The third insurgency
by Tom Sullivan
Antelope Wells border station. Photo by wbaron via Wikimedia Commons.
They do not build. Not much since Eisenhower, anyway. Republicans break things. Now they have broken The Weekly Standard, Beltway conservatives' favorite bathroom reading. As the mouthpiece for Never Trump conservatives, Bill Kristol's little magazine had to die. Philip Anschutz, Colorado billionaire and reported Christian conservative, through his Clarity Media CEO announced he is shutting it down.
A conservative media outlet losing money for a couple of decades is expected. Criticizing Donald Trump is intolerable, especially while shedding readers.
Franklin Foer reviews the publication in his eulogy for The Atlantic:
The magazine itself combined high intellectual seriousness with the crass mentality of a political operative. A single edition of the Standard might contain gonzo reportage, erudite cultural essays, and op-eds filled with gross clichés that made you want to force the whole thing down the garbage disposal.
Clarity Media will flush the troublesome anti-Trump Standard down the corporate Hobart after its final issue on December 17.
Also on Friday, a conservative federal judge in Texas ruled that as congressionally disfigured — sans its original individual tax penalty for failure to carry insurance — the Affordable Care Act is no longer a valid exercise of Congress' taxing authority and thus unconstitutional. Legal scholars who support the ACA as well as conservative critics found the ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor, dare we say, deplorable.
“He effectively repealed the entire Affordable Care Act when the 2017 Congress decided not to do so,” Yale law professor Abbe Gluck told the Washington Post. Ted Frank, a lawyer and ACA critic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, called the decision “embarrassingly bad.”
O'Connor issued a declaratory judgment against the Act but no injunction. He means to break it, preexisting condition protections and all, but stayed his hand for now. Obamacare will continue, the White House said, “pending the appeal process.” Tens of millions of Americans shuddered.
George Packer believes the Republican party bent on eradicating Obamacare has become “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”
Packer presumably completed his essay for The Atlantic before reports of the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal. The child died of dehydration, shock and liver failure after hours in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol.
“This child’s death was the inevitable result of this administration’s cruel and inhumane border enforcement policies,” said Peter Simonson, executive director of New Mexico's American Civil Liberties Union. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen held up the child's death as an object lesson to desperate migrants who would cross the border illegally: Keep Out.*
The product of "a series of insurgencies against the established order," Nielsen's Republican party is by now thoroughly corrupt, Packer explains. "The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them."
An America that once celebrated the peaceful transfer of power after elections now sees Republican-controlled legislatures moving in state after state to lock in their power and lock out opponents after losing ground to the will of the voters. That is, to refute the will of displeased voters and to ensure popular democracy cannot undo what Republicans have done to them.
Packer chronicles the march of movement conservatism from Goldwater to the New Right's embracing "mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas" and the opening of the movement to "extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers." If Goldwater marked the first insurgency, Newt Gingrich led the second, demonizing opponents and announcing there could be no compromises.
Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom—unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.
Then came September 11, the Great Recession, and the election of Barack Obama.
In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.
The party's present condition was a long time coming, Packer concludes, "In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter." Power now trumps principle. Bow or perish.
Civil rights leader Rev. William J. Barber II sees a need for a counter-movement to this extremist "whitelash." The movement must be "indigenously led, state-based, state-government focused, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor, and transformative." Donald Trump's movement, Barber argues, sees "the possibility of a Third Reconstruction, which is why they’re working so hard this time to strangle it in its cradle." The third insurgency wants to roll America back to after the first Reconstruction.
* New Mexico's Antelope Wells Port of Entry is an official border crossing in the Chihuahuan Desert 120 miles west of El Paso, TX. It closes at 4 p.m. The Associated Press reports after being dropped off a 90-min walk from the border, seven-year-old Jakelin Caal, her father, and 161 other migrants crossed at Antelope Wells and approached U.S. Border agents to turn themselves in about 10 p.m.
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