Ever Think About The Nature Of Conservatism?

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

When I was a kid, there was a really clownish conservative douche of a senator from Nebraska, Roman Hruska. What's the opposite of a brain scientist? A Roman Hruska. He was a one-term congressman from Omaha before winning for an open Senate seat in 1954-- and then getting reelected over and over until he finally retired in 1976. He died in 1999 (age 94) but never stopped defending Nixon and claiming Watergate was somehow a Democratic plot to get Nixon. He's best known for his defense of mediocrity, an anti-Semitic speech he delivered on behalf on Nixon's failed Supreme Court nominee G. Harrold Carswell in 1970. "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Benjamin Cardozo were all Jews and all widely considered among the most brilliant Supreme Court justices in history. Carswell was a third rate jurist who is best known for groping men in public toilets and for being beaten up by some guy in Atlanta he lured to his hotel room and tried felating. From Nixonland by Rick Perlstein:

Really horrid people, these crackpot right-wing Republicans, right? Fake Democrat Brad Ashford-- a frequent party switcher who claims to be a "Democrat" now and who the DCCC and the Blue Dogs are running for Hruska's old Omaha congressional seat again recently posted this photo of himself on Facebook from when he was first learning politics from his mentor, Roman Hruska:

Largely because of the advent of Señor Trumpanzee, some people are just beginning to discover just how disgusting and self-centered these conservatives are. Take Charlie Sykes, the conservative talk show host from Wisconsin. He's been coming to a different conclusion about the world around him. This week, in an essay for Time Magazine, Roy Moore Signals the End of the Republican Party, Sykes noted that "[c]onservatives who pride themselves on their respect for the constitutional rule of law now find themselves embracing a former judge twice removed from the bench for flouting the law. Moore has suggested criminalizing homosexuality and banning Muslims from political office. The man who may soon be the newest member of the U.S. Senate has suggested that some communities in Illinois and Indiana are under Sharia law. (They aren’t.) Moore backs Trump’s hardline on immigration, but seemed to know little about what and who the Dreamers were. The GOP nominee is an unrepentant 'birther' and has suggested that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were God’s punishment for America’s sins, including 'legitimized sodomy.' (Naturally, his candidacy was embraced by Sarah Palin as well as Steve Bannon.)"

For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley’s famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s. Responsible thought leaders have also pushed back against a variety of paranoid conspiracy theorists, including anti-Semites and the denizens of the fevered swamps who became known as the alt-right.

But in 2016, Trump first emboldened, then empowered those various paranoiacs who until then had only made cameo appearances on the national stage. Now they gleefully crashed the party, overturned the furniture and settled hierarchies as they raucously dismissed traditional gatekeepers. Those who were slow to join the bacchanal were denounced as sellouts and traitors or, perhaps worse, dismissed as elitists, as have George Will and the editors of the venerable National Review magazine. This breakneck transition required extraordinary nimbleness: Conservatives who had just five minutes earlier agreed that Russia posed a global threat, pivoted to embrace Vladimir Putin as an exemplar of white Christian civilization; Tea Party activists who had railed against deficit spending accepted calls for massive stimulus spending the party of free markets endorsed protectionism and an economic policy that seemed driven by personal fear and favor; constitutionalists watched silently as the rule of law was undermined and norms of public integrity were ignored.

...It turns out that many of the Trump voters who had said they wanted to burn it all down meant it, and they are taking to the task with great relish. The result, the punditocracy declares, will be a full-out civil war in GOP. But it’s actually worse, quite a bit worse... The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan and John McCain. Today, Donald Trump is the face of what the GOP has become. Roy Moore is the face of what it is becoming.

Inevitably. Remember, it was also the party of Roman Hruska. And Brad Ashford.