GEORGE WILL DISAPPROVES OF YR TRUMPINESS

The GOP has gone so far off the rails that George Will is urging conservatives to vote Democrat this November.

Which would be significant if not for the fact that George Will’s opinion doesn’t really count for anything in conservative circles anymore.

Why am I blogging about this?

Mainly because I have a soft spot for George Will. To be sure, I rarely agree with him on anything, but I do see him as one of the last of his breed – an intellectual political commentator with a journalistic approach, a well-read understanding of the issues, and a deep sense of classical party loyalty and a firm belief in what the party stands for (or at least should stand for). When I was growing up, Will was among that class of newspaper pundit who not only had a good grasp of the political issues of the day, but could put together a decent and logical argument for his opinions of them – complete with stats, studies and anecdotes to back up his point.

Again, that’s not to say he was right. But you knew where you stood with him, and you knew that he had at least put some thought into whatever point he was trying to make.

For me, I always felt his main weakness is that his worldview often seems to come more from reading about it rather than experiencing it (particularly when it comes to baseball). That comes across in his writing – typically for Will, his latest column reads like an A- answer to a essay question in a university class. If he was a liberal instead of a conservative he could contribute song lyrics to Bad Religion. Who else but Will would quote The Federalist papers and A Man For All Seasons in the same column, much less use words like “vitiate”?

But that's exactly why I doubt anyone in Trump’s MAGA base cares what George says. For one thing, many of them probably wouldn’t understand half of it. For another, the MAGA clan has openly and frequently ridiculed intellectual elitists for the sole crime of thinking they’re smarter than everyone else. The fact that Trump is POTUS (Electoral College weirdness and Vlad Putin’s cyber-troll action team notwithstanding) is strong evidence that the modern conservative movement prefers opinion leaders who eschew intellectual reasoning in favor of people who shout a lot, insult their opponents personally and blame liberals, feminists and ethnic minorities for all their problems.

Also, Will quit the GOP over Trump’s nomination. He also bad-mouthed Bill O’Reilly to his face. Both of which are virtual treason in Trumpland.

In other words, George Will is one of many classic GOP loyalists who have been left behind by refusing to compromise on principles. Indeed, that’s why he quit the GOP – it’s no longer the party he once supported. Will is from that classic school of post-Vietnam conservatism embodied by William F Buckley’s National Review (of which Will was editor for something like eight years) and the Reagan-era GOP that had a specific ideological vision of what conservative govt should be and could accomplish – but was also rooted in a spirit of bipartisan deal-based practicality necessary to a two-party system.

Thanks to the Dubya Bush era and the Tea Party movement – enabled by the bullhorns of Fox News and conservative talk radio (and eventually Twitter) – the current GOP now embodies almost none of those principles and has morphed into something completely different and horrible. The GOP is dead. Long live the Trump Party. They kept the brand, but it’s a completely different company now. Etc. 

Consequently, no one in the current party is going to listen to his plea to vote the GOP completely out of power in Congress. The truth is, the majority of Republicans like this version of the GOP. Also, as other people have mentioned before (and correctly), the GOP wasn’t exactly dragged unwillingly into Trump’s hate-fueled xenophobic universe of dumb vitriolic race-baiting conspiracy theory batshit. 

The bigger problem is this: convincing conservatives to vote against the Trump Party means convincing them to vote for Democrats. Any given poll shows that most Repubs would vote for Trump all over again even knowing what they know now because they believe Hillary would have been be far, far worse. So I don’t see any of these people taking a chance on a Demo – much less to punish a party they don’t think needs fixing.

Ironically, of course, this is one of those times I agree with Will – to a point. I do think that the only thing that can stop the GOP in its sycophantic tracks and trigger some kind of self-reassessment is having its collective ass handed to it in the mid-terms – badly. Ideally they should lose enough seats that not only make the Demos filibuster-proof but will also take Republicans a good 20 years to try and take back at least one Congressional house.

However, Will seems to think this would force a rethink of GOP leadership that will bring it back to its Reagan-era ideology. He sees a mid-term routing as shock therapy to save the patient.

Remember the scene in Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom when Indy is under the spell of Kali and Short Round snaps him out of it by burning him with a torch? Like that.

However, my personal diagnosis is that it’s too late for that. The GOP as we know it is gone, and it is not coming back. It’s now the Trump-Fox-Alt-White Party. A mid-term defeat will cause plenty of soul searching, for sure, but the result will be either doubling down or figuring out how to better package their message, not a return to classic Republicanism.

And it’s a moot point anyway, since – again – most people who consider themselves Republicans would much rather vote for this trash fire than for any Democrat.

Still, you can’t blame George for trying.

Will the circle be unbroken,

This is dF