The MAGA A-holes Killed My Conservatism

My tiny patch of sensible conservatism is dead.

image via Bill O’Leary | Reuters

by Rich Herschlag

In his 2004 HBO special Never Scared, Chris Rock shouted inimitably that anyone who was on one side of the aisle on last every issue had essentially turned their brain off. “I've got some shit I'm conservative about. I've got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal!” Like Chris Rock, throughout much of my life I took some satisfaction in thinking and rethinking every available issue from scratch, often in a partial ideological vacuum separated from both the politics of the day and peer pressure.

The results could be a bit unpredictable and make me a gadfly at times—the most liberal in a room of conservatives, the most conservative in a room of liberals, but hopefully worth listening to for a minute and a little too intimidating to dismiss with a couple of shallow talking points. A few friends had me pegged as socially liberal and fiscally moderate, and that wasn’t the worst conceivable shorthand for a lifetime of wrestling with weighty issues. But I believed it never quite did my cerebral cortex justice.

A quick example from the distant past is the Moynihan Report. When the report was issued in 1965 by Johnson administration adviser, intellectual, and future Democratic New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, I was too wrapped up in diapers and Superman reruns to take much note, but by high school in the late 70s it had become part of the lexicon for anyone serious about American social policy. The report took a deep dive into the results of what was becoming known as the “welfare state” and found among other things that by disqualifying potential welfare recipients because there was an adult male living in the household, federal welfare law was incentivizing financially struggling women to cast out husbands and male partners—often the father of their children.

The effect, the report contended, was particularly harmful to Black households, where good jobs for Black males were limited by widespread discrimination, and strong matriarchal patterns dating back to slavery may have represented a tipping point. These findings enraged many diehard liberals, emboldened members of the Goldwater conservative constituency, but most importantly for some folks raised critical issues about economics and the family that needed to be approached objectively. As a decent AP US History student I was solidly in the last group, actually read the report, and brought it up—both its credibility and its shortcomings—whenever I felt the ideologue in the crowd was either somewhat reasonable or outweighed me by less than 30 lbs.

I enjoyed the constant labor of reading whatever I could get my hands on and the fairly well earned identity of the guy who at least tried not to swallow polemics—left or right— whole. And then, almost 40 years later, the MAGA assholes took it away. They took away a lot of things, of course—a bunch of friendships, trust in a smattering of media sources, confidence that political power would transition peacefully, belief in the inevitability of success for the American experiment in democracy—but this one really hurt.

Today, like so many semi-free thinkers, I walk around in a largely self-imposed safety bubble where in a discussion of policy options I often have two choices—repeat the liberal talking points of the day or say nothing. Privately I’m well aware that addictive deficit spending beyond the point where total national debt exceeds a year’s GDP has led historically to the crumbling of empires and that the very beginning of the death knell is already present in American life.

Back in 2010 a bipartisan commission known as Bowles-Simpson studied the issue and came up with a reasonably well balanced approach to tackling the deficit utilizing both spending cuts and revenue increases, including an increased tax burden on the highest bracket. Well, just about nobody from either side wanted to touch Bowles-Simpson with either a ten foot pole or a conscientious debate on the floor. Over the next ten years modest spending cuts were enacted, tax rates for the wealthy were maintained then cut, and then COVID-19 blew any deficit reduction out of the water. A full legislative enactment of Bowles-Simpson’s recommendations would have spread the sweet suffering of self-discipline up and down the food chain in a nation addicted to iPhones and web porn.

Just three years prior, during the Bush 43 administration, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 made its way around the halls of Congress. With bipartisan support, the bill provided a compromise of sorts by funding increased border security while offering a viable path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. How did this legislation fare? See Bowles-Simpson. The bill never even made it to the floor for a vote.

These two missed opportunities to address substantial national problems largely signified the end of bipartisan politics in the American 21^st century and perhaps even more so than birtherism or easily gamed social media set the table for Donald J. Trump to show up at dinner. Worse still, though the Trump tumor may one day go to die in a federal prison, the cancer it promoted is currently nearing stage IV.

In the meantime, during something like the sinking of the Titanic, I would like to spend some quality time not only rearranging the chairs but also walking around the deck having interesting little envelope-pushing conversations with the other doomed passengers. To me, this is no small pleasure lost, because my own selective, sporadic conservatism went far beyond politics.

My wife and I raised our kids to restrict their blame of others and instead look inward for solutions to most personal problems. We called that conservatism. We led them by example in the removal of every last scrap of refuse during picnics and outings. We called that conservatism. We avoided spending on all sorts of crap hawked on TV and the internet, in the name of having funds available for things the family actually needed. We called that conservatism. And a bit later in their upbringing we explained that the decision of whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term was probably the most significant decision a woman or a family as a whole could ever make and that its repercussions would likely be felt over a lifetime. We called that reality.

And now largely thanks to Mitch McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and a deep bench of players so cynical and devoid of anything that could ever be faintly confused with integrity I’m ashamed to share even a short sequence of DNA with any of them, it’s all gone. My tiny patch of sensible conservatism is dead. The portion of my brain that once swiftly attacked both sides of an issue is perhaps not entirely dead but certainly necrotic. And the pure, unadulterated joy of entering a public forum to speak freely and honestly from my nuanced heart is as over as George Santos’s volleyball career.

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The Biden Classified Document "Scandal" Is Another Utter Failure By The Press

The desperate need to create an equivalence between Biden and his predecessor has meant grotesque distortions of reality that are getting harder to ignore.

by Justin Rosario

Since the Joe Biden document story broke, the media has not exactly covered itself in glory. The desperate need to create an equivalence between Biden and his predecessor has meant grotesque distortions of reality that are getting harder to ignore.

Let’s look at the facts. Donald Trump stole hundreds of classified documents, up to and including nuclear secrets with the highest security level. After he was asked to return them, he hand-picked documents to hide from the National Archives before the FBI showed up and reclaimed most of the stolen material. We still don't know what happened to the files from the dozens of empty folders they found. Sold for money? Traded for favors? Handed over to pay off debts? Maybe John Durham can investigate that since he has a lot of free time on his hands these days.

Biden, on the other hand, had a dozen or so classified files scattered throughout his old paperwork that no one knew were missing. The files were then returned immediately. The fact that the National Archives knew what files Trump had stolen and had no idea that any of Biden’s files were missing at all suggests that Biden’s files were not particularly important.

But apparently none of this matters, because the press was never going to pass up a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone…

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