Conservative Anti-Trump publications become Anti-Anti-Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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one can divide the reaction among conservative commentators into three categories.
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At one extreme sit those conservatives who championed Trump during the campaign, and still do: Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, among others. Their base is talk radio. They pride themselves on speaking for those plainspoken, dirt-under-the-fingernails conservatives who loathe not only Hillary Clinton, but Paul Ryan.
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Their ideological forefathers are Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan, who claimed that America’s cosmopolitan, deracinated ruling elite had betrayed the white Christians to whom the country truly belonged.
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At the other extreme sit conservatives like my Atlantic colleague David Frum, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies Professor Eliot Cohen, and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who warned against Trump during the campaign, and believe he is now vindicating their fears.
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For them, conservatism is about prudence, inherited wisdom, and a government that first does no harm; they see none of those virtues in Trump. They see themselves as the inheritors of a rich conservative intellectual tradition; Trump’s ignorance embarrasses them.
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they believe America should stand for ideals that transcend race, religion and geography; they fear white Christian identity politics in their bones
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In between are the conservatives who will tip the balance. Unlike Breitbart and company, they generally opposed Trump during the campaign. Unlike Brooks and company, they serve a conservative audience that now overwhelmingly backs him.
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they work for conservative publications and networks. Their business model is opposing the left. And that means opposing the people who oppose Trump."
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National Review is the most illustrative. During the campaign, it called Trump “a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.”
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But now Trump is a Republican president, popular with most conservatives, and under liberal attack. So National Review has developed a technique that could be called anti-anti-Trump. It goes like this.
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Step number two: Briefly acknowledge Trump’s flaws while insisting they’re being massively exaggerated.
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The problem with these formulations should be clear. Some liberal criticism of Trump may indeed be melodramatic. But liberals don’t wield much power in Washington right now. Conservatives do. The key question facing National Review, therefore, is not whether Trump’s actions are as bad as the most extreme lefties say they are. The key question is whether Trump’s actions warrant conservative opposition.
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Among National Review’s favorite phrases these days is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It refers to Democrats who describe Trump as mentally unstable, a pathological liar or a would-be dictator
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But National Review once described Trump in those terms itself. A year ago, in its issue entitled, “Against Trump,” the magazine called him a “huckster” whose populism contained “strong-man overtones.”
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Its contributors declared him a “charlatan,” a “con man,” someone exhibiting “emotional immaturity bordering on personality disorder” and an “American Mussolini.”
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It’s not deranged to worry that Trump may undermine liberal democracy. It’s deranged to think that leftist hyperbole constitutes the greater threat. Unfortunately, that form of Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well at National Review.
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It is inconvenient for National Review that the individual in government who now most threatens the principles it holds dear is not a liberal, but a president that most conservatives support. But evading that reality doesn’t make it any less true.