World Where You Live

Let's start with a little music from the band Crowded House, circa 1986:

Here's someone now who's got the muscle
His steady hand could move a mountain
Expert in bed, but come on now
There must be something missing
That golden one leads a double life
You'll find out

The detail about being expert in bed is a tell. Just ask him.

Tell me, I don't know where you go
Do you climb into space
To the world where you live
The world where you live, oh-hoo

The world where you live matters. So if you ask an expert, what do you learn? Here's one right now:

Democrats' principal appeal isn't to philosophical coherence: They tell their coalition that they'll take care of their own - the gays, the blacks, the feminists, the transitioning, the environmentalists, the Hispanics, the educators... This time round, a big chunk of the Republican base has figured it'd like someone who's looking out for them, too.

If the present polls hold up through Iowa and New Hampshire, it'd be the reconfiguration of Mr and Mrs Main Street America as just another interest group. So a philosophical commitment to free trade means less to them than the degeneration of mill and factory towns into wastelands of fast-food service jobs and heroin addiction. An abstract respect for religious pluralism means less to them than reducing the number of crazies running around whose last words before opening fire are "Allahu akbar!" A theoretical belief in private-sector health care means less to them than not getting stiffed by crappy five-figure health "insurance" that can be yanked out from under you at any moment under Byzantine rules and regulations that change 30 times a day. And bipartisan myth-making about "a nation of immigrants" means a whole lot less than another decade of Press One For English, flatlined wages, sanctuary cities and remorseless cultural transformation...

That's Mark Steyn, surveying the scene. Everybody searching for something, and if it's true, a lot of people are landing on a blowhard with a combover. 

His steady hand could move a mountain

Meanwhile, out in exotic Wichita, our man Bud Norman and his "editorial we" aren't so sure:

We also note that except for the predictable schoolyard taunts that Trump prefers, and the frequent outright racist screeds from supporters won’t hold Trump responsible for, and there’s the strangely anachronistic argument that anyone who isn’t marching in lockstep with Trump must be supporting some evil creature called “Jeb!,” but the most common retort from Trump and his acolytes is that “at least he fights.”

But who is the fight against? Bud doesn't know, either.

By “establishment,” we no longer have no idea what Trump’s supporters mean to describe.

At the outset of Trump’s campaign we assumed he meant the likes of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who have so frequently angered such rebellious and old-fashioned conservatives as ourselves by signing off on big government crony-capitalist scams from ethanol subsidies to private property land-grabs to big-bank bail-outs and all those deficit-spending budgets, but now we’re told by Trump himself that Cruz was a loose cannon to have opposed all that as a Senator and that nobody in the establishment likes him as a result so the master deal-maker is best suited make the deals that will increase the ethanol subsidies that Iowa voters have a special interest in and uphold that “wonderful” Supreme Court decision that allowed him to tear down a widow’s home and build a parking lot for his casino and assure the next round of bail-outs that he didn’t think were big enough the last time around and pass a plan that cuts taxes and doesn’t decrease spending and will somehow end with a surplus. 

Do you climb into space
To the world where you live

It's all irreconcilable, isn't it? We make America great again by fighting what, exactly?

Here's someone now who's got the muscle

How will it be deployed? Don't expect any help from our normal tutors. Back to Steyn:

All the Chumpy McDonorpants had to do was sit on their hands and not give 100 million bucks to another hereditary-class rich-boy stiff with no flair for retail politics who thinks that illegal immigration is "an act of love". But they couldn't help themselves. The Donor Class decided it would take its contempt for the rubes to the next level ...and now they're surprised that the rubes have decided to take it to the next level, too. They don't care when the insiders say that Trump isn't a "real Republican". To them, that's not a bug, it's a feature. But Rush posits that disenchantment with the only electoral alternative to the Democrats is now so great that they don't even care that Trump isn't a "real conservative". My old colleague Jonah Goldberg is pointing out today, yet again, that Trump is "not a conservative".

That's true. But he's not campaigning like one, is he? Cruz is running proudly under the conservative banner. Trump is running like a guy who got Frank Luntz to do one of his "words that work" focus groups and "conservative" came back with net unfavorables.

It's an impasse. I'm not sure how to bridge the gap, especially when the operative notion seems to be to burn it all down.

We're looking for wide open spaces 
High above the kitchen
And we're strangers here
On our way to some other place

I don't know that we're going to like the destination very much.

A very long time ago

Mark Steyn on the National Review anti-Trumpalooza:

Nevertheless, notwithstanding some contributors I admire, the whole feels like a rather obvious trolling exercise. As I explained yesterday, I don't think Trump supporters care that he's not a fully paid-up member in good standing of "the conservative movement" - in part because, as they see it, the conservative movement barely moves anything. If you want the gist of NR's argument, here it is:

I think we can say that this is a Republican campaign that would have appalled Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan...

A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance...

My old boss, Ronald Reagan, once said...

Ronald Reagan was famous for...

When Reagan first ran for governor of California...

Reagan showed respect for...

Reagan kept the Eleventh Commandment...

Far cry from Ronald Reagan's "I am paying for this microphone" line...

Trump is Dan Quayle, and everyone and his auntie are Lloyd Bentsen: "I knew Ronald Reagan, I worked for Ronald Reagan, I filled in Ronald Reagan's subscription-renewal form for National Review. And you, sir, are no Ronald Reagan."

You have to be over 50 to have voted for Reagan, and a supposed "movement" can't dine out on one guy forever, can it? What else you got?

Emphasis in original. Let's think about that last line. You have to be over 50 to have voted for Reagan. That brought me up short, but it's true. I did vote in the 1984 election and I was 20 years old at the time. I wasn't sure what I believed, but I wasn't going to vote for Ronnie Raygun. To show you how confused I was, I voted for Gary Hart in the primary and David Bergland, the Libertarian Party candidate, in the general. How does one go from a Democrat to a Libertarian in less than a year? By continuing to reject Reagan, especially after he enthusiastically signed a law that nationalized the drinking age at 21, while simultaneously recognizing that Walter Mondale was a sanctimonious scold. I also had a good friend who was an LP member and he certainly had some influence on my thinking.

My dad was a rock-ribbed Republican and he always maintained a subscription to National Review, so I had an opportunity to read plenty of NR growing up. Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher were the high priests of the conservative movement and they were willing to cast apostates into the outer darkness. It was Buckley who sent the Birchers and the Randians away. Later on, he cast Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran into the abyss. Buckley has been gone for nearly a decade now and NR no longer holds the imprimatur it had then. Back to Steyn:

The movement conservatives at National Review make a pretty nice living out of "ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth". The voters can't afford that luxury: They live in a world where, in large part due to the incompetence of the national Republican Party post-Reagan, Democrat ideas are in the ascendant. And they feel that this is maybe the last chance to change that.

Hope is a lapel pin

You used to see, from time to time, people wearing a lapel pin of the sort you see on the left. That pin identified the wearer as a speaker of Esperanto, the 19th century synthetic language that people hoped would become the lingua franca of a better world. Esperanto has elements of  both Slavic and Romance languages but also other elements, in an effort to be internationalist. The name itself is similar to the Spanish word esperanza, which means hope. Esperanto still has its adherents but it never really caught on while you can still learn it, I wouldn't be surprised if more people know how to speak Klingon these days. And in some crucial ways, I think movement conservatism is becoming too much like Esperanto, a language people could learn but never will. I haven't seen an Esperanto lapel pin in at least 20 years. Hell, it's increasingly rare to see lapels these days. 1984 is a very long time ago.

Donald Trump doesn't bother with political Esperanto. He talks directly to people and he's very good at it. The writers and thinkers at NR are, in the main, not known for direct expression. Trump is winning because he doesn't bother with caveats and cavils. As Steyn notes, the hour is short. No one gives a damn about fealty to an idea, or for hero worship. People want a plan. A couple dozen denunciations isn't a plan. What is the conservative movement for? Do you know? If you read  the current issue of National Review, you won't know.

22 pundits, no waiting

So National Review has brought out a boatload of pundits to inveigh against the Donald, including everyone from old Reagan hand Edwin Meese III (show of hands, how many people thought he died 20 years ago?) to Dana Loesch, who posed for her book cover with a cocktail dress and a big gun.

You can read what they all say at the link I've provided. It's all good and I agree with nearly every sentiment expressed. And you know what? It won't matter at all. From what I can see, people who support Trump aren't doing so because they see him as the redeemer of Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. That's not the point. Trump supporters are instead, in the main, looking for a Man of Action rather than a Man of Words. So the pleadings of the Men (and Women) of Words aren't going to change anything.

In his 1963 work "The Ordeal of Change," Eric Hoffer explains the distinction:

In the modern Occident power was, and still is, the prerogative of men of action – landowners, soldiers, businessmen, industrialists, and their hangers-on. The intellectual is treated as a poor relation and has to pick up the crumbs. He usually ekes out a living by teaching, journalism, or some white-collar job. Even when his excellence as a writer, artist, scientist, or educator is generally recognized and rewarded, he does not feel himself one of the elite.

Trump is a Man of Action -- he builds skyscrapers and casinos with his name on them. He doesn't walk on the stage. He struts. And he doesn't really give a damn about intellectual consistency. Why would he?

So when pundit L. Brent Bozell III, who is the nephew of William F. Buckley, Jr. and has been on the ramparts for over 30 years, offers the following:

A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance; spoke annually to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Young Americans for Freedom, and other organizations to rally the troops; supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him; raised money for countless conservative groups; wrote hundreds of op-eds; and delivered even more speeches, everywhere championing our cause. Until he decided to run for the GOP nomination a few months ago, Trump had done none of these things, perhaps because he was too distracted publicly raising money for liberals such as the Clintons; championing Planned Parenthood, tax increases, and single-payer health coverage; and demonstrating his allegiance to the Democratic party. We conservatives should support the one candidate who walks with us.

If you were to ask a Trump supporter about all that, the response would be, so what? This isn't about hoary principles and whether you have built your credibility in the conservative salt mines over the decades. This is about results. Does L. Brent Bozell III have a 98-story building in Chicago with his name on it? Yes, Ronald Reagan walked with us. Donald Trump struts.

Don't get me wrong -- I admire Brent Bozell and the work he has done for movement conservatism. No one has been more diligent in exposing the systemic rot of liberalism and the role its cheerleaders in the mainstream media play in propagating nonsense. It doesn't matter, though. If you put every word that Brent Bozell has offered on paper, Donald Trump would treat it as Charmin.

The torrent of words pouring forth from NR isn't about convincing anyone, really. It's about establishing parameters. That's worth doing, but we should not assume it will convince a single soul to abandon Trump.