By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, January 04, 2024
Before
it was a worn-out celebrity magazine, Vanity Fair was a
wonderful novel by the English satirist William Makepeace Thackeray, whose
benevolent Puritan name belied his cutting and skeptical temperament, and
before Thackeray got hold of it, “Vanity Fair” was an allegorical venue in John
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a place where, as
Thackeray would later put it in his novel, “Everybody is striving for what is
not worth the having.” That sentence in slightly modified form was used as the
tagline for the terrific 2018 television adaptation starring Olivia Cooke as Becky
Sharp, though it might as easily be the motto of the dreadful 2024 American
reality television series currently starring Nikki Haley as Becky
Sharp-as-a-Doorknob.
One
could make a pretty good case that the 2024 Republican presidential nomination
is something not worth striving for and not worth having, but Haley isn’t even
in the running for that: At the risk of giving a hostage to fate, her most
likely political future includes losing in Iowa, then losing in New
Hampshire—and then being shredded like a dry winter leaf sucked through a Husqvarna Z572X
Zero Turn in her home state of South Carolina, where Donald Trump
currently leads her by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in the polls. I am not in
the race, but I am closer to Haley in the polls than Haley is to Trump.
It
would be one thing if Haley’s bid were some kind of admirable display of
conscience: When Cato the Younger disemboweled
himself (twice, really—it is kind of a grisly story) rather than
consent to live one day under the tyranny of Julius Caesar, it was a worthwhile
gesture, and he died a good death. Nikki Haley is not going to her death, even
if her reputation is. Haley—a Southerner and former governor who once acquitted
herself reasonably well in a Confederate flag controversy and currently is
striving after a presidential nomination once conferred upon Abraham
Lincoln, for Pete’s sake—managed to wrongfoot herself on a predictable
troll question about the Civil War, initially describing it as a conflict about
liberty and good governance before adding, pathetically—and here pathetically is,
for once, precisely the right word—“What do you want me to say
about slavery?”
Well,
governor—what do you want to say about slavery?
People
ask Republicans these Civil War questions for two reasons: 1) They think there
is no good way for a Republican candidate to answer the question, that waving
away the slavery question makes them look like they are courting bigots and
Lost Cause goofballs, while being frank about slavery will cost them support
among the bigots and Lost Cause goofballs they are courting; 2) They think
Republicans are dumb.
Nikki
Haley is not dumb—she is not an idiot, but she plays one on TV.
Most
Republicans do the same—it is the defining feature of their party in 2024. They
have fully internalized Trump’s boobishness (though he is not the origin of GOP
boobery) and his used-car-salesman’s superlatives. Rep. Elise Stefanik, taking
a victory lap after the announcement of the resignation of Harvard President
Claudine Gay, boasted that this is “just the beginning of what will be the
greatest scandal of any college or university in history.” That is true if by
“any college or university” you mean the 20 most famous institutions in the
United States and if by “in history” you mean the past six months—if not, then
surely Martin Heidegger’s Sieg-heil!-ing his way to the top at Freiburg
University in the 1930s limbos right under the admittedly low bar set by
Claudine Gay and her enablers at Harvard. But that is how Republicans
talk—and think, if I may abuse the word—these days, “the fierce
urgency of now” as seen from whatever is three flights of stairs down from the
lowest gutter in Palm Beach.
I
used to say that Ted Cruz reminds me of the pickup artist in Infinite
Jest, whose opening line with women is: “Tell me what sort of man you
prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” (Yes, I wrote the same
thing about Elizabeth Warren, once—it’s a good line.)The difference, of course,
is that the imaginary pickup artist in the novel deploys his gambit with
success, while Ted Cruz almost lost reelection to an El Paso trust-fund
snoot with the politics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the keen mind
and Ciceronian affect of Jeff Spicoli after an
all-morning wake-and-bake in the VW van. Cruz is the guy who lost to the
delusional authoritarian game-show host the last time around, and I wonder
which part of his subsequent story arc has Nikki Haley saying: “I gotta get me
some of that political magic.” Trump calls Haley “bird brain”
and his minions call her “Nimrata Randhawa,” believing—not without reason—that
there is political juice to be had out of primary voters by painting the South
Carolina-born former governor as a dirty foreigner scooped up out of some
sweaty Noida call center, but I’ll bet you a fair heap of gently
depreciating U.S. dollars that my editors will get more of an earful from her
people after this column than Trump has received in the whole
of her timid, chickens—t campaign so far.
What
do I think of the Republican contenders’ attempt to take on Trump head-on? I
think it would be an interesting idea—maybe even one worth trying.
Very
large majorities of Americans do not want Donald Trump—or Joe Biden—to be
president again. According to my English-major math, that suggests there is an
opportunity for some sensible center-right politician to build an
anti-Trump and anti-Biden coalition, winning the primary and
the general election with basically the same group of voters, thereby
liberating himself or herself from the perceived need to pretend to be one sort
of man or woman for one set of potential voters and a different sort for
different voters. It suggests that some sensible center-right person could win
the primary and the general without the coup-plotters and the Lost Cause dopes
and the bigots and the QAnon kooks and the rest.
Chris
Christie isn’t really trying to do that—he’s just waging a merry little jihad
that is about Trump rather than about the wider movement currently organized
around him. But somebody could do it. The thing is, Nikki Haley
does not seem to think that she can do that. Her idiotic Civil
War gaffe isn’t evidence of some covert racist sensibility on her part—such
claims are ridiculous. Instead, her idiotic Civil War gaffe is evidence of
something we already know that requires no additional evidence: Haley thinks
her best bet is trying to stay in the good graces of the kooks and bigots and
conspiracy nuts, because that is the only available path to power. I have a
pretty low opinion of the Republican electorate—but not as low as Nikki
Haley’s, it would seem.
Maybe
Haley has it right. But if you don’t think you can win without the kooks and
the bigots, then it probably isn’t worth winning. But winning is one thing—if
you think you can’t secure … a distant second-place showing that is only a
point or two ahead of third place … then, really, why invite all of that stink
into your life?
***
One
rarely hears the words, “Thank goodness I ended up back in Arkansas!” But, for
Bill Clinton, those were the right words.
In
the early 1990s, Democrats were in a state of absolute political despair.
Ronald Reagan had trounced them twice, hard, and Americans had come to equate
the party with the unfortunate dorks it had put up against Reagan in 1984 and
George Bush in 1988, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, respectively. In 1972,
Richard Nixon had crushed George McGovern in a 49-state landslide, and while
Watergate was the end of Nixon, the GOP bounced back pretty quickly, with
Reagan taking 44 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984.
(Recount
Minnesota!)
You
know who wasn’t in the middle of all that? Bill Clinton.
In
1972, Clinton was still in law school; in 1980, he was on his way to becoming,
as he ruefully put it, the youngest ex-governor in Arkansas history; in 1984,
he was back in the governor’s office and, having learned something from losing
to a Republican in a state where there often had been no Republican candidate
at all for some statewide offices (Clinton himself had run unopposed in his
election as attorney general), Clinton turned a few degrees to the right; in
1988, he opened the convention that would nominate the doomed Dukakis by giving
a speech that was mostly an advertisement for his own moderating “New Democrat”
style of politics and then, when Dukakis went down in flames, Clinton led an “I
Told You So” tour as head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.
It
helped Clinton a great deal that he was, for all of that time, the big noise in
a Southern state that was trending Republican (a partisan transformation that,
following the slow political pace of many other Southern states, would not be
complete until 2014) and that he was far, far away from the likes of Dukakis,
Mondale, Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and other exemplars of sanctimonious urban
Northeastern welfare-state politics who were, at the time, the towering figures
in the Democratic Party. If Bill Clinton had been a son of Greenwich who grew
up to be governor of Connecticut or a Hoboken scion who grew up to be governor
of New Jersey, he would not have been president of the United States—and,
indeed, the Democratic Party might never have recovered from its defeat and
humiliation in the 1980s and 1990s.
(Oh,
the Rev. Jackson! If you think antisemitic outbursts are a new feature of
left-Democratic politics, go read up on “Hymietown.”)
It
is an interesting matter for speculation: Bill Clinton’s policies as president
had very little to do with the technology-driven prosperity of the 1990s—Bill
Gates and Marc Andreessen had a lot more to do with it—but Clinton and his
party had a lot of good feelings stick to them, as was inevitable, and one
imagines that the dynamic would have been even more intense had that decade of
prosperity happened under a president from the more capitalist-friendly (at the
time, and in theory) Republican Party rather than under a Democrat who had to
drag his party—whining and moaning if not kicking and screaming—out of the
1970s and toward some kind of British-style pre-Thatcher union-goon social
democracy. Bill Clinton learned the lessons of his party’s mistakes, as did his
opposite number in the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, the modernizing and
moderating Labour leader whose Spice Girls-era “Cool Britannia” was a
hell of a lot more attractive than the Sad Britannia of the current crop of
resentful Little Englanders.
Bill
Clinton was a canny enough politician that he did not run a lot of no-hoper
campaigns that obliged him to make a lot of promises and sell little bits of
his soul to the likes of Lane Kirkland (the AFL-CIO boss who opposed Clinton on
NAFTA) or Al Sharpton (speaking
of left-wing antisemitism) or their ilk. Clinton knew how to dance: As
governor, he cheesed off Arkansas teachers’ unions by pushing for mandatory
competency testing, but he also softened the blow with higher pay. When his
party was making tweedy professorial noises about the need to address the “root
causes” of crime, Clinton made a big show of tough-on-crime policies and
did everything short of staging a bullfight to publicize his state’s
reinstatement of capital punishment and its first executions in years.
All
of that meant that when the time came—the time when the country was a little
bit fatigued by 12 years of Republicans in the White House and irritated by a
modest recession but by no means interested in resurrecting the political
corpse of Walter Mondale—Bill Clinton could step forward and plausibly
advertise himself as a different kind of Democrat, as a real alternative both
to a Republican Party whose conservatism was increasingly strident and
doctrinaire and to the model of Democratic politics that had, e.g., turned
Detroit into a smoking ruin.
Nikki
Haley is a little older today than Bill Clinton was when he was elected
president and a little younger than George W. Bush was. She has some time. Or,
rather, she had some time. One might wonder: If she is not really going to run
against Trump and Trumpism—not only as a matter of bad manners and corruption
and the occasional attempted coup d’état but as a matter of
substantive ideas and real values—then what the hell is she doing? We know what
Christie is doing: He loves this stuff, loves being in the game, and he doesn’t
think he’s really hurting his party or his country, and because he’s a cheerful
nihilist from New Jersey who naturally assumes that we are all doomed, anyway.
We know what Vivek Ramaswamy is doing: He’s a bored rich mediocrity who, like a
lot of bored rich mediocrities, thinks that his talent for making money is part
of a general-purpose genius encompassing a talent for statesmanship that simply
could not be fully actualized as, say, a county commissioner in Ohio or a city
councilman in New York. We know why Ron DeSantis is in the race: Politics is
his therapy, and he’s one broken shoelace away from leaving a jack-o’-lantern with a knife
stuck in the side of its head and a note that says “You” on the
national doorstep before ringing the doorbell and scampering madly away. Haley
could, if she were so inclined, stand tall among these Lilliputians and offer a
real alternative to the moral midgetry of the contemporary Republican Party
rather than merely retailing a skim-milk version of the genuine full-on-psycho
article.
Ultimately,
Nikki Haley can’t give the Republican Party what it really needs—which is one
of those 49-state wipeouts like the Democrats suffered in 1972 and 1984: Even a
1988-style 40-state ass-whipping might do the trick. The people who study
addiction tell us that the need for junkies and drunks to “hit bottom” before
recovery is a dangerous myth—but it may be true for political parties.
But
for now, Haley and the GOP seem content to do what addicts always do: to keep
striving after what is not worth having.
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