My Questions, Answered With Sad Finality

Back on November 9th, 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s election victory (known to this day among Trump loyalists as “The Steal”), I wrote here of the short-term future of America’s two main political factions. In that rumination, I posed a couple of questions about the prospects for the respective factions in 2024, questions which time has now firmly answered, though not entirely as I had anticipated.

Here is what I wrote in November 2020, first about the Democratic Party:

In four years, Joe Biden will likely no longer be mentally or physically competent to serve as U.S. president, even in the Max Headroom-like digital hologram form he was remastered into for this election season. This means that in four years, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination will be Kamala Harris. The question then becomes, “Will Americans have the guts in this politically correct age to vote against the ‘historic’ first Black woman president?” If you do not know the answer to that one, you have not been paying attention to the movie up to now.

Well, we know what happened there. My prediction about the final stages of the Biden presidency and the inescapable elevation of Kamala Harris was accurate enough. Where I went wrong, of course, was in overlooking, by wishful thinking I suppose, the wildcard that could upset the inevitability of Harris’ victory, namely the Republican Party’s willingness to turn itself over to the Trump cult irrationality yet again, in an excess of cowardice and stupidity (“Fool me once…”) that appeared less likely in November 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s ignominious election defeat at the hands of a Biden dummy on a stick, but was perhaps carved in stone two months later by the events of January 6th, 2021, wherein the cult turned violent, thereby sending a terrified shiver down whatever occupies the place of a spine within the GOP establishment.

As for that opposing faction, this was the curiosity I raised:

I find myself mulling over a question I was asking in anticipation, both privately and publicly, back in the spring and summer of 2016, when I was still personally associated with the “conservative media”: When the Trump fantasy world disintegrates, as it inevitably must, how will all those dozens of “conservative media” pundits and millions of “Tea Party” voters, who had long identified themselves as principled defenders of the U.S. Constitution and rebels against the Republican Party establishment, before they cast all that to the wind to support Mitch McConnell’s mega-donor, reframe their political identities post-cult? Where can Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Roger Kimball, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Mark Steyn, and all the rest of the gang position themselves now, without looking even more like compromised hypocrites than they already do? How can the old Tea Party voters who demanded constitutionalism and liberty from 2008 to 2015, but then suddenly gave that up to chase pop idol power dreams with The Donald, reassemble the principles and traditions they have smashed to smithereens over the past four and a half years?

The answer to this one, though certainly shameful, was perhaps more predictable in a way. Principle and honor, even in their ersatz instantiations, are not easily restored once sacrificed. Set yourself on a path of mewling duplicity and self-annihilation, and the recovery of one’s dignity and sense of purpose becomes a task beyond Herculean. The final (I choose that adjective carefully) test came in 2024, when Trump ran for president again, in spite of having been thoroughly exposed in the interim as a man with neither a shred of respect for the rule of law nor an ounce of shame about using his cult leader status to incite mob violence as a method of frightening elected officials into compliance with his effort to overturn the very essence of the American constitutional system in the name of saving his own shriveled ego. How would those abject sycophants and the millions of faithful adherents to the dogma of Trumpism respond to the call this time, amid the lawlessness entailed by Trump’s attempt to erase the memory of his having been prevented from destroying the republic only by the sheer decency and surprising courage of one man, the man whose death by hanging many of Trump’s mob were chanting for as they burst into the U. S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

And the answer to this final test, offered in near-perfect unanimity by all those sundry and sullied “conservative media” figures and Tea Party constitutionalists of yesteryear, was nothing short of impressively evil. They not only granted their support to Trump again in 2024, but even reinforced their allegiance to his true cause — that cause being his personal self-aggrandizement through the pursuit of unlimited executive power — by committing themselves to the continual and ongoing apologia for the ever-metastasizing demagoguery and executive overreach that has now, after just nine months of his undeniably transformative second term, given birth to a new United States of America: a land of unlimited and unhinged government, almost devoid of any balance of power, and ruled by the day-to-day grudges, whims, and revenge fantasies of a runaway id released at last from even the minimal requirement of having to fake a semblance of social responsibility, let alone of humility before anything (country, species, heritage, divinity) greater than himself. Nothing he does — not his attempts to manipulate the entire world economy, not his socialistic demands for a state ownership stake in corporations he deems useful, not his attempts to override the constitutionally protected right of free speech for anyone whose words oppose or annoy him, not his use of humiliation, “cancel culture,” and physical intimidation (via his cult mob) as weapons to frighten the other branches of government (particularly within his own party) into a quiescent deference to his will — has dissuaded them from their piety in the least. They have apparently decided to go to their graves as worshippers or at least fellow travellers of Donald Trump, which is to say of the entity who has utterly destroyed American conservatism, the last vestiges of American constitutionalism, and any hopes of sustaining the norms of decency and moderation upon which the American polity always depended for its survival, i.e., for the survival of practical liberty on this Earth. 

The public voices are prepared to go down with the ship for no reason nobler than their lack of backbone or their craven quest for money and audience numbers. As for the millions of former Tea Party conservative voters who have remained steadfast Trump idolaters throughout this national catastrophe, I can say only this: It is interesting that the rise of Trump coincided with the quick and unanimous erasure of that movement’s name and stated principles from the Republican Party grassroots, never to return. For that is just what the GOP establishmentarians who adopted Trump as their weapon against the grassroots in 2016 were hoping for. It is also just as Trump himself needed, since nothing he represents or desires has anything in common with any of those old Tea Party goals. Best to forget all of that forever, then, lest anyone — above all those voters cum idolaters themselves — should begin to face up to some questions too ugly, and for the converts themselves too painful, to answer.