for making ideological consistency the main criterion of excellence.  We blame them for confusing fealty to institutions designed to offer apologias for their donors with intellectual courage and leadership.  We blame them for finding truth in adherence to dogma rather than achieved results, quality in comfortable conformity rather than depth of experience or thought.  Ronald Reagan’s life experience was not limited to attending the right seminars nor, for that matter, was Irving Kristol’s.  And if it were, most probably neither would have amounted to much of anything.

Like many elite institutions, orthodox conservatism has become its own mandarin class, and as such it is no surprise that it fails to produce any effective political or intellectual leadership.  It has no capacity for self-examination or critique.  It has no basis outside–and it is incapable of drawing ideas from anywhere beyond–the established think tank programs, where one former low-ranking Bush appointee imparts the immutable creed to the next generation of already sympathetic “young leaders.”  The actual experience of a policy’s author, or the practical results of its implementation, rarely seem to be considered.  The system is designed to create a professoriate and a priesthood, not a president; a book club rather than a government.  The result is an intellectual leadership as obscurantist as the Lebanese Druze, without any of their political agility.

The “seriousness” of every Republican candidate is judged by how many of the old think tank hacks they have on staff as advisors, regardless of how many failures those same advisors may have been responsible for in the previous administration.  Any candidate suggesting the slightest deviation from the old Reaganite platform will be denounced as an irresponsible heretic.  Any candidate who promises a third term of the Bush administration will inevitably be praised for “innovative policy proposals.”

Of the formerly “greatest field ever” of Republican presidential candidates, one glaring deficiency characterized the whole establishment-approved lot: Neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz nor Scott Walker nor any of the others (except Paul, Carson, and Trump; Bush’s career as a showpiece for Lehman does not count) had any significant life experience outside of politics.  Is it any wonder, then, that they could not conceive of a political campaign outside the straight-jacketed conventions of the conservative cocoon?  That they could curry favor with pundits and donors, but no one else?

Yet the politicians, at least, have to win elections to hold their offices.  The former frontrunners of the media-think tank complex never gracefully suspend their campaigns.  Why anyone ever considered Bob Kagan and Max Boot credible foreign policy strategists in the first place defies belief, neither of them having ever accomplished anything greater than speechwriting and punditry.  But that anyone continues to publish their nonsensical drivel–now so thoroughly discredited by an uninterrupted series of failures over the last two decades–is an insult to reason.  And yet, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men of conservative media foist them upon their readers again and again.  Why?  So they can express how outraged–nay, appalled!–they are by the voters who reject them?  Where is the National Review special issue which denounces these clueless blowhards and Clinton supporters?

Thus it is that most conservative institutions today are intellectually bankrupt.  They have been for decades.  Most of the movement’s leading talkers are a defunct clerisy.  And it is this class which Trump now threatens most.  He has already exposed them and their whitepaper filigrees as hopelessly irrelevant–if not repellent–to a wide swath of the party, and a Trump victory would shatter all the precious china of conservative “thought” completely.

Admittedly, we wish that National Review would have purged the failed doctrines of the Bush administration and their oblivious authors from its pages rather than waiting for Trump to marginalize National Review.  And we would prefer that the destroyer of institutional conservatism had a firmer grasp of policy and a better understanding of the theoretical currents in American history.  But at this point it is clear that a plurality of the party, at least, would prefer even the shallowest Trumpism to the profound failure of Bush era conservative doctrine and its gatekeepers.  Frankly, we find it hard to disagree with them.

The Bush presidency discredited the movement’s ideas.  The Romney campaign proved it could no longer win on a national level.  And, win or lose, Donald Trump has proven that its self-proclaimed intellectual elite no longer motivates its own party.  For even the “non-Trump” candidates have discovered that they can only win by running against Trump’s personal flaws, rather than for the desiccated husk of Bush era ideology.

In a healthy political movement, such events might be cause for serious reflection and a rethinking of its doctrines, of whether its policy platform is the right one for the country and its constituents.  But we do not have a healthy movement, so the debate is over whether a particular candidate or policy is authentically “conservative” or appropriately “Reaganite,” but never whether it is right.  Is this really all there is to conservative thought?

If so, those who continue to affiliate with the movement will soon find themselves holding their debates in the basement rooms of used bookstores, wielding as much political influence as the pre-Bernie Sanders Trotskyites.  Trump’s many shortcomings notwithstanding, clearing the dead wood of such a hopeless elite is the most compelling rationale for his campaign.

—PLAUTUS

The 5th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

The 4th post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

Trumpism, in other words, looked like a political movement that could — and possibly even should — be incorporated into the GOP.

The 3rd post on the Journal of American Greatness originally published in February, 2016.

Originally published as the second post on the Journal of American Greatness in February, 2016.

Arising from the collapse of the Bush campaign comes an unmistakable if somewhat disturbing sense of pleasure.  This pleasure goes beyond the schadenfreude of the hard right at the humiliation of a “RINO.”  It is palpable throughout the party and beyond, and it is evident across the spectrum of media coverage.  Even the candidate himself, by all accounts a decent man, seems relieved that his ordeal is over and that he can move on to all the “cool things” a life outside politics has to offer.

No such glee was felt at the exit of Scott Walker, who was for a time considered a similarly strong candidate.  And no such excitement will greet the departure of others as the field narrows.  This striking fact that no one is mourning—and everyone is celebrating—the defeat of Jeb Bush demonstrates that his campaign actually did have a certain significance, although certainly not the significance intended.

Students of campaign history will find peculiar parallels between the 2016 primary and that of 1996, which was delightfully chronicled by Michael Lewis under the Trumpian title Losers.  Lewis at the time was especially drawn to Morry Taylor, an iconoclastic businessman whose principal argument was that a political class composed of idiots too incompetent to succeed in business was driving the country to ruin.  Taylor’s campaign, of course, appealed to few besides Lewis in 1996—the world was younger then.

However, if Taylor was Lewis’ hero, his most pathetic character was Lamar Alexander, whose banners read Lamar! and whose expensive, pre-packaged and ultimately hollow campaign perfectly presaged Jeb! 2016.  It is not coincidental that the destitution of both candidacies was revealed from the start by the false familiarity and artificial exclamation points.  Lamar! was the brainchild of Mike Murphy, current manager of Bush’s superpac.  Lewis quotes Morry Taylor describing Murphy, his former neighbor turned consultant, as “a fat little kid from next door who didn’t know anything you don’t know and who is now making hundreds of thousands of dollars telling Lamar Alexander what you think.”

Within this Trumpian character sketch is precisely what motivates the electorate’s euphoria at the unraveling of Jeb! 2016: everyone can see that the so-called elite is really quite stupid!  And they are losers!

Bush is losing not because his policies are too moderate or even because he is supported by the “establishment.”  He is losing because he believes in the establishment.  Everything he says and everything he does reveals him to be the devotee of an elite that is thoroughly discredited to everyone except itself.  And the elite, in creating, funding and advising Jeb! 2016, revealed how deserving of discredit it is.

Who but a paid political consultant could be so politically tone-deaf as to believe that attacking Rubio’s missed Senate votes would be a popular issue?  Yet Bush, apparently unable to think outside the narrow circles of beltway conventional wisdom, deployed this line and effectively ended his already flailing campaign.  He exposed his own lack of judgment in listening to such advice, and, more significantly, the intellectual bankruptcy of his highly paid, supposedly elite, advisors.  This exposure of an elite wholly bereft of quality underlies the exhilaration experienced at the end of the Bush campaign—the only joyful thing to come out of Jeb! 2016.

Pundits with nothing better to write about complain, as they always do, that this election has favored sharp sound soundbites over substantive policy.  But what constitutes substantive policy?  What innovative or even interesting ideas did the Bush campaign propose?  After months of campaigning, he could not articulate a coherent view on immigration, education, Iraq, or even fantasy football.  Bush, like any candidate, was called substantive only insofar as his positions comported with the views of the political, financial, and intellectual elite.

And the critical difference between 1996 and 2016 is that Morry Taylor’s message has found an audience.  Indeed, insofar as a candidate is seen to personally endorse the elite consensus (which is distinct from simply being endorsed by the elite), that candidate will struggle to inspire any broader constituency.  This might say something about today’s elections or today’s electorate, but it certainly says something about today’s political elite.  Ben Bernanke can call people know-nothings, but what, exactly, in Ben Bernanke’s record should merit unquestioning confidence?  Is it really so absurd that a meaningful segment of the public would prefer candidates offering little beyond opposition to Davoisie conventional wisdom over the vacuous “substance” and mindless conformity of the elite consensus?

Quoting Lewis again:

For the last four years Lamar has been raising money by telling people he is the only Republican in America who can beat Bill Clinton.  He talks endlessly about his ‘vision.’  He squints as he does this; he sees it; the trouble is, no one else does….his pitch is that he is not someone else—he’s not Washington, he’s not a negative advertiser, above all he’s not Clinton.  But of course he is Washington, he is negative, and, above all, he is Clinton….To which segment of the American population does this appeal?…Alexander [only] attracts people who use niceness to get what they want.

The same phenomenon is present as well on the Democratic side.  Hillary may attain the nomination for lack of an opponent, but the obvious absence of enthusiasm for her candidacy is the result not only of endless scandal but also the inescapable sense that she represents and is personally invested in an elite status quo which commands no respect.

It is difficult to ignore the Weberian aspects of the present election.  The Clintons, of course, have always embodied the late Weberian political types—specialists without spirit and voluptuaries without heart—but this time the feeling is not confined to them alone.  The gulf between charisma and expertise has widened conspicuously since 1996, and the impression that electoral popularity now seems inversely proportionate to political experience cannot but disquiet.

It is tempting to see a return to an earlier and in many ways more vibrant condition of American politics—what Weber called “government by dilettantes,” in which voters prefer “having people in office whom we can spit upon, rather than a caste of officials who spit upon us.”  Indeed, after the experience of the last twenty years, in which the elite consensus has been wrong about seemingly every issue of any consequence, it is impossible to avoid the definitive Clintonian question: What difference, at this point, does it make?

— Plautus