Victims of Communism, Victims of Modernism

By Richard M. Reinsch II & Paul Zepeda

Saturday, June 03, 2023

 

The Holodomor: 2–7 million dead.

 

The Gulag: 1.5 million dead.

 

The Great Leap Forward: 30 million dead.

 

These are just some of the grisly atrocities documented at the Victims of Communism Museum. Communism has left a trail of blood from Potsdam to Peking. The museum is dedicated to the memory of the some 100 million people who have lost their lives to this odious ideology.

 

The museum has been open for nearly a year, yet it has received little recognition in the mainstream press. A Washington Post story on the museum noted without irony that “this philosophy that killed tens of millions also inspired generations of activists” in America. Apparently, the museum isn’t balanced enough in its history of communism. Next to the exhibit on Stalin’s crimes they need to note the legions of left-wing labor activists it provided guidance to. That’s a sad reflection of our times: another indication that, at its philosophical foundation, the modern West struggles to contemplate and understand the wreckage that was imposed on millions of people by Marxist communist states. The reasons why are troubling and indicate that certain forms of Marxist ideology seeped into the Western mind, although not to the point that the American-led West was unable to defeat the Soviet Union.

 

It’s easy to think of communism as an unfortunate system afflicting poor souls in the far reaches of the earth. As British historian Arnold Toynbee sardonically put it, “History is something unpleasant that happens to other people.”

 

Yet history is never far from us. Substantial forms of the same spirit that animated the Bolsheviks run rampant in the West today.

 

The hesitancy of news outlets to recognize the importance of the Victims of Communism Museum has been entirely in keeping with the refusal of Western elites to reckon morally with communism’s casualties. Why wouldn’t leading outlets cover a museum that details the atrocities of communism, one of the biggest human-rights disasters of the 20th century? From New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty and Vice President Henry Wallace to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Hollywood, there has been no shortage of prominent communist sympathizers. We do not say that media outlets refusing to report on the museum are engaged in the same moral degradation as was Duranty, who lied about the Ukrainian starvation by Stalin. However, many Western thinkers and politicians found the ideology attractive or felt the need to dismiss its opponents. Why?

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke to this point eloquently in his famed Harvard commencement address of 1978. While the audience expected a nicely delineated comparison between a wicked communist East and a free, liberal West, Solzhenitsyn excoriated the latter, characterizing it as afflicted with the same sickness that led to the horrors of the surveillance state, the KGB, and the Gulag.

 

The seed that bore this bitter fruit was planted centuries ago, he claimed, in the soil of Renaissance humanism, when man turned his gaze from God to himself and embraced the aphorism of Protagoras, “Man, the measure of all things.” Looking upon his own desires, he soon pursued earthly pleasures until “everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning.”

 

Man’s focus on himself reduced him to the material, temporal world. Whereas before he had seen himself as both spiritual and physical, his worldview was now diminished solely to the latter. Unshackled from piety, he was in his behavior not beholden to a superior being, nor did his ends remain spiritual.

 

As he further developed the arts of science, technology, and industrial scale, the Renaissance humanist abolished the physical limits that had been present since his beginning. Thus the modern world rose from the spires of Western Europe, destined to conquer the globe.

 

On this topic, Leo Strauss frequently referred to a quotation of Horace: “You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will come back.” Modern man rejected that sentiment as he exercised his industrial prowess.

 

What results are two sides of the same modernist coin. Communism rejects the dignity of the human person, rejects the existence of God, and rejects moral truth itself. In its aim to abolish the family, religion, and private property, which are merely institutions that capital owners control to maintain power, communist ideology casts a totalizing control over the human soul. In the end, communism in practice must violently reject all higher limits that had been placed before it, in the hopes of creating the workers’ paradise.

 

Western liberalism, on the other hand, maintained limits for man as long as religious faith remained its foundation. Solzhenitsyn pointed out that the rights enumerated in the early American republic were “granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.” Divine limits were preeminent in the American Founding and were what allowed for such freedoms to be permitted by the republic.

 

With the leaps of industrial prowess, though, Man continued his turn from God that began in the humanist age. Increasingly, he eschewed those limits instilled by God and nature and turned toward what he could accomplish materially.

 

The communist East had violently abolished the limits and duties of man. The liberal West had discarded them voluntarily.

 

Modern man, impious, statist, and commercial, is left with only earthly ends. This false anthropology of the godlike man has become firmly entrenched in both communist and liberal nations. The former believes that man as the state can achieve all aims; the latter, that man as individual can do the same.

 

This abandonment of the spiritual ends and limits is why so many in the West cannot condemn the crimes of communism. The ideology provides an end in their temporal world, in which man need not adhere to the natural limits placed on him.

 

The words of Solzhenitsyn cry out this inevitability: “The current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition.” Of course, American military, technological, political, and moral power provided the crucial reserves in defeating the Soviet Union. Reagan invoked spiritual and moral sentiments in his challenge to communism and rallied the opponents of communism to defeat it. The West was not wholly unregenerate, a fact that Solzhenitsyn overlooked. But he still accurately grasped the trends in Western thought that have led it to turn on its biblical heritage.

 

With those words in mind, we should contemplate the horrors shown at the Victims of Communism Museum not as distant historical facts but as the eventuality of the fallacy of hope that is modernity. This is not a call to return to a premodern age, which is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, we should seek to reignite that piety that understands man as God’s creation, not self-made, that recognizes our limits, and that sees our end not in an earthly paradise of this world but in the everlasting world of the hereafter.

 

Solzhenitsyn closed with declaring that the world “will demand from us a spiritual blaze.” If we want a viable alternative to a closed world of abysmal ends, then we would do well to heed him.

DeSantis Goes There

By Rich Lowry

Friday, June 02, 2023

 

The Trump–DeSantis battle has been fascinating, no less in how DeSantis pushed back when asked about Trump’s insults in this radio interview.

DeSantis didn’t just call Trump’s gibes juvenile but said that this kind of conduct is part of the reason Trump is no longer in the White House — an obvious truth that Republicans in the mainstream of the party have been loath to say out loud.

Yeah, Walls Work

By Rich Lowry

Saturday, June 03, 2023

 

Five hundred and seventy years ago this week, the walls of Constantinople were finally breached and the city fell to the Ottomans.

 

Thus ended an 800-year period when the eastern half of the Roman Empire survived after the fall of the West, courtesy of an enormous, multi-layered system of walls that repeatedly repelled besiegers.

 

Among others, the Arabs, the Russians, the Bulgarians, and the Ottomans (the first couple of times) tried and failed to overcome the defensive structure. The forces of the Fourth Crusade got into the city, with frightful results, but only because a door was left open.

 

The Cambridge Ancient History deems Constantinople’s barriers “perhaps the most successful and influential town walls ever built — they allowed the city and its emperors to survive and thrive for more than a millennium, against all strategic logic, on the edge of the extremely unstable and dangerous world of the post-Roman Balkans.”

 

It’s worth recalling the success of the so-called Theodosian Walls since a border wall is once again going to be a focus of the GOP nomination battle. This time, it won’t be because Trump is making a big, memorable boast about building a wall that sets him apart from the rest of the field, but because he didn’t build a wall as president, and Ron DeSantis and others are going to try to hold him to account and make the case they can do better.

 

“Walls work,” DeSantis said at a speech at the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation.

 

About this, he is emphatically correct. We shouldn’t exaggerate how easy it is to build a wall on the southern border, given issues with eminent domain and the need for ranchers to be able to pass through fencing. And even if we could instantly build much more fencing, as long as people can get on U.S. territory, even on the wrong side of a fence, the machinery of asylum is going to kick in. (For this reason, fences work best where they can be built almost up to the line of the border in New Mexico, Arizona, and California and are less effective on the river in Texas, where they have to be set back from the floodplain.)

 

All that said, a wall is part of the solution, and such barriers have been an element of sovereignty and self-defense from time immemorial. Proverbs 25:28: “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”

 

In his book Walls a few years ago, David Frye made the case that walls are a foundation of civilization itself:

 

How important have walls been in the history of civilization? Few civilized people have ever lived outside them. As early as the tenth millennium BC, the builders of Jericho, encircled their city, the world’s first, with a rampart. Over time, urbanism and agriculture spread from Jericho and the Levant into new territories: Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, and beyond. Walls inevitably followed. Everywhere farmers settled, they fortified their villages.

 

Walls created the relatively peaceful, orderly spaces where human ingenuity and thought could thrive in the great ancient civilizations. “Without walls,” Frye continues, “there could never have been an Ovid, and the same could be said for Chinese scholars, Babylonian, mathematicians, or Greek philosophers.”

 

And there clearly wouldn’t have been a Constantinople — not for long.

 

Trump would have been justified by any standard in calling the city’s defensive system “a big, beautiful wall,” especially the Golden Gate, a formidable marble structure notable for its splendor, including gilded doors and a sculpture of four elephants on top.

 

The walls get their name from Theodosius II, who ordered the construction of one of the best infrastructure investments of all time. The triple fortification, including an outer ditch that could become a moat, stretched about four miles.

 

The walls frustrated attackers for centuries. In 717, a massive Arab force of tens of thousands — the exact number is impossible to know — with a formidable fleet besieged the city for a year. No dice.

 

In the end, it was Ottoman cannons that defeated the walls in 1453. Even then, it was no easy task. The Ottomans bombarded the walls for weeks, and, at night, the defenders would patch them back again. After a desperate two-month struggle, the city fell, and with it, what remained of the Roman Empire.

 

The era of the artillery barrage was just beginning. Today, nobody is building castles anymore, but walls are still showing their efficacy in Israel and elsewhere.

 

We live in an era of constant flux and technological change, yet part of the answer at the southern border is one of the oldest technologies known to man.

The Secret to McCarthy’s Success

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, June 03, 2023

 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) notched a victory for himself and for Republicans with Wednesday’s passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The bill will raise the debt ceiling through 2025, claw back pandemic and IRS spending, improve welfare programs, speed up permitting, reinstate student-loan payments, and cut nondefense discretionary spending. The bill also has an enforcement mechanism: If Congress fails to pass the required appropriations bills by January 1, overall discretionary spending will be cut by 1 percent.

 

The legislation doesn’t restore fiscal sanity to the federal budget — only changes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would do that — but it is a step in the right direction. Since becoming speaker in January, McCarthy has faced a test: Could he strike a fiscal bargain with President Biden that would earn Republican support and avoid a breach of the debt ceiling and a government shutdown? Well, the grade is in. He aced the exam.

 

Consider where the parties started. Biden spent much of this year demanding that Congress raise the debt ceiling without preconditions. He refused to negotiate with McCarthy. At one point the White House floated the idea of tax increases. The speaker, by contrast, said that he was willing to work with the president to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for cuts.

 

Now look at where the two sides ended up: The Fiscal Responsibility Act is much closer to McCarthy’s original position than it is to Biden’s. It doesn’t hike taxes. It reduces spending. It contains measures the Left can’t stand. The public supports the deal by a two-to-one margin. Most Republicans and Democrats voted for it.

 

The media, as usual, highlight McCarthy’s internal critics. They are a distraction. The press is so obsessed with Republican infighting that it overlooks the real story: Kevin McCarthy is shaping up to be the most effective House GOP leader in decades. Biden, the Democrats, and the liberal culture have been unable to transform him into a bogeyman. To the contrary: His net approval rating has risen by double digits since January. Biden’s numbers have dropped. Nor is McCarthy’s favorability the result of playing to the media crowd and appeasing the Left. The Fiscal Responsibility Act is the latest piece of significant center-right legislation that the House has passed this year.

 

What, then, is McCarthy’s secret? He succeeds because it pays to be underestimated. He’s not the first Republican to surprise a Beltway media that holds him in low regard. The rap on McCarthy has long been that he’s an amiable politician with no ideological core. This lack of substance was exposed, according to conventional wisdom, by the disappointing outcome of last year’s midterm election. The same conventional wisdom took as a sign of weakness the unprecedented concessions McCarthy made to the House Freedom Caucus to end the agonizing, four-day, 15-ballot vote for speaker in January.

 

All these assumptions were wrong. McCarthy’s amiability and flexibility are not liabilities but assets. The narrow Republican majority hasn’t stopped the House from moving bills on the floor. Nor have McCarthy’s concessions to the Freedom Caucus hindered him. Putting Freedom Caucus members on the important Rules Committee gave figures such as Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) a stake in the legislative process. And the lowered threshold to remove the speaker is meaningless if a substitute is not waiting offstage.

 

McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job — a rarity for the GOP. He’s the first public-facing Republican speaker since 1994 to be in sync with both his office and his conference. The talents that aided Newt Gingrich in his quest to build the first GOP House majority in 40 years did not necessarily translate to the speaker’s office. Gingrich is a revolutionary, not an institutionalist. He’s more interested in figuring out how America can ride the Third Wave into a technological utopia than in legislative detail and intra-party bargaining. His record of welfare reform and balanced budgets was impressive, but his tenure was chaotic.

 

Gingrich’s successor, the disgraced Denny Hastert, avoided the limelight. President George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Freedom Agenda overshadowed Hastert, who delegated most of his authority to Tom “the Hammer” DeLay. By the time DeLay resigned over scandal in 2006, the Republican House majority was on the verge of collapse. Democrats took over Congress soon after. It fell to John Boehner to pick up the pieces.

 

Boehner became speaker in 2010, thanks in part to McCarthy’s recruiting skills. The problem was that Boehner belonged to a different political era. He was a product of the 1990s and the early 2000s whose party was increasingly shaped by the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, bank and auto bailouts, and Barack Obama’s “New Foundation” for America. Boehner hated living in “Crazytown,” and it showed. The Tea Party Republicans didn’t care for him either. The mismatch made Boehner miserable. As soon as he brought Pope Francis to Capitol Hill, he left.

 

The next Republican speaker, Paul Ryan, had the title forced on him. Ryan is a supply-sider and wonk. He understands dollars and cents. He’s a protégé of Jack Kemp, who felt out of place in Donald Trump’s Washington. His main priority was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Once it had Trump’s signature, Ryan was ready to leave. Democrats won the House the following year. Ryan was out.

 

McCarthy, unlike his predecessors, has no earth-shattering plans. Holding the speaker’s gavel is enough. He doesn’t shy away from the camera. He doesn’t represent a faction of the GOP; he tries to enact the party consensus. He isn’t at war with Tea Party (now MAGA) conservatives. He wants to be on the rostrum. He alone commands majority support.

 

Maybe McCarthy will lose his touch in upcoming fights over assistance to Ukraine. Maybe one day an alternative to McCarthy will emerge, someone who can unify the Freedom Caucus along with the rest of the GOP conference. Maybe Democrats will take back the House next year. For the moment, at least, Kevin McCarthy is the rare Republican who both understands and is satisfied by the role he’s been given and the responsibilities it entails. He wants nothing more nor less. And he’s winning.

NYT: GOP’s Diverse Field a Sign of . . . GOP Racism

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 01, 2023

 

New York Times reporters Jonathan Weisman and Trip Gabriel began with a challenge: how to make the square peg of the most diverse field of Republican presidential aspirants in memory fit into the round hole of Republican voters’ presumed racism. Whereas other journalists might have shirked this awesome responsibility and just described the observable contours of their environments, these intrepid reporters sheltered their readers from any preconception-shattering revelations by applying a novel framework: Republicans’ racism is apparent in their support for candidates who refuse to buckle under the weight of American racism.

 

Sure, Senator Tim Scott talks about the country’s “bitter, racist past” and his family’s own experience with discrimination. Sure, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley describes the “isolation” she felt as a dark-skinned girl growing up in “small-town South Carolina.” Sure, talk-show host Larry Elder acknowledges the existence of the “systemic racism” to which his family was subjected. Sure, Vivek Ramaswamy, too, “often” confides in his audiences about the “isolation” he experienced “as the son of Indian immigrants” growing up outside Cincinnati. But in describing these phenomena as obstacles to be overcome rather than insurmountable barriers to the success of individuals of minority extraction, these candidates have demonstrated that they really don’t understand bigotry in America.

 

In bolstering their own bootstrap biographies with stories of discrimination, they have put forth views about race that at times appear at odds with their view of the country — often denying the existence of a system of racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.

 

This, the authors contend, is a strategic calculation — and because it is strategic, it is dishonest. Or, if you prefer to be charitable, it is at least ignorant of what “many scholars say” about the legacy of structural racism that “left people of color still struggling.” The insidious implication in this line of argumentation is that the nonwhite candidates in the race for the Republican presidential nomination are, at best, inauthentic. At worst, they are contemptuous of those with similar ethnic and racial distinctions because they reject the undeniable existence of insuperable racism in American life.

 

All this is a ploy, these reporters suggest — a sop to the racial hatreds that lurk not far beneath the surface of the average Republican voter. And to the likes of perceptive New York Times scribes, it’s not even particularly coded.

 

Republican candidates of color don’t see their pasts in their present, even if the two front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, are elevating racial grievance to the center of conservative politics, through overt or covert appeals to white anger.

 

We’re left with a narrative sure to satisfy the audience to which the Times has become hostage: The Republican front-runners are doling out conventional white racial hostility; their opponents, while superficially nonwhite, are broadcasting a nuanced message on race to which they couldn’t possibly subscribe if they were being honest with themselves and their audiences; Republican primary voters are either too stupid or too bigoted to know the difference.

 

If that doesn’t work for you, it does work for the usual suspects marshaled into providing supporting quotes to buttress this prefabricated thesis.

 

Former South Carolina lawmaker and current cable-news panelist Bakari Sellers found it “troubling” that Haley and Scott — both of whom acknowledge American racism as an obstacle they’ve overcome — can’t make the “logical jump” to the conclusion that “systemic racism” is functionally insurmountable (irrespective of their life experiences indicating otherwise).

 

According to former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, who has fitted himself with a hairshirt in penance for his professional sins and self-flagellates on command, the presumed dishonesty of the Right’s minority candidates is only an effort to “make an overwhelmingly white Republican audience feel better about themselves.” Indeed, what these candidates offer Republican voters is ony indemnification from the charge of racism. The candidates themselves are immaterial.

 

Indeed, according to Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie, the very premise of the article is flawed insofar as it presents evidence that candidates such as Haley, Scott, and Elder are, in fact, addressing the existence of racism head-on. Rather, the “problem” with these and other candidates is that they are “declaring there’s no racism.” Here the fault lies with the Times editors, who, we must assume, skimmed the copy that proves Gillespie’s contention false.

 

Ultimately, all this “downplaying of systemic racism” serves to advance a nefarious Republican cause: attacking “wokeness,” arresting “the influence of ‘critical race theory,’” and scuttling “diversity” in all its forms. All its forms save, you know, the Republican presidential nominating contest.

 

Torturing these candidates’ description of their own sense of agency and mastery over their challenging environments into a narrative that reduces them to tools in the hands of ill-defined but surely bigoted social forces is a transparent exercise in political branding. It’s also pretty gross. Still, the candidates in the Times’ crosshairs should wear this calumny as a badge of honor. Their national prominence disproves a central progressive conceit: American minorities cannot advance in American society if their hands are not being held by condescending left-wing ideologues bankrolled by the redistributionist fiscal schemes that society’s enlightened social engineers envision.

 

You are meant to subscribe to the proposition that true anti-racism sees minorities as interchangeable, monolithic, nondescript victims. We’re fortunate that some prominent Americans in public life see the prefix “anti” in this proposition as an utterly superfluous addition to a familiar description of a very old American sin.

When Reporters Make Fools of Themselves, It Doesn’t Reflect Poorly on DeSantis

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 01, 2023

 

In the week since Florida governor Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign, political observers have been forced to witness a bizarre martyrology. Frustrated by the governor’s penchant for stonewalling them, reporters have taken to bombarding him with superfluous questions, to which the governor responds with amused indignation, if he responds at all. It would be a footnote to the campaign if these reporters didn’t promote these episodes online with video evidence of the interactions with DeSantis in the mistaken expectation that it makes him look bad. It doesn’t.

 

On Thursday, Associated Press reporter Steve Peoples confronted DeSantis at an event in Laconia, N.H., where the governor had just concluded a stump speech. According to the reporter’s account of events, he asked DeSantis “why he hasn’t taken any questions from voters so far.” To this mildly pointed question, DeSantis supposedly lashed out:

 

“People are coming up to me, talking to me. What are you talking about? Are you blind? Are you blind? People are coming up to me, talking to me whatever they want to talk to me about.”

 

Shortly after this exchange was published on Twitter, the pro-DeSantis PAC Never Back Down published a video of the exchange captured by NBC News, which Peoples himself promoted.

 

In order to answer the charge that he refuses to talk with voters, DeSantis had to break off an ongoing exchange with voters.

 

This was not an attempt to ignite a fabricated war with the press for the benefit of media-hating Republican primary voters. DeSantis was not visibly flustered. If he was perturbed at all, he managed to control his emotions. Nor were DeSantis’s supporters in the room much put off by the candidate’s conduct, though the campaign’s minimally competent advance work ensured that the room wasn’t populated with DeSantis critics. What are we privy to here beyond a banal exercise in basic campaign work?

 

Politico senior columnist Jonathan Martin acknowledged all this. “But,” he added, “the larger problem [with] DeSantis[‘s] reaction is it shows he still doesn’t grasp the bad will he’s courting by, in this case, lashing out at one of the top reporters for the @AP.”

 

So, to reporters, it’s personal. To judge by DeSantis’s demeanor, however, it’s only business.

 

This exchange was reminiscent of a similar exercise in narrative-crafting by Puck reporter Tara Palmeri, whose efforts were belied by the video of her terse and entirely one-sided exchange with the governor.

 

Palmeri related her experience of attempting to question DeSantis: The governor “seemed almost to be running away from me.” DeSantis’s aides countered by posting a video of Palmeri’s inquiries. “I am Italian American too. Does that matter to you?” she asked. “Why are you against Disney characters? Which one is your favorite one?” DeSantis’s unwillingness to defer to ethnic chauvinism and elaborate on his favorite cartoons wasn’t all that Palmeri exposed.

 

The reporter answered the DeSantis camp’s video with her own, in which she peppered the governor with questions about his willingness to meet with Disney CEO Bob Iger, the box-office potential of a live-action version of The Little Mermaid, the political viability of Florida’s six-week abortion ban, and, of course, his refusal to speak with the press. At least in part, that final query is answered by the questions preceding it.

 

The journalistic establishment seems to be operating under the flawed assumption that their hostility toward the governor is both justified and requited by DeSantis. From the outside, however, these look like cloying displays in pursuit of the attention the governor won’t give them — not out of antipathy but out of ambivalence.

 

It could not be that the governor doesn’t care for and doesn’t need conventional mass media. He must really not like them. And his refusal to acknowledge the necessity of the mainstream press must be met with consequences.

 

This seems so far to be a melodrama that exists only in the minds of reporters. But if members of the political-journalism establishment think that making themselves into hysterical parodies of their industry somehow hurts DeSantis, they’ve miscalculated.

The Race to Be the Second-to-Last Man Standing

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, June 01, 2023

 

Last week, Ron DeSantis finally announced his long-expected entry into the 2024 presidential race. By the time he’d gotten there, he had been beaten to the punch by Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Asa Hutchinson, Larry Elder, and Tim Scott. Next week, they will reportedly be joined in the race by former vice president Mike Pence, former Garden State governor Chris Christie . . . and electoral juggernaut Doug Burgum. That brings the total to ten.

 

With the understanding that many of these candidates will not make it to the Iowa caucuses (and some not even to the debate stage), it is nevertheless clear that Ron DeSantis has failed to clear the field of competitors. This much has been obvious for months now; Trump’s resilience in GOP primary polls ensured it. While we are thankfully being spared the ridiculous 17-person clown car that was the 2016 Republican presidential primary (remember the seriocomic travesty of “undercard debates”?), the sheer number of non-DeSantis entrants in the race suggests something ominous: Most have concluded that Trump is already the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. What they are doing instead is running for second place, either so they can step into the breach should Trump suddenly “fall down a manhole” (i.e., suffer a suddenly incapacitating event), or so they can position themselves for the future.

 

Thus, regardless of whether their electoral strategy is to play footsie with Trump or attack him directly (Christie is signaling this, and Pence will have no choice in the matter as his continued political existence is a living rebuke to Trump’s January 6 narrative), the candidates are not really paying attention to him: Their eyes are all on DeSantis. They believe they have the opportunity to supplant him as the last remaining non-Trump alternative.

 

Historically, coming in second in the presidential primary sweepstakes has carried real long-term political value. (Ted Cruz was notably unable to capitalize on it, but that is largely because Ted Cruz is a charismatically challenged man who believes himself to be Machiavelli in The Prince when in reality he is Vizzini in The Princess Bride.) 2024 is set to be Trump’s final race regardless — do not accuse me here of tempting fate — making the runner-up spot a prize plum, whether claimed by an aspirant heir or by a would-be repudiator.

 

As the race begins to properly develop over the next weeks and months (seemingly every potential impact candidate save New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu is off the fence), my recommendation is to pay attention to two intersecting dynamics. First, is there any softening in Trump’s poll numbers in the wake of sustained attacks against him by primary opponents? It is easy enough to forget that all the other 2016 candidates basically ignored Trump until long after it was too late, assuming throughout the fall and winter of 2015 that he was a joke candidate whose bubble would burst. Nobody suffers from any such illusions nowadays; the race will be entirely about him until the primary has concluded, and all know it. If Trump’s numbers begin to perceptibly sag, then that means his base isn’t nearly as locked in as many believe, and it’s a brand new ball game.

 

If Trump’s base is united by a shared sense of resentment and defensiveness towards their candidate, however, the attacks on Trump may only have the effect of solidifying his support. They may simply fall on deaf ears. In that event, pay attention to a second emerging dynamic: the remaining candidates targeting one another instead of Trump or Biden. Only Tim Scott — running a purely upbeat campaign in accordance with his native good nature — seems likely to refrain from what will then become a mêlée amongst the non-Trump candidates competing for a prize few Republican voters are actually all that invested in helping them obtain: the title of Second-to-Last Man Standing.