By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, October 20, 2023
I admire Noah’s relentless attempt to analyze the 2024 Republican
primary, with its various dissections of the coalitions, demographic groups,
polling shifts, and “theories of the race” that are supposedly informing its
outcomes, but I must dissent from his conclusions nevertheless, on the simple
grounds that I don’t really believe that any of it is true —
or, indeed, that it can be true — while Donald Trump remains
in our politics.
Increasingly, inquiries into the GOP’s primary strike me
as Dispatches from Wonderland, in which sound logical conclusions and embryonic
mathematical proofs are mapped onto the frame of pure nonsense. It’s not that
Noah’s theories aren’t solid on their own terms; it’s that they cannot be
checked against anything constant. As he has since he first arrived on the
scene, Donald Trump continues to distort our political field to such an extent
that it is impossible to know whether a given shift in sentiment is the product
of something tangibly real or if it is the result of a bunch of opportunistic
garbage that was arrived at yesterday evening. Is Ron DeSantis running a bad
campaign? I honestly have no idea. Does the Republican electorate care about X
or Y independently of their utility to Donald Trump? Beats me. Is Nikki Haley
actually rising in the stakes because of something she said at a debate? I
dunno.
I am told that there exist “lanes” in which the aspirants
must run. Is this true? Because it seems to me that there are only two: the one
without any rules, in which Donald Trump runs amok; and the one whose rules are
set by Donald Trump, in which everyone else is obliged to play. Usually, in
politics, we debate issues, ideas, positions, visions. In the modern Republican
Party, we debate Donald Trump. He is the constant, and everything around him is
in flux. Disagreements are held relative to him, and their details change
according to his every whim. Terms that once had concrete meanings are defined
relative to what Trump needs at any moment, to the point at which words that
once had meanings — “hawk,” “conservative,” “RINO,” et al. — have been
disintegrated into dust. It is said by smart people that Haley is more
aggressive on foreign policy, or that DeSantis has run too far to the right, or
that Vivek Ramaswamy made a mistake with his policy on this or that, and that
these variables are materially affecting the race. I suppose that’s possible,
but, again, I don’t know whether it’s right, because trying to argue about
anything in this environment is like trying to navigate while standing next to
an electromagnet: One might maintain one’s rubrics and instincts and eloquence,
but the result one gets will still be gibberish.
Ultimately, we seem to have lost the crucial relationship
between inputs and outputs on which any rational politics must rely. A majority
of Americans do not want Trump to run; it doesn’t matter. Trump is facing a
tsunami of court dates that might well lead to his imprisonment; it doesn’t
matter. Trump is demonstrably out of his goddamned mind, and he has no
political philosophy to speak of; it doesn’t matter. Were the man to be
abducted by aliens tomorrow, I might be capable of interrogating our politics in
a way that satisfies my gut. For now, though, I cannot, for all the stars in
the firmament are in flux.
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