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It’s not really a shock that some on the Trumpist right are responding to the midterm results with a doubling down. Here’s Declan Leary at The American Conservative:
The Republican Party lost this week for the same reason it always loses: it’s soft. Up against the party of infanticide and child mutilation and carnage in Ukraine, the best attack it could muster was “...Inflation!” It tacked to the center in all but a handful of general election campaigns in the desperate hope that Janice, 53, who voted third party in 2020 and for Gretchen Whitmer in 2018 and for Romney/Ryan in 2012 might just cast a ballot for John Gibbs.
For all its posturing, the Republican party refuses to acknowledge that the culture war is a war, and needs to be fought like one. You can win a war by convincing enough of the enemy soldiers to come over to your side. It’s possible, in theory. But how many wars in all of human history have actually been won that way?1
This doesn’t really track with my personal experience in Kansas, where the GOP candidate for governor Derek Schmidt ran a race that focused largely on the possibility of trans girls playing high school sports and a discredited story about state-funded drag shows. He lost. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach — you’ve probably heard of him, he more or less ran Donald Trump’s fruitless “find voter fraud” commission a few years back — has been a culture war lightning rod for years, but this year he ran somewhat under the radar and narrowly won the race for attorney general. I live in a red state, which means we should’ve bought the culture war stuff more than other states — but it doesn’t look like we did. I’m not sure Leary’s “lean into it” is the best electoral strategy here.
But it would be good for keeping the people who already like you riled up.
And that’s kind of the point of Trumpist politics. Keeping the people you like on your side, instead of persuading anybody to join you. At American Greatness, Matthew Boose makes it fairly explicit with his lament on America’s “Third World Electorate”:
If it’s any consolation to the party, this election showed us that the country is so deeply divided that the GOP probably couldn’t have done much better. About half the country cannot be expected to vote rationally under any circumstances. Republicans should give up any illusion of convincing them and focus on delivering for their base.
That pairs nicely with Boose’s AmGreatness colleague, Christopher Roach, who says maybe democracy itself is the problem.
Conservatives used to be skeptical of democracy, emphasizing that the country was designed to be a republic, that elites emerge and must be selected in every system, and that too much democracy would upset the balanced, mixed regime contemplated by the Constitution. Any system that selects someone like Fetterman or a tyrant like Whitmer is flawed and questionable.
The real measure of good government is not how leaders are picked, but rather who it elevates to leadership and how they govern. A system where oligarch-controlled media influences voters, where millions of new voters are let into the country to tip the scales, and where marginal people on welfare and with criminal records can vote and have the same impact as the productive and the law-abiding has a problem, which only becomes more apparent when reviewing the results.
I’m not going to get too gloaty here, because I’ve seen left-of-center commenters grumble about the people when election results don’t go their way. Remember Jesusland?
But I think these comments aren’t just in-the-moment lashings out by the Trumpist right — rather, they’re an expression of a long-held worldview that says when they’re not winning, the wrong people are voting. I’d like to think some of the authoritarian fever on the right broke this week. Maybe these guys will return to the fringe instead of being conservatism’s intellectual leaders. They’re still out there, for now.
“But he fights!” can never fail, it can only be failed.