Henceforth, Only Invertebrates And Opportunists Need Apply

Writing for the conservative Washington Examiner, Salena Zito reminded her readers that "In the wake of an election where Republicans lost 40 seats, Trump has careened, strategy-free, toward a shutdown, negotiating only with himself. He's blowing up the staff that gave wary Republicans confidence, and in the realm of foreign policy, he's abandoning the Reaganite conservative part of his coalition to the consternation of Israel and the delight of dictators in Moscow and Ankara. Trump won by bringing wary nationalists and populists into a conservative party. But the tail cannot wag the dog. Trump's coalition is big enough to govern as long as he agrees to preserve the four legs of the conservative stool: babies, guns, tax cuts, and a muscular foreign policy... Trump did not create this conservative/populist coalition. His presidency is the result of it. The past few weeks show he’s either forgotten that or he believes that doesn’t matter anymore."

The past few weeks? Trump's entire life has shown what his capabilities are and aren't. That he somehow slipped into the White House-- whether because of Putin or because of a hopelessly flawed electorate or because of a Democratic Party establishment determined to spit in the eye of America-- is a dangerous condemnation of our country that needs to be seriously examined and ameliorated. As for Trump... absolutely hopeless. There is no amelioration, just an exit. Last week, Eliot Cohen, a very conservative professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins and a pillar of the Military Industrial Complex, wrote that the departure of Jim Mattis shows you can't serve both Trump and America. His kind of conservative understands Trump's danger and his toxicity. Trump gave up on Mattis as soon as he got an inkling that he wasn't really a "mad dog," which was the only reason Trump chose him as Defense Secretary. Trump was not looking for what Cohen describes as "a resolute military leader who was a reader and a thinker." If Trump had been told you could "give him a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and he would compare it with the other two editions that he already owned," he would have climbed out a bathroom window rather than give him a position. Trump, wrote Cohen, "had a vague notion of the killer part when he appointed Mattis. He had no notion of the morally and strategically informed restraint, of the intellectual sophistication, of the selflessness." One thing about Trump is that he has never hired anyone good or sought to be in the company of anyone good. The best executives look for people who have traits and abilities that strengthen what they themselves have to offer. Trump is the opposite of that. You can count on him hiring only the worst people. He always has and he always will. Stephen Miller is a pure Trumpian hire.

It was not Mattis’s idea to become secretary of defense, and indeed, he may not have been the best pick for the job in normal times. But then again, 2017 was anything but a normal time, and even those who believed that the job should in principle go to a real civilian rather than a retired general were relieved that Mattis took it. In office, he had to spend most of his time buttressing the alliances that the president despised, and affirming values of fairness and legality that Trump could not comprehend. Success in government is often measured less by the brilliant things one does than by the stupidities one prevents. By that standard, Mattis’s tenure as secretary of defense was a success.

His story, however, has a larger significance. From the unlikely victory of Trump in the November 2016 election to the present, some have argued that principled patriots could serve in high office, retain their character, and either mitigate the damage or do some positive good. To be sure, they would need their red lines, their signed-but-undated letters of resignation. But they could pull it off. Though they might be maligned by irresponsible enemies of the administration, they would serve the country, and do so more honorably than mere critics.

Mattis indeed had his walking points, and he leaves with his head held high. But he is alone. The clusters of sub-Cabinet officials who privately boasted about their walking points have, with very few exceptions, stuck it out. They give sickly smiles when, at a seminar or dinner party, someone describes the president’s character as it is; they give no evidence of sticking their necks out to take positions that might incur the wrath of the America Firsters; they have taken the mad king’s shilling, and they are sticking with the king.

The departure of Jim Mattis from government service is proof that you cannot have it all. You have to walk if you are to remain the human being you were, or conceived yourself being, before you went in. He alone refused to curry favor, to pander at the painful televised Cabinet sessions, or to praise someone who deserved none of it. In the end, he could not do his job and serve the country as he knew it had to be served. No one could.

Henceforth, the senior ranks of government can be filled only by invertebrates and opportunists, schemers and careerists. If they had policy convictions, they will meekly accept their evisceration. If they know a choice is a disaster, they will swallow hard and go along. They may try to manipulate the president, or make some feeble efforts to subvert him, but in the end they will follow him. And although patriotism may motivate some of them, the truth is that it will be the title, the office, the car, and the chance to be in the policy game that will keep them there.

They may think wistfully of the unflinching Sir Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s magnificent play about integrity in politics, A Man for All Seasons. But they will be more like Richie Rich, More’s protégé who could have chosen a better path, but who succumbed to the lure of power. And the result will be policies that take this country, its allies, and international order to disasters small and large.



Jim Mattis’s life has been shaped by the Marine motto: semper fidelis, always faithful. Against the odds, he remained faithful to his beliefs, to his subordinates, to the mission, to the country. The president who appointed him to the office might have as the motto on his phony coat of arms nunquam fida, never loyal. His career has been one of betrayal-- of business partners, of customers, of subordinates, of his wives, and as we may very possibly learn from Robert Mueller, of his country. The two codes of conduct could never really coexist, and so they have not.

Chris Christie was on This Week yesterday and pointedly announced he was addressing the audience directly, and then compared Trump to "a 72 year old relative whose behavior they were attempting to change... When people get older they become more and more convinced of the fact that what they’re doing is the right thing and it becomes harder to convince them otherwise." That was around the same time we learned that the brittle and somewhat senile Señor T, enraged when someone finally told him what Mattis' letter was actually saying about him, kicked his Secretary of Defense out-- Mattis had planned to stay through February to ensure a smooth transition-- and replaced him with Mattis' deputy, Patrick Shanahan, now Acting Secretary of Defense. By the time the Trumpanzee Regime is put out of its misery, every confirmable position will be held my an acting this or an acting that. And the invertebrates.

I don't want to see Michael Bloomberg wind up with the Democratic nomination by any stretch of the imagination but yesterday he was right on target when he wrote that "the past week all too perfectly exemplified [Trump's] destructive effect on competent government in Washington-- and it should give all Americans, in all parties, cause for concern... At the halfway mark of this terrible presidency, one has to wonder how much more the country can take... Unless something changes-- unless, in particular, Republicans in Congress start showing some spine-- two more years might be enough to test whether we can sustain Trump’s model of bad government. This past week, we got a glimpse of what the beginning of the collapse may look like-- and what it may ultimately cost us."

Eliot Cohen Pronounces The Dissolution Of The Bond Between The GOP And Conservatism

Republican Values by Nancy Ohanian

Other than Jeff Flake, he wrote Sunday, "There was not a profile in courage to be seen. Not one." Eliot Cohen is a professor at Johns Hopkins and a neo-conservative thinker who worked for Condoleezza Rice at the Bush State Department. He was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century and is the author, most recently, of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force. He's a real war-monger and has been an unrelenting champion of going to war against Iraq and Iran. A Putin-hater, he was also a prominent Never-Trumper. Last year, he wrote in The Atlantic that "Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character. We were right. And friends who urged us to tone it down, to make our peace with him, to stop saying as loudly as we could 'this is abnormal,' to accommodate him, to show loyalty to the Republican Party, to think that he and his advisers could be tamed, were wrong."

Over the weekend he published a new piece at The Atlantic, The Republican Party Abandons Conservatism. He's correct, but he doesn't identify the Republican Party with the fascism it has turned to. Maybe next year. He re-registered as an independent in 2016 after Trump occupied the White House. "Being a conservative," he wrote, "has always meant, to me, taking a certain view of human nature, and embracing a certain set of values and virtues. The conservative is warier than her liberal counterpart about the darker impulses and desires that lurk in men and women, more doubtful of their perfectibility, skeptical of and opposed to the engineering of individual souls, and more inclined to celebrate freedom moderated by law, custom, education and culture. She knows that power tends to corrupt, and likes to see it checked and divided. Words like responsibility, stoicism, self-control, frugality, fidelity, decorum, honor, character, independence, and integrity appeal to most decent people. They come particularly easily to the admirers of thinkers from Edmund Burke to Irving Kristol. The GOP threw frugality and fiscal responsibility away long ago, initially in the Reagan years, but now on a stunning scale involving trillion-dollar deficits as far as can be forecast. It abandoned most of its beliefs in fidelity and character when it embraced a liar, cheat, and philanderer as its nominee and then as president. But something else snapped this week." I guess you can imagine now that Cohen is no fan of Brett Kavanaugh nor of any of the Trump enablers like Kavanaugh.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy as expressed in various statements and conclusions was, for the most part, pretty standard conservative fare, save for one tell-tale element: his ascription of very high levels of immunity and discretion to the executive. In this respect what passes today for conservativism is anything but. Where traditionally, conservatives have wanted “ambition to check ambition” as Alexander Hamilton put it, Republicans are now executive-branch kinds of people. It is not surprising that Kavanaugh himself worked at a high level in a Republican White House. The disdain of many contemporary Republicans for congressional power and prerogative makes them indistinguishable from liberals who (as recently as the Obama years) turned to sweeping uses of executive power to circumvent a balky House of Representatives and Senate.

It was, however, in the epic clash over the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that the collapse of conservatism in the Republican Party became most evident. Eleven men, most of them old, hid behind a female prosecutor wheeled in from Arizona because they could not, apparently, trust themselves to treat a victim of sexual assault with consideration and respect. So much for courage. Their anger at Democratic shenanigans was understandable, but virtually without exception, when they did summon up the nerve to speak (during Kavanaugh’s turn) their questions consisted almost exclusively of partisan baying at the opposition. Genuine conservatives might have snarled initially, but would, out of regard for the truth, tried to figure out exactly what happened to Ford 35 years ago, and whether the character of the man before them was what it was said to be.

Perhaps the collapse of modern conservatism came out most clearly in Kavanaugh’s own testimony-- its self-pity, its hysteria, its conjuring up of conspiracies, its vindictiveness. He and his family had no doubt suffered agonies. But if we expect steely resolve from a police officer confronting a knife-wielding assailant, or disciplined courage from a firefighter rushing into a burning house, we should expect stoic self-control and calm from a conservative judge, even if his heart is being eaten out. No one watching those proceedings could imagine that a Democrat standing before this judge’s bench in the future would get a fair hearing. This was not the conservative temperament on display. It was, rather, personalized grievance politics.

Real conservatives have always prided themselves on their willingness to stand up to their own kind in the name of moral principle. Think of Senator Robert Taft opposing the North Atlantic Treaty, knowing that those positions could destroy his political career. Taft was wrong in his views, but he was principled, he was courageous, and he went down speaking truth as he saw it. William F. Buckley took on the John Birch Society in the middle of the 20th century, and the anti-Semites in the conservative camp later on. In 1993, when Buckley had to choose between loyalty to Joseph Sobran, his long-time protégé and colleague at the National Review, and rejection of bigotry, principle won and he fired his friend.

During the Ford and Kavanaugh testimonies, Americans watched the cranky maunderings of Senator Chuck Grassley and the spitting, menacing fury of Senator Lindsey Graham. The combination of calm strength and good humor that characterized the modern conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, was nowhere to be found. But that spirit, the spirit of a president who celebrated America as a city on a hill that was generous abroad, welcoming to newcomers, and self confident at home, has been replaced by the sour meanness of a party chiefly of men, who build walls to keep the world out, erect tariffs to destroy free trade, despise the alliances that keep Americans secure, and sanction the deliberate plucking of babes from their mothers’ breasts in order to teach illegal immigrants a painful lesson. In such a world, decorum and courtesy are irrelevant.

There was always been a dark side to American conservatism, much of it originating in the antebellum curse of a society, large parts of which favored slavery and the extermination of America’s native population, the exclusion of immigrants from American life, and discrimination against Catholics and Jews. Many of us had hoped that the civil-rights achievements of the mid-20th century (in which Republicans were indispensable partners), changing social norms regarding women, and that rising levels of education had eliminated the germs that produced secession, lynching, and Indian massacres. Instead, those microbes simply went into dormancy, and now, in the presence of Trump, erupt again like plague buboes-- bitter, potent and vile.

The last twitches of conservative independence consisted of Senator Jeff Flake securing a week-long FBI investigation of Ford’s charges. For the rest, there was not a profile in courage to be seen. Not one.

It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple. It might stumble into a political tar pit and cease to exist or it might survive as a curious, decaying relic of more savage times and more primitive instincts, lashing out and crushing things but incapable of much else.

Intellectuals do not build American political parties. Politicians do. The most we can do is point out the truths as we see them, and cheer on those who can do the necessary work. It is supposedly inconceivable that a genuinely conservative party could emerge, but then again, who thought the United States could be where it is now? And progressives no less than bereft conservatives should want this to happen, because the conservative virtues remain real virtues, the conservative insights real insights, and the conservative temperament an indispensable internal gyro keeping a country stable and sane. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” runs the proverb. The hour is upon the country: conservatives wait for the men (or more likely women) to meet it.

While conservatives wait for a messiah to rescue them from Trumpism, may I humbly suggest that you help us rid our country of the unfettered power Trump now exercises with the connivance of his congressional rubber-stamps and enablers, like Drunken Hunter (CA-50) and Chris Collins (NY-27), the first two members of Congress to endorse him, both currently awaiting trial for dozens of personal enrichment fraud charges. See this thermometer on the right? That's a 2018 ActBlue congressional thermometer for heavily vetted progressive candidates devoted to our country and to a sense of integrity and truth. Even if you're a conservative through and through-- and believe in conservative values-- we all need to keep our eyes on the ball: checking Donald Trump's authoritarian nature. Click the thermometer and you'll find congressional candidates who will help do just that. Please contribute what you can to their campaigns. You'll be happy to know that none of the money you contribute goes anywhere near the DCCC or the DNC or to any crooked consultants. 100% goes right to the candidates of your choice.

Two crucial Senate seats are slipping out of the GOP's grasp. They have been desperate to hold onto Dean Heller's seat in Nevada and were certainty could win Claire McCaskill's seat in Missouri, a state with a PVI of R+9 (same as Indiana and Mississippi), which Trump won 56.77% to 38.14%. A pair of new SSRS Research polls, released this afternoon by CNN, show the Democrats ahead in both:

What's the common denominator? The toxicity of Señor Trumpanzee doesn't really tell the full story. Among likely voters in red Missouri 51% of likely voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job compared to 45% who disapprove. But among likely voters in purple Nevada 51% disapprove and just 45% approve when asked the Trump question; the exact opposite. McCaskill is fighting a successful uphill battle to present herself as a Missouri candidate above the national fray. Jacky Rosen, pretty much a nothing candidate, looks like she'll just washed into office in the anti-Trump/amti-red wave.