If you have any doubt whatsoever about how Donald Trump totally fried the conservative movement as it used to exist, this will disabuse you of such notions.
Ann Coulter, who used to be known as a far-right extremist, is now making complete sense. Yes, Sir, she is stating the obvious even. Who would have thought such a thing was possible?
So much for E Pluribus Awesome, which was her ditzy book about an early Trump. (Meaning circa 2015) We’re way past all of that now.
Imagine that. pic.twitter.com/apfGfX2xR6
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) December 15, 2022
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Yep, I don’t think there’s anything meat and potato-ey about stolen election conspiracy theories, anti-vaxx theories, and all of the sheer madness which MAGA has come to represent.
Now we wait for the rest of them to catch up to this giant realization. Or, alternatively, does the GOP need to take a beating for a couple of more election cycles?
To answer your question at the end, they’ll continue to take beatings. Think back to every time the GOP has lost in a general election in your lifetime. They do the requisite autopsy, and even when it’s an honest, for-real effort that identifies (correctly) what went wrong like the majority of voters saw them as being over (sometimes way over) the line with hard-core conservatism what have they done? They’d decided THAT was wrong, and the “problem” was that they hadn’t been conservative enough! Nixon loses to JFK and they put forth Goldwater. Nixon replaces LBJ by their cynical adoption of the infamous “southern strategy” to appeal to conservative white Democrats in the south. Ford loses to Carter, in no small part because he pardoned Nixon and they gave us Reagan. They sure as hell didn’t think Bush 41 was conservative enough so in 2000 we get Bush Jr. and the neocons. Their hard-core, revamped conservatism set the stage for Obama, and their reaction was of course McCain hadn’t been nearly conservative enough so we got the Tea Party. And Romney’s loss only intensified the belief that by god they had to be even more “out there” which led to Trump and a wet-dream for conservatives with their RWNJ activist judges and Justices, wholesale deregulation and/or gutting of cabinet agencies to hamper efforts to enforce what regulations they couldn’t do away with entirely. And despite getting their asses handed to them in 2018, and Trump losing (but with some keeping their distance Congressional races going much better than expected for them) they decide yet again their conservative “vision” just isn’t strong enough to get through. Hence the crop of burn it all down conservatives that cost them their expected (and frankly should have been given conditions and history) Red Wave last month!
Does ANYONE think they are going to change their approach, that they will accept that their ever increasing level of batshit crazy conservatism isn’t what Americans want? Fat chance. In fact, what to we keep hearing and even confirmed with recent polling? Republicans want Ron DeSantis – seeing him as the guy who can do all the conservative wet-dream shit Trump did for them BUT more effectively and without all the distractions!
DeSantis won’t do well in a general election. Of that I’m sure despite a poll showing him leading Biden if the 2024 election were held right now. But even then they will huddle and do what they’ve always done which is promote being even more conservative!
Batshit crazy conservatism is what their billionaire backers want and pay for, so it’s what they’ve got. Those backers now see clearly that democracy is in the way of what they want, but instead of realizing that they need to dial back, they’ve decided to get rid of democracy. They obviously favor a Somalia/Russia style of warlord/oligarch control with themselves as the warlord/oligarchs and they’re prepared to throw everything else away because they think they’ll get richer that way.
Said by me before but bears repeating: Coulter is a grifter who is recognizing that her old market is drying up. Whatever else one can say about “Coultergeist”, she has decent survival instincts that recognize that the American conservative movement is long overdue a revamp. The second a cleaned-up, respectable, non-threatening version comes along (and I’m certain it’ll be this decade), she’ll be in a better position than most to leap onboard.
There really is no such thing as “Conservatism” today. Conservative means wanting things to stay the same, or pretty much the same. They don’t want that. They want radical principles which were held in the not-so-recent past. In fact, they’ve gone beyond that to wanting principles so radical they were never generally held un th US – although there have always been som of them around. Calling that “reactionary” is really too kind.