&c. by Jonathan Chait

 

 

At Least They Didn’t Pick Moscow

 

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

 

Last month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis created a new police force to investigate and prosecute election fraud, despite the lack of any detectable levels of fraud in the state. This week he chose the person to lead that force: Cord Byrd.

DeSantis described Byrd as a “staunch advocate for election security, public integrity, the fight against big-tech censorship and the de-platforming of political candidates.” Byrd’s wife — whom DeSantis appointed to his education department — is a QAnon supporter who defended the insurrection on January 6.

Of course, not every married couple agrees on everything. But there is no reason to believe the two Byrds have any serious disagreements on their basic worldview.

When I wrote a feature on DeSantis earlier this year, I noticed that he was asked a couple times whether Joe Biden had legitimately won the election in 2020 and simply dodged the question, and then reporters got tired of asking and simply stopped. Now the national media routinely greets the nomination of new Republicans who refuse to acknowledge the election result — Doug Mastriano, Herschel Walker, etc. — as evidence of extremism. And it is, at least in absolute if not relative terms.

But what DeSantis shows is the degree to which the Republican mainstream has co-opted the belief system of its fringe. The movement is happening simultaneously among the party’s voters, its candidates, and its affiliated intellectuals. This movement can be seen in a few events of the last week.

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Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, gave an interview to The Claremont Review. His choice of Claremont is itself significant — the think tank has become a hotbed of intellectual support for Trump’s most unhinged coup supporters, including John Eastman, one of the lawyers most intimately involved in the plot to overturn the election.

Podhoretz told Claremont that he blamed Trump for “political malpractice” in contributing to the special-election defeat in Georgia that gave Democrats their Senate majority. “However,” he noted, “I have to say that I am perfectly prepared to believe that the 2020 election may have been stolen.”

There you have it: a straight-out endorsement of Trump’s most dangerous anti-democratic lie, issued by one of the conservative movement’s most eminent intellectuals.

Meanwhile, and very much related, Commentary has published a symposium on Matthew Continetti’s new history of the American right. I reviewed the book last month. Continetti’s analysis is a frustrating but interesting combination of self-scrutiny and wishfulness. In the former category, he acknowledges that the right has veins of paranoid, plutocratic anti-democratic thought running through it, and that these traditions have resurfaced in the form of Trumpism. In the latter category, he presents the neoconservatives as the movement’s saviors, crediting them with rescuing the right from the fever swamps.

Podhoretz’s endorsement of Trump, and Trump’s most paranoid lie, is obviously a rebuke to his theory. If the neocons are the antithesis of the Trumpist strain of authoritarian paranoia, how can the most esteemed neoconservative (who comes in for extensive praise by Continetti) have thrown his name behind Trump’s ugliest and wildest lie?

Anyway, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry has contributed to the symposium. National Review famously published an issue devoted to attacking Trump during the 2016 primary. Lowry’s response to Continetti concedes a great deal of ground to factions on the right he once believed he could ignore and overpower:

The dual task for conservatives now is to do everything in our power to stop a descent down the rabbit hole of anti-fluoridation-type obsessions in the name of fighting the country’s corrupt elite, while engaging with populists and nationalists who have thoughtful, if excoriating, critiques of the prior conservative consensus. What must be resisted is the impulse to take our ball and go home—the Benedict Option for disheartened conservative intellectuals and writers—because forces on the right that have long been on the losing side of intramural fights are now in the ascendency.

The bolded passage is the key one. He is resisting the impulse to admit that the cranks and lunatics have won, even if that reality is undeniably true. Lowry’s metaphor of taking their ball and going home is a way of presenting principle as pique. National Review will continue to struggle for factional control of the Republican Party, while conceding that the most extreme elements of the right must be placated somehow.

That is the synthesis behind NR’s relentless promotion of Ron DeSantis, which includes a studied refusal to acknowledge the latter’s alliance with anti-vaxxers and supporters of Trump’s election lie. Lowry is presenting this strategy as fighting against the kooks, but in reality he is counseling cooperation with them. When one line in the end is washed away, they will retreat and draw a new one, and then another and another.

Tuesday’s primaries resulted in Pennsylvania Republicans nominating Doug Mastriano, an especially deranged Trumpist. Mastriano has not only endorsed election-fraud conspiracy theorists but bussed activists to the January 6 rally, appeared with QAnon, barred the mainstream media from his rallies, and has vowed to decertify voting machines in counties that produce voting totals he doesn’t like. Mastriano’s election as governor of a key swing state would raise the probability that the 2024 election turns into the kind of republic-ending crisis Trump attempted in 2020.

The anti-anti-Trump right has responded to this event in an interesting way. They have blamed Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, for nominating him. Shapiro put up ads attacking Mastriano as a slavish Trump supporter, knowing full well the campaign would help him in the primary. “The Democrats Wanted Doug Mastriano, and Now They’ve Got Him,” writes Charles C.W. Cooke. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial, headlined “The Democrats Get Their Man in Pennsylvania,” expresses the same theme.

I agree that Shapiro’s gambit — while probably not decisive, given Mastriano’s overwhelming, 20-plus-point victory — was unethical for the reasons the anti-anti-Trumpists say it was. Shapiro deliberately advanced the prospects of his most extreme opponent, thereby increasing both the chances that Shapiro would win and that his defeat could trigger a national catastrophe.

But it is worth considering why the anti-anti-Trumpers have grasped ahold of this grievance now, after the fact.

During the beginning stages of Trump’s first campaign, I mostly ignored it on the assumption that he would lose and my attention was better spent on more serious candidates. One of the first things I wrote about Trump was an impish column arguing that his nomination would be a good thing — not only because he would most likely be defeated, but because he would tear apart the party’s plutocratic coalition and, if elected, probably discard its orthodoxy and veer to the center, like fellow celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger had.

Needless to say, all three assumptions proved totally incorrect. To my credit, I abandoned that argument explicitly in short order. I started paying serious attention to Trump and realized he was not another Schwarzenegger at all. A few weeks later, I wrote a column admitting I had been wrong, and cited the evidence that was already piling up that “his authoritarian style could degrade American politics even in defeat.”

I mention all this to note that the anti-anti-Trump right has referred to that original column (without noting my quick retraction of its thesis) innumerable times. There are many conservative readers who know me only through these citations of my work and earnestly believe I spent the 2016 election promoting Trump. Cooke in particular loves to cite it.

The anti-anti-Trump obsession with that one (admittedly errant) column has always struck me as bizarre. Why should my one, early, and explicitly retracted argument for nominating Trump weigh so heavily on the minds of people who spent years and years running interference for Trump by focusing relentlessly on discrediting his opponents?

I think their response to Mastriano clarifies the matter. Put yourself in the mind of a conservative who dislikes Trump, earnestly wishes his party would nominate a different and more competitive candidate, but cannot bring himself to support the Democrats as an alternative. You express most of your political beliefs in the form of anti-anti-Trumpism, but this pose is a kind of torment. You resent the position in which you find yourself, and the easiest target for your blame is … the liberals.

Yes, the liberals are the ones who forced Republicans to nominate Trump. They have subjected you to the humiliation of insisting the greatest threat to the republic on any given day is Adam Schiff or D.C. statehood or Nina Jankowicz while trying very hard to not notice what is happening to your own movement.

Most importantly, focusing on the perfidious liberal role in aiding the extremist right, however minor it might be, relieves you of any obligation to take the threat seriously. In Cooke’s case, I am not speculating about his desires, because he has made them explicit. “I do not want to hear a single thing from the Democratic Party about the ‘threat’ that Doug Mastriano presents to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, or to the republic in general,” he writes.

The anti-anti-Trumpists don’t need to consider the awful choice of conceding that the health of the republic requires supporting a Democrat in the Pennsylvania governor’s race, or possibly for president in 2024, because the liberals brought this all on themselves.

As a capstone of sorts to all this, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which last year was held in Florida to highlight the good works of DeSantis, kicks off this year’s version in Budapest to showcase conservative idol Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian president has carried out a program of democratic backsliding that has seen his ruling party gain control of the country’s media and business, all of which understand that maintaining their current positions requires staying in Orban’s good graces. The conservative movement’s increasingly undisguised longing to import Orbánism to the United States is a clear sign of its ideological direction.

At least they didn’t pick Moscow?

Finally, on a (slightly) less cataclysmic note, the Washington Post has a story on suicides among college athletes. The suicides are obviously a rare event, but they highlight the extreme edge of the normal conditions of college athletes, which almost universally include intense pressure that often bleeds into outright abuse.

The discussion of college athletics overwhelmingly focuses on issues facing high-level football and men’s basketball players. The tenor of this discussion treats the problem as a free market that needs to be unleashed by permitting these athletes to capture their market value. That system is in place and working. Football and men’s basketball programs are now bidding on a more or less open market for talent.

But I hold the rather lonely view that these changes do absolutely nothing for the vast majority of college athletes, who not only have no market value but whose market value is negative. They play a money-losing sport. Their scholarship is a cost for the school, which has little incentive to respect their right to an education or the semblance of a normal college social experience.

College athletics has grown much more marketized over the last generation. It is intensely frustrating to me that marketization enjoys a monopoly on the discourse of college-sports reform to the point where even greater marketization is literally the only idea for reforming college sports that most fans can imagine.

As a liberal, I regard markets neither with automatic ideological hostility nor support, but instead consider them as a tool to achieve ends. In this case, marketization has achieved the end of making college athletes more competitive. The problem is, I don’t think this is a needed or worthy end. A generation ago, when college athletes were weaker, slower, and less skilled in just about every sport, college athletics was just as much fun — or at least served its purpose of fostering school spirit just as well.

If colleges decide the objective of their athletics program is something other than the single-minded pursuit of competitiveness, and includes giving their athletes a chance to have an education and a happy experience on campus along with participating in a sport, they are going to have to move in a different direction.

 

 

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