November 30, 2022
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
The Oncoming Second
American Civil War:
Donald Trump and the
Failure of Conservatism
Friends,
Much of the talk recently among the “conservative chattering
class” has been about how the “movement” must somehow “move on” from Donald
Trump (without overly alienating his base) and take a serious look at
alternatives, most notably Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, with lesser—and
far less distinguished—papabile such as the incredibly ambitious Nikki
Haley, Mike Pompeo, and even the discredited buffoon Chris Christie of New
Jersey, in tow.
Building up to President Trump’s announcement of another run
for the White House on November
15, and then with a crescendo effect afterwards,
Republican politicos, consultants, congressmen, and the Murdoch media (through
its voices the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, with
less strident flurries on Fox News) echoed the same mantra: “Trump is not the
man for the GOP in 2024!” And it was up to the “party” (read=elites) to select
someone more—how should we say it?—more smooth and agreeable, less
confrontational, less likely to “shoot-from-the-hip,” and more apt to bring
over those brainless soccer moms, while reducing the unrelenting attacks spewed
forth by the legacy media. In other words, what the Republican Party needed was
a nicer, quieter, better groomed and mannered figure who could essentially get
us back to more halcyon times. Essentially, the GOP needed to go back to its
now traditional role of perfunctory opposition to the Leftist tsunami, while,
in effect, only slightly impeding the Left’s inevitable advances in and capture
of all our social, cultural and political institutions.
Examples of this pusillanimous political posture within the
GOP abound plentifully, most recently in the vote on the absurdly-called Respect
for Marriage Act to enshrine same sex marriage nationally requiring
the federal government to recognize a marriage
between two people if the marriage is valid in the state where it was performed
and guaranteeing that such a marriage is given full faith and credit,
regardless of the couple’s sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. Leading up
to the US Supreme Court’s outrageous and unprecedented Obergefell
decision in 2015, the Republican Party supposedly
opposed such an aberrant constitutional view. Indeed, various GOP elected
leaders pledged that they would strongly support the traditional moral view of
their constituents, the overwhelming opinion of a majority of Americans. Thirty
states had already adopted constitutional amendments defining marriage as
between one man and one woman, including my home state, North Carolina, in
2012, where the vote
was 61% to 39%.
But since Obergefell, not hardly a peep. Mostly
just acceptance.
And indeed, in the recent vote, twelve
Republican senators crossed over and insured easy passage, with such unprincipled
chameleons like Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) defending staunchly his vote by declaring ingenuously that the act “maintains the status quo with respect
to same-sex marriage that was set forth by the Supreme Court….”
Same sex marriage is just one such issue; there
are countless others where “conservative” opposition has proven to be little
more than a paper tiger, engaged in shadow boxing, while ceding the way clear
for an advancing, all-encompassing radicalism.
Public education? It has been taken over,
literally, by the radically “woke” left, as have most colleges and
universities. And the reaction of conservatives? Complain and grouse about,
talk and write about the insanity which has captured academia and our children.
And the solution? In addition to remaining motionless as if blinded by
headlights, maybe just throw more money at the problem! Here in North Carolina
where the General Assembly is dominated by Republicans, just name a few more
political/financial cronies to the board of governors for the university system
who will…do nothing!
Where are the fearless Republicans to at last
arise and state the obvious: that our public education system has failed miserably,
and that the schools (physical plants) need to be sold off to consortia of parents
and private organizations, with the appropriate tax monies going directly to
the parents who must have complete school choice? Such a program would,
certainly, require time to implement, but can anyone think of a better way to
stanch the destruction of public education?
Where are the conservative/Republican voices
advocating radical reform? Again, mostly silence.
Illegal immigration? Republicans promise to do something,
perhaps even
impeaching Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his
utterly disastrous “open door” approach and his de facto support for porous
American borders. But does anyone think that Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans
will actually go through with that threat? After all, this is the same party
that desperately attempted to find a compromise with the radical Dems over “dreamer”
citizenship. Does anyone seriously believe “conservatives” will, once in power,
actually begin to expel illegal aliens now situated here in the US? Oh, yes,
Governors DeSantis and Gregg Abbott have staged a few highly publicized transferals
of a few illegals to places like Martha’s Vineyard, which were, of course,
experiments in symbolism. But where is the firm promise to remove those several
millions who have come in since Donald Trump left office?
The silence is deafening.
The list of conservative promises, followed then
by conservative collapse and full acceptance of those very positions once so
strongly denounced is appalling.
What more evidence do we need to confirm the
verdict, rendered nearly 150 years ago, by
great Southern writer Robert Lewis Dabney on the “conservative” party:
“This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has
been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party and aims to
save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at
last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day
one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in
affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its
timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and
then adopted in its turn.
“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows
Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but
never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath
utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not
hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of
expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious,
for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of
martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the
wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its
bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle
of resistance.
“The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American
politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to
prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip….”
Which brings me back to Donald Trump and 2024.
I have a friend who is fairly-well acquainted with GOP politics. Although
he supported Trump in 2016, like some establishment Republicans he is dead set
against another Trump campaign. When I questioned him, he responded with the
usual complaints:
“Trump is a walking time-bomb.” “He shoots from the hip and says crazy
things.” “His mannerisms and language will
not attract ‘independents’ and suburban voters.”
Then, the clencher from my friend: “Trump’s endorsed candidates lost
big in 2022, and he will carry the GOP down to defeat in 2024.” Yet, as Bloomberg
admitted on November 15, 2022: “The record of Trump’s endorsed candidates who were on the ballot
last Tuesday was 236-38, with eight races still being decided….” Not a bad
record at all for a walking time-bomb!
And most recently,
of course, the meal with Ye and controversial activist Nick Fuentes, which the
news media, including the so-called conservative media, was quick to pounce on.
Here was the “smoking gun” (to paraphrase the leftover Bushite Karl Rove) that
would “sink” Trump. Yet few proceeded to unpack the facts of case, that as even
NBC News admitted, Trump had been in a way set up and did not realize that
Ye was bringing along Fuentes, about whom Trump had no real knowledge. As reporter
March Caputo wrote:
“Trump was
walking into what may have been a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls…. Trump has since said he didn’t know
Fuentes or his background when they dined together, a claim Fuentes confirmed
in an interview…. One longtime Trump adviser, who didn’t want to go on the
record criticizing his preferred candidate, said it was clear that Fuentes’
presence was part of a headline-grabbing setup. ‘The master troll got
trolled’….”
Without hesitation GOP elites, from Mitch McConnell and the
loathsome Mitt Romney to Mike Pence, jumped up and down and denounced Trump,
either by name or implicitly.
My friend did the same, as if this was some sort of kiss of
death. Yet, I reminded my friend that the very same types of situations
abounded in the Republican primaries and general election in 2016. Who does not
recall the infamous “Access
Hollywood” story with Billy Bush (October 7, 2016), which was supposed to
sink the Trump candidacy? Or, how about the Donald asserting that “thousands of
Muslims celebrated 9/11” on roof-tops across the Hudson River in New Jersey
back in 2001. Reports
finally made public in December 2015 confirmed Trump’s position: “Just a couple of blocks away from that Jersey City apartment
the F.B.I. raided yesterday…there is another apartment building, one…was swarming
with suspects — suspects who…were cheering on the roof when they saw the
planes slam into the Trade Center.”
Oh, yes, and the epithets
and nicknames that Trump applied to his GOP opponents—remember “little Marco,” “lying
Ted,” “sleepy Jeb”—each of those was supposed to be a self-inflicted dagger wound
which should have or would have ended Trump’s momentum.
Then there were the
condescending neoconservative plutocrats at National Review and the DC
think tanks, the ex-Bushite Never Trumpers, the pitiful epigones of Bill
Kristol, George Will, Max Boot, and others. Remember them? They have never gone
away. A few of the less principled ones, for example a Nikki Haley—once staunchly
anti-Trump, then cozying up to him and cooing into his ear, and now once again
steadfastly standing up against his “vitriol,” are back at their workbenches
devising plans how to stop him.
Now these termites
come out once again, employing the same tactics and same invective, in which
the legacy Leftist media is more than eager to join in and cheer on.
The latest “golden
boy” to appear on the scene is Governor Ron DeSantis, and already the campaign
war drums are beating on his behalf. My friend Dr. Brion McClanahan of the
Abbeville Institute rightly cautions (November 28, 2022) against jumping on a
DiSantis bandwagon. As he writes:
“DeSantis
would be something entirely different, and when National Review starts making the case, you need to be worried. You see, when
people like Jack
Geraghty think a President Ron is a good idea, that can only mean one
thing. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. DeSantis is a great governor,
arguably the best in the United States at the moment. But Geraghty likes
him because he would be more like George W. Bush than Donald Trump….”
As
I told my friend there are some worrying aspects to DeSantis which need to be
aired.
Consider
Geraghty’s headline (his article
appeared in The Washington Post): “DeSantis would pave the way for a
post-Trump GOP return to normal.” Are we allowed to question his definition of “normal”?
Is it not a return to the old, defecated, totally bankrupt policies and
philosophy that have only confirmed Robert L. Dabney’s acute understanding of
American “conservatism” nearly 150 years ago?
Geraghty
praises DeSantis as a “non-threatening” politician, who would make “moderates”
and independents feel better, “not fearing that he’d burn the
country down in a fit of rage because he thinks someone wasn’t being fair to
him.”
But that was Trump’s
original point, and one I emphasized strongly in a previous essay I authored back
on November
4, “Will Donald Trump Bring on the End of History?”
We do not need
at all a “return to normal,” that is, a return to the no-longer-viable
political culture that existed before Trump…a system that has become truly noxious
and poisonous for any devotee of older American traditions, a system now which
only enables and advances a thorough and feculent Leftist agenda in every
aspect of our lives.
Whether he realized
it or not (and there is substantial evidence that he did not), in 2016 Donald
Trump ran to not just overhaul our morally decrepit and virally dangerous
system, but to replace it, essentially returning to the wells of our past,
discarding the farce which is modern “liberal democracy,” and actually returning
power and authority to a citizenry that has been progressively castrated at the
behest of the Behemoth conglomerate of big government/big corporations/big tech
dictatorship, itself part of a massive globalist reset.
That he failed in
many aspects—terrible appointments and horrible advisors, a belief that somehow
he had to placate the GOP establishment, a lack of political acumen—yet nevertheless
he scared the bejesus out of the elites, out of the Deep State, out of the
dominant progressivist controllers over things like education, immigration, and
an asinine globalist foreign policy. That was—and is—something that a Ron
DeSantis is not most likely to do, nor for that matter, any of the pygmy-brained
wannabees such as Haley or Christie.
The final verdict
may be out on DeSantis, but we know that a Trump presidency in 2024 would bring
our enemies out into the streets even more frenetically and violently than ever
before. And that event would result in the complete disappearance of their
veils obscuring their obscene hatred for what the late Sam Francis called “middle
Americans,” AKA MAGA Americans.
As I wrote on
November 4, bringing all the various issues to a perhaps violent head finally
may be, tragically, the best (and only) way to undo the infectious and fatal
dross which has converted the American nation into a veritable cesspool of
ungodly evil and moral turpitude, both at home and in its dealings abroad. It
could force American citizens to finally do something, take a stand, arm
themselves, protect their communities against wanton rioting and violence and decay.
Communities, perhaps states, would be forced to act. And in the process perhaps
Americans would discover an older America, with its older Constitution, its
ingrained and protected rights and duties derived from God, its defense of the
liberties guaranteed to us by the Framers.
I employed the case
of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, previously. Certainly, no one wishes for
full-fledged civil war. But Spaniards learned eighty-five years ago that some
things—religious Faith, heritage and tradition, rights guaranteed to us by natural
and Divine law—are more precious than Jack Geraghty’s deceptively attractive
but fatal “return to normal.”
So, I repeat: bring
it on, sooner when there still may be a chance to succeed, not later.
