Victor Davis Hanson: The NeverTrumpers Are Cultural Kin of the Progressive Left, And Would Rather Lose All Political Points Than Lose Face With Their Leftist Political Brethren Being Seen Associating With Embarrassing Walmart Republican Bumpkins

Dem's fighting words-- and completely accurate, down to the punctuation.

Have you noticed the Detestables -- the cohort of liberal-leaning #FakeNews Republicans largely ensconced in liberal industries in liberal neighborhoods in liberal cities -- emulate their liberal pals' use of the curled-lip sneer as their primary method of disagreeing with actual Republicans?

There's a reason for that. It's not just a coincidence. They are liberals in most of the ways that count, and that includes the belief that they are members of the High Caste and do not need to answer insolent questions from their lessers, but merely need to sneer such questions down.

The aristocrat does not stoop to answer the objections of the commoner; he merely fixes an aristocratic glare at him and expects him to whither under the force of his sun-like bearing.

We rightly associate the elite disdain for the clingers, irredeemables, and deplorables with progressives like Obama and Hillary Clinton. But politics is incidental to the matrix; more essential is class.

It was Mitt Romney who said he could not work with 47 percent of the population and wrote them off as hopelessly lost voters. It was David Brooks and Bill Kristol who caricatured the white working class as near Neanderthal and romanticized illegal aliens (often by deliberating conflating them with legal immigrants.)

If one were to read carefully through the disparagement of Americans in the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, with their slurs against hillbilly Virginians and Texans and smelly Trump supporters, one can see that Strzok appears likely to be a suburban Republican or independent of the sort who would vote for John Kasich.

The point is not that Strzok and Page are hyperpartisans, but that they are comfortable with candidates who foremost reflect their cultural tastes and proper cursus honorum [the traditional route of rising through the ranks through various offices in the Roman imperial government -- ace].

And as we have witnessed with some in the NeverTrump movement, for these sorts, being grateful that new economic policies might reinvigorate the old rust-belt and the hinterland is more than offset by the concomitant price of an ascendant working class that lacks the tastes of the elite and the romance of the deliberately distant poor and minorities.

The Trump catharsis has shown that about 10 percent of the Republican Party, the NeverTrumpers, was largely apolitical. That is, former cornerstone positions of deregulation and tax reform, oil and gas production, charter schools, deterrent foreign policy, restoring friendship with Israel and moving the embassy to Jerusalem were apparently always secondary to the more important criterion of offering a mild, sober and judicious frown to progressivism, through discerning losers like George H.W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.

Such a Republican elite was so embedded within American establishment institutions as to be both immune from the economic stagnation of an Obama neo-socialist revolution (remember income inequality soared under Obama) and in no real need of a Reagan revolution or Trump’s often messy radical push-back against progressivism.

Its creed was not really, as advertised, the ethics of "losing nobly is better than winning ugly," but rather the snobbery of "losing a cultural image is worse than winning a political agenda." Put more bluntly, it is better to put up with a socialist with a "perfectly creased pant" than a prairie-fire conservative in rumpled Walmart slacks.

Well, it depends on which Walmart line of clothing you're talking about. Faded Glory is a top-shelf clothier and definitely for the better sort of people in the market for a more upscale $19 pair of pants, whereas Puritan is for the riff-raff and railway hobos.

posted by Ace at 03:19 PM

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