The reason NRO is shit is because it continually rectifies the past to service the current identity politics of social conservatism while (1) denying it, (2) abhorring the insane retrograde belief structure that has formed from the crazy alt-history that it perpetuates. If you can only comment on Harriet Tubman within the frame of âsheâs okay, but these awful feminists and race hustlers shouldnât have pulled this offâ the the point of the article isnât Harriet Tubman as person, itâs Harriet Tubman as yet another excuse to re-iterate that all liberals and stupid and evil and deserve nothing.
Much like the beneficent of mythos of Ronald Reagan and William Buckley airbrushes the ugly aspects of past conservatism so that present conservatism can be presented as not just the same reactionary shit, but some kind of boldness and honesty. The joke being, the rest of the world isnât supposed to notice that the Reagan-esque condescension that NRO sells is what begat the angry fuckwittery of people like Limbaugh, which begat the mindlessly hateful shit of Breitbart. All have the same âweâre correct, and Right, and weâll work backwards from thatâ premise.
Keeping in mind that the fundamental dishonesty and lunacy of this kind of rolling anachronistic cynicism is crystallized in âLiberal Fascism,â in which the horror of Nazi Germany is appropriated to demonstrate how awful and dangerous American liberals are. Because that is âserious thinkingâ if youâre willing to be fundamentally dishonest, disingenuously, and cynical. And those three adjectives are what keeps coming up with regard to NRO. Itâs the pseudo-intellectual branch of the âcan fail, can only be failedâ worldview thatâs been propagated.
Hence the joke of stuff like âAgainst Trumpâ and the Williamson screed about Trump voters: they set the stage for this solipsistic politics by their own revisions and myth-making. They encouraged anti-intellectualism as a basis for culture war issues as long as it seemed containable in the lower orders, while the leading class did âseriousâ stuff like read David Brooks columns about how âseriousâ they are. Theyâre con men, in that they wish to cynical use the paranoid style, and to move a âbaseâ whose fear they inflate to insane levels, but theyâve gone all Hubbardian and started to believe their own hustle: hence this kind of endless loquacious game of Pin The Tail On The True Scotsman, where thereâs always a new Serious Conservative Hope about to break out and change politics.
Well, that particular rainbow-shitting unicorn has failed to manifest, so now that failure has to be explained away because canât fail. So Trump is a secret liberal, and those dedicated party bloc voters who used to be lauded as bedrock are shitty meth-addled, unemployed proles.
Marginally longer sentences and patrician affectations donât actually conceal that theyâre just selling the same hubris as the other hucksters.