The Salton Sea

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 09, 2024

 

You can put me down with the other pointy-heads who believe that the best thing to happen in the next election—the best thing for the Republican Party (which I care almost nothing about), for the conservative movement (which I care about less than I used to), and for the country (I love you, America, but I think we should start seeing other people)—would be a massive, humiliating, 49-state beatdown for the GOP (they can keep Oklahoma), a knock-down, low-bottom Old Testament episode that ends up being the political equivalent of getting sober in jail. The worst outcome is the one we’re likely to get: another close race decided by a handful of mouth-breathers and suburban snoots in Pennsylvania.

 

My friend Sarah Isgur insists on The Dispatch Podcast that it is obvious and undeniable that Donald Trump would do more conservative things as president than Kamala Harris would. I am not so sure that she is right about that.

 

On abortion, to take a representative issue, Trump looks unlikely to take any affirmative act at all: His position—to the extent that one is discernible somewhere in that Hefty SteelSak full of meth-addled New York City subway rats that he calls a brain—is that he has done everything that needs to be done on the issue by appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted against Roe. To the extent he has adventured beyond that, it has been to wander away from the pro-life position and toward something closer to—not to put too fine a point on it!—the positions typically held by people who are going to vote for Kamala Harris. On that and many similar domestic issues, there is not much reason to think he is going to do anything at all.

 

Perhaps Harris would be worse in the sense that she would act where he would idle. But on foreign policy, Trump is likely to be affirmatively worse than Harris, especially vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin’s attempt to annex Ukraine into his squalid little empire. Given that the president is relatively constrained when it comes to domestic matters and relatively independent when it comes to foreign policy, it is far from clear to me that Trump would be, operationally, more conservative than Harris—or, to put it in less ideological terms, that he would be in any meaningful way better for the country on balance.

 

There isn’t any constituency or principle Trump won’t sell out if he thinks it will keep him in the news and out of jail.

 

The case against Harris is pretty straightforward: She’s a left-wing mediocrity with an ugly authoritarian streak. The case against Trump is pretty straightforward, too: He is a daft would-be caudillo who tried to stage a coup d’état the last time he lost an election. As Marcus Aurelius never wrote, a man who is 103 percent sure he is going to get testicular cancer would be craven indeed if he cared very much about whether it was in the left testicle or the right. There isn’t a good outcome on the menu. 

 

I am not really in the prediction business (I was insufferably certain in my view that Trump would lose and lose badly in 2016, and I have repented), but it seems to me that Harris is winning the race right now and that she is likely to win in November. Proceeding from that admittedly uncertain position, I am interested in a question that is, for understandable reasons, not yet urgent in many Republican minds.

 

What kind of opposition is the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, going to be if a Harris administration takes office in January? After the riots mostly peaceful protests have been concluded, I mean? 

 

In opposition, as in administration, personnel is policy. Right now, the GOP is the Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene party. Is it cursed to remain such? 

 

We can probably assume safely that at least a few worthy Republican figures—Liz Cheney, Mike Gallagher—will remain on the sidelines, Cheney because that’s where Republicans want her, Gallagher because that’s where he wants himself. (David Ignatius’ much-remarked-upon Washington Post column on Gallagher’s exit from politics will be a document useful to historians of our profoundly stupid times.) Mitt Romney won’t be taking center stage. Jeff Flake, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and has spent the past four years building an impressive foreign-policy résumé as ambassador to Turkey, is young (for Washington, at 61), charismatic, and generally impressive, but it is not clear that in our age of politics-of-cooties that he can overcome having endorsed Biden and reclaim a prominent role in Republican affairs—or that he wants to.

 

Flake could probably do Harris some good in Arizona and may see himself as a secretary of state—a good move for aspiring presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, but none of the nation’s top diplomats have gone on to be elected president since James Buchanan in 1856. I can think of three recent cases in which that is regrettable: James Baker, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell would have made excellent presidents. (I know what you’re thinking, Mike Pompeo, because I can see you thinking it. Not gonna happen.) George Schultz and Alexander Haig were pretty impressive figures, each in his own way, as well.

 

Do you know what else Baker, Rice, Powell, Schultz, and Haig have in common? It is impossible to imagine any of them choosing to make a political career in today’s Republican Party. Baker’s contempt for Trump and Trumpism is obvious; Schultz’s read on Trump in 2016 was—and I quote—“God help us”; Rice sees the world rather differently from Trump, to say the least. Haig and Powell have the diplomatic suavity to be dead and subsequently unavailable for comment, but it is difficult to imagine Colin Powell—whose last real public act was leaving the Republican Party after January 6, a few months before he died—saying the words “President Trump” today without throwing up in his mouth.

 

Figures of the kind mentioned above are largely absent from today’s Republican Party except in those cases where they remain thanks to inertia. That’s because the GOP has become the Salton Sea of political parties: As the good stuff evaporates, the toxins left behind get more and more concentrated. Gaetz, Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. take on a larger role in the Republican Party as intelligent conservatives recede or retire, in much the same way that Russian-financed YouTube clowns grow more prominent in the conservative movement as many of its traditional organs atrophy under leadership that is exhausted or compromised by Trumpism or both.

 

There is a kind of symmetry at work: Like the dying rural areas that are now its stronghold, the Republican Party has seen the educated and affluent suburban professionals that once filled its ranks decamp to the party of the cities and inner suburbs. And they are being replaced by … whom? By age group, Trump’s strongest showing in 2020 was among the old, 65 and older, winning 52 percent of that vote; Biden’s strongest showing was among the youngest voters, 18-29, winning 60 percent of them. The GOP talks about building a new multiethnic coalition, and Trump was relatively good at that: Biden won only seven times as many black voters, only twice as many Hispanics, only twice as many (a little less, in fact) Asians, etc., along with a third more women and a third more middle-income ($50,000-$100,000) voters. And, in spite of what you might have been led to believe, 56 percent of union voters went for Biden, only 40 percent for Trump.

 

Who wants to go skinny dipping in the Salton Sea? 

 

Irving Kristol observed that the conservative movement had two distinct main tendencies: the anti-state tendency and the anti-left tendency. These two tendencies characterized to varying and inconsistent degrees several factions that were joined by their common enemies: the nuclear-armed threat of Soviet socialism abroad and the quieter threat of democratic socialism at home. Aggressive Russian communism and aggressive Euro-Anglo-American welfare statism were very different threats, but it is not difficult to sympathize with the partial identification of the two enemies by the emerging conservative movement in the mid-20th century. That bureaucracy, even in a genuinely democratic system, could end up being totalizing and unaccountable is a reality that we still very much live with: “No regulation without representation!” as my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleagues put it.

 

But the Soviet Union is no longer with us (except that it kinda-sorta is, under new management with a new logo—and new American “conservative” friends!), and Republicans have discovered a newfound love for entitlement programs. The GOP once operated under Jude Wanniski’s “Two-Santa Claus” model: Democrats bought low-income voters with welfare benefits, and Republicans bought high-income voters with tax cuts. But Republicans got so good at cutting taxes that they ran out of politically juicy taxes to cut, and now they want to buy voters with corporate subsidies and crony capitalism (“industrial policy” and “fair trade”), with richer and more freely given entitlement benefits (especially when these disproportionately benefit GOP constituencies, as with Medicare), and that sort of thing. The anti-left side of the movement gets Kulturkampf mainlined into its jugular—“OMG they’re letting that horrible Barbie woman direct a Narnia series!”—and lowbrow rage-monkey content to tide them over between Sean Hannity’s commercial breaks, while the anti-state side of the movement gets … not much, except sneering and bullying certitude from fellow partisans who insist that a Kamala Harris administration would be more statist than one headed by a guy who admires Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. 

 

So, the GOP and the conservative movement—the latter of which still insists for some reason on being associated with the former—will, in the event of a Harris presidency, have to decide what kind of opposition to be. Decent and patriotic seems like a stretch, given the current tenor of right-wing politics and the decadence of the institutions associated with them—sucks to be you, Kevin Roberts—but we might hope for at least a little bit of a lurch in the direction of intellectual and political coherence. Americans on both sides of the partisan divide are a wildly, passionately libertarian people—culturally, your average po-faced progressive campus administrator is basically John Wayne compared to your average Jantelaw-observing Norwegian conformist—but there doesn’t seem to be any interest on the part of Republicans or Democrats in being if not the anti-state party then the party of anti-state voters, which isn’t quite the same thing. 

 

Republicans right now are already deep into the muck of welfare chauvinism—the combination of economic statism, entitlements, and nationalism that characterizes many right-wing European political parties—while the divide among Democrats is between socially progressive neoliberal technocrats and identity-obsessed practitioners of increasingly exotic and finely cut intersectional politics. Some things the anti-state voters traditionally have favored—free trade and a balanced budget—have better advocates in the Democratic Party today than in the Republican Party. But most items on the anti-state agenda have no real champions at all. 

 

You can kind of see one way for this to play out: A Republican opposition in 2025 doubles down on the J.D. Vance-style welfare chauvinism and discovers something conservatives have known since the 1930s: The right cannot outbid the left when it comes to welfare benefits and other handouts. Kamala Harris has already shown that with her willingness to “yes-and” every daft proposal from the Trump team that suits them, e.g. trying to buy off Culinary 226 voters in Nevada by eliminating the income tax on tips. And so there will be nothing to do but to dig deeper into the nationalism and the chauvinism—and there are plenty of weird dudes in the GOP willing to pick up that torch and run with it, especially if some kindly Muscovite benefactor will pay them $100,000 a week to do it. And when that doesn’t work … there’s always rioting. 

 

If there is a Harris administration, there will be much in it to oppose: too much, in fact, an embarrassment of poisonous riches. But how will Republicans oppose it? If they start complaining about debt again after spending a decade drinking off the top shelf in the devil’s whorehouse with Donald Trump, then Americans are just going to laugh their asses off. If they start talking about projecting American strength in the world, many American friends abroad—Volodymyr Zelensky, for example—are going to stand there as human proof of Republican unseriousness. Perhaps the J6 Choir can be brought out to make a compelling case for law and order on behalf of the thousand criminals for which they stand. And who will lead this effort? Sycophantic hollow men such as Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz? Kid Rock? 

 

Being the opposition party used to come naturally to Republicans. Conservatism is a largely oppositional sensibility: “Don’t touch the stovetop—it’s hot.” And they’d certainly oppose a Harris administration. But if that opposition is to be anything more than a tantrum—or opposition as opportunism—then they’re going to have to think through some things and decide what kind of party they want to be. Because being the party of the poor and dying parts of the country while heaping scorn upon the parts of the country where the people and the economic activity are is a losing formula.

 

It’s also just a weird way to be a nationalist: “I love America, except for the cities, California, the East Coast, the West Coast, New England and the Pacific Northwest most especially, the Ivy League and most of the better colleges, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the medical and legal professions, people with graduate degrees, people who liked that Barbie movie, Taylor Swift, that football player she’s dating …”

 

Words About Words

 

I like to think in this case that I’m not picking a fight with John McWhorter but with his editors at the New York Times:

 

No friend of his am I (nor an English professor exactly — my field is Linguistics), but I wrote in 2018, in response to speculation even then that Trump was suffering some kind of dementia, that in listening to him we must realize that informal, occasionally jumbled speech is not automatically incoherent.

 

I’d like a word about that capital L in “Linguistics.” 

 

Normally, a field of study is capitalized only when it is derived from a proper noun or a proper adjective. You can major in French literature or English or Arabic, or you can major in journalism or history or mathematics or computer science or linguistics. Superfluous capitalization is a sign of puffery, as when people capitalize president or pope in the middle of a sentence rather than only when used as a title in front of a name. If ever there is a Kevin D. Williamson Endowed Chair in Pedantry Studies at UT-Muleshoe, I will not permit the title to be written that way.

 

In Other Wordiness …

 

Severely fatal? As opposed to mildly fatal? From our reliable illiterates over at Salon:

 

In Massachusetts, a coastal county called Plymouth has shut down its parks and fields between dusk and dawn in response to the town’s “high-risk status” of eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), a rare, but severely fatal mosquito-borne illness. It’s also known as “triple E” or sleeping sickness and gets part of its name from the fact that it infects horses as well as humans.

 

That EEE is bad news, apparently. Unlike pancreatic cancer or a 12-gauge buckshot blast to the face, which will leave you only mildly dead. 

 

Our friends over at Merriam-Webster like to reference my stuff, because I like slightly esoteric words and expressions and try to keep them in circulation. They attribute this to me:

 

While high and low, as the mad fit invades

 

Bellow the same trite nonsense through the shades.

 

That’s not me. That’s Juventus, translated by William Gifford. I quoted it once. 

 

Now hear this: 

 

“The likes of” is a slippery phrase. Last week, I described the two big tribes of American life as the people who liked school and the people who hated it and described the former tribe as producing “the likes of Ezra Klein.” Ezra Klein apparently didn’t like school very much and has talked about this in public. What I meant was “people in this class of which I take Ezra Klein as a smugly representative type, irrespective of whether he is, in fact, a member of the class,” but that isn’t really what “the likes of means.” So, I got that one wrong, both as a matter of fact (I regret the error) and as a matter of writing what I meant to write. “The likes of him” really means “him and others of his kind,” not “people of a sort typified by this fellow.” As with ilk, the connection observed is a strong one. There’s a difference between “That’s the kind of suit Cary Grant would have worn” and “Dunhill’s suits were worn by the likes of Cary Grant.”

 

So, sub-standard work on my part. Sorry about that. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Over at Slate, David Mack (or, rather, his headline writer) asks: “Nicole Kidman has never been a bigger star. So why does she keep doing this?”

 

The “this” in question is making unimpressive made-for-television stuff such as The Perfect Couple. I think I have the answer.

 

Money. 

 

Actors work. They get paid when they work. They don’t get paid when they don’t. (Please hold your emails about residuals. You know what I mean.) Some people who are professionals of one kind or another have very busy and rich personal lives, with lots of family time, hobbies, pleasure travel, etc. Some don’t. I don’t know about Nicole Kidman’s life, but it seems that she likes to work.

 

How you figure opportunity cost will vary depending on your circumstances. I’ll occasionally write something for somebody who needs it quick on a Friday afternoon when I’m relatively free. And, often, it’s not something that I would have really wanted to do otherwise. I don’t do work that I don’t believe in or that I think is bad work, but not everything is your best, and it doesn’t have to be: Journalism is a thing of a day, just like it says in the word journalism. And if I can make an extra day’s pay in 45 minutes—I’m a fast writer—then I’ll do it: I have four boys and enormous diaper bills.

 

Nicole Kidman doesn’t have to make every performance one for the ages. Maybe she has a couple of weeks free in March and wants to make … whatever she makes for a third-rate Netflix feature, which I’ll bet is a huge sum. If you believe the Daily Mail, she and her husband have a portfolio of personal residences worth nearly $300 million—it’s nice to have an Oscar, but an Oscar doesn’t pay the taxes on all that.

 

And we’ve all met that guy who is working in his 80s even though he doesn’t need the money. Ask him about it and he’ll answer: “I don’t like golf.” Nicole Kidman apparently does like golf, but one can play only so much.

 

The lady likes to work, possibly because she likes money. Get your paper, ma’am. 

 

In Conclusion 

 

Today is the feast day of St. Peter Claver, who spent much of his remarkable career ministering to slaves in 17^th-century Cartagena. His life is worth reading about. I recommend it. And I recommend the lives of the saints in general as a tonic against feeling too deeply the minor irritations of the small and unimaginative time in which we live.