Elite Political Press Fears Calling Trump Movement What It Is

In the early years of the shebeen, we used to have a semi-regular weekly feature called What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days? It was a survey of the state of our national dialogue. The management abandoned it because, frankly, it didn’t want to watch the damn Sunday Shows anymore. (And because other people, most notably the formidable Driftglass, were doing it better.) But last weekend, a disturbing pattern emerged among the various gobshites that does not bode well for the crisis that presently exists in our democratic republic. Call it the Church of the Savvy. Call it the Both Sides Conundrum. Whatever you call it, this illustrates the fact that, among our elite political press, there is a disinclination towards—or, more accurately, an abject terror of—looking the monster in the eye and calling it by its correct name. The elite political press is not wired for that. It is something beyond its comprehension.

The monster is the Republican Party, and the modern conservative movement that is its animating force. If the Republicans are Medusa, the modern conservative movement is her headful of snakes. It is bound and determined to destroy the current constitutional order and replace it with an autocratic plutocracy, because that is its only clear mission now. It is a party bereft of ideas and driven by a movement that has as its only fuel a reckless, poisonous nihilism. It is a beast to which the Republican Party gave life, and which the institutions of American society and American politics abetted out of denial and fear, leaving the monster to cry out now, in the words of Frankenstein’s Creature:

Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.

Elsewhere in the book, the Creature warns that, “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

A while back, instead of looking the monster in the eye and calling it by name, the New York Times went out on another one of its Trump voter safaris and, unsurprisingly, it discovered yet another group of people who feel unloved and, therefore, will indulge their rage without regard for the rest of us.

Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor,…