By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, July 12, 2015
What’s generally misunderstood on the left is that the
tea-party movement did not arise as an alternative to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi
Democrats but as an alternative to the Bush-McConnell-Hastert Republicans, who
were judged to have spent too much, warred too recklessly, and — most
significant — to have been too ready to make themselves complicit in the
bailouts.
What began as a bracing revolt quickly congealed into
pasty dogma.
I’ve spent the past few days at Freedom Fest in Las
Vegas, Mark Skousen’s annual gathering of liberty-minded activists — think of
it as CPAC for people who like weed and gold coins and who are maybe interested
in hearing a pitch about taking up domicile in Belize. Far from a doctrinaire
libertarian (or even Libertarian) affair, it draws a large number of
self-described constitutional conservatives and limited-government types of all
persuasions, including Republican activists and candidates.
It is also WHINO central.
You know the RINO — Republican In Name Only — but you may
be less familiar with the WHINO. The WHINO is a captive of the populist Right’s
master narrative, which is the tragic tale of the holy, holy base, the victory
of which would be entirely assured if not for the machinations of the
perfidious Establishment. Never mind the Democrats, economic realities, Putin,
ISIS, the geographical facts of the U.S.-Mexico border — all would be well and
all manner of things would be well if not for the behind-the-scenes plotting of
Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their enablers, who apparently can be bribed
with small numbers of cocktail weenies. The WHINO is a Republican conspiracy
theorist, in whose fervid imaginings all the players — victims, villains — are
Republicans.
Barack Obama? Pshaw. The real enemy is Jeb Bush.
That this is a deeply stupid view of the world should go
without saying, but if you need evidence, consider that the WHINO vote has
settled for the moment upon Donald Trump, a Hillary Rodham Clinton donor who
supports Canadian-style single-payer health care and amnesty for as many
illegal immigrants as he imagines to exist, who has 0.00 percent chance of
winning a general election and who is, as if more were needed, a ridiculous
buffoon.
Ask the WHINO to explain that and you will get the
characteristic WHINO whine: “But what about the baaaaaaaaase!?!”
Which is to say, the WHINO loves Trump not because Trump
confounds the Democrats or because he constitutes a serious threat to a
Democratic victory in 2016, but because he confounds the Republicans and
constitutes a serious threat to a Republican victory in 2016.
The worst part of the WHINO approach is the campaign
strategery. At Freedom Fest, I did an interview with Matthew Boyle of Breitbart
Radio, a nice enough guy but a pretty good example of the WHINO style in
American politics. What about Romney? Boyle demanded. Romney, he said with
absolute assurance, lost to Barack Obama because millions of conservatives
stayed home, finding him insufficiently committed to their cause.
The first aspect of what is wrong with this analysis is
obvious: It assumes that a “real conservative” who couldn’t beat Mitt Romney in
a Republican primary dominated by “real conservatives” would have defeated
Barack Obama in a national election not dominated by conservatives at all,
i.e., that Romney was the weakest candidate except for all the guys who
couldn’t beat him.
But the defects in this analysis do not stop there. I am
not sure that the psephology actually says what the WHINOs think it does, but
even if it were so, the further problem with this line of thinking is obvious:
If you are a conservative, and if you believe that the way to reform American
public policy is to elect conservatives, and you arrived at Election Day
believing that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were, from the conservative point
of view, interchangeable commodities, then you are either a fanatic or
extraordinarily ill-informed. In either case, you owe it to yourself and to
your country to be a better citizen, and maybe read a book. There are all sorts
of good reasons to abstain from voting, but the preposterous notion that there
isn’t much difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney isn’t one of them.
Republicans would probably be more inclined to give an
ear to campaign advice from people who had — stay with me here — a good record
for winning elections. The anti-McConnell gang took its run with Matt Bevin in
the primary and got beat like a pack of circus monkeys. Louis Gohmert made his
run against John Boehner for the speakership, and there he sits. These were
both fine projects — primary challenges and leadership challenges are positive
developments that should generally be welcomed — but they were losers. On the
other hand, the campaigns to elevate Ted Cruz over David Dewhurst and Marco
Rubio over Charlie Crist — insurgencies that were supported by a lot of the
same Establishment leaders and institutions abominated by the WHINOS — were
successful. They were so successful, in fact, that Rubio and Cruz immediately
became faces of the Establishment that we are informed is so despicable.
It takes a certain quality of mind to embrace Rubio over
Crist only to look over the new senator’s shoulder longingly at . . . Donald
Trump.
Rhetorically, this has reached the point of silliness.
When Ted Cruz was shaking the rafters, I had dinner with a state party chairman
who assured me that he was a thorn in the side of the Establishment. If a party
chairman isn’t the Establishment, who is?
We must give some consideration to Trump, Breitbart’s
Boyle informed me, because he is a vessel for the expression of the base’s
frustration.
The base should get a hobby.
Politics is a slow, maddening, incremental business.
Bawling that Mitch McConnell is a mean meany won’t change that. Whining is no
substitute for winning.
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