Is it time to serve the nuts?*

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Jonah Goldberg writes,

as a matter of rank political analysis, most Americans are members of the stupid party as [Irving] Kristol described. These people aren’t dumb, and they’re not necessarily Republicans, but they do have strong antibodies against radical excess or excess radicalism.

He argues that Republicans who try to appease hard-core Trump supporters are doing damage to the party and to the country.

Here is the counter-argument: Donald Trump signed an executive order banning government training using Critical Race Theory. Joe Biden reversed that.

The counter-argument amounts to, “The Democrats are serving their nuts. So if we have to serve our nuts to beat them, so be it.”

I don’t find the counter-argument persuasive. I think that we will soon see in the voting public a longing for order. The editors of Quillette write,

there is likely a solid majority of Americans who know that Biden won the election, that biology is real, that QAnon is a conspiracy theory, that COVID-19 isn’t just a seasonal flu, that skin colour doesn’t indicate your moral worth, and that abolishing the police is a bad idea. If Biden can empower that silent majority without gratuitously denigrating the 74 million Americans who voted against him, perhaps he can get America to start coming together

I think that our present period reminds me of the late 1970s, when people longed for order. They were suffering from rampaging inflation, rising crime, high divorce rates, and humiliating defeats overseas in Vietnam and Iran. The relative success of the Reagan Presidency in taming inflation, and in the now-forgotten invasion of Grenada, helped to satisfy that demand. Conservatism and the Republican Party gained in status.

If President Biden restores a sense of order, his party will rise in status. But there are chaotic forces in his party, and his first round of executive orders mostly catered to them. Crime is rising. The stock market is looking like a consensual hallucination. Inflation is looming.

Above all, the pandemic war is still killing people and the economy. If President Biden doesn’t replace the peacetime bureaucrats with a fighting general soon, no amount of fawning PR from the WaPo is going to save him.
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*The title to this post is a line from one of the original Thin Man movies. It is spoken by Nora Charles, played by Myrna Loy as hostess of a dinner party arranged by her husband Nick. But although she is referring to food, the movie audience laughs because of how aptly it refers to their guests.

45 thoughts on “Is it time to serve the nuts?*”

  1. I think there is a stronger argument that Republicans who strongly oppose Trump are doing more damage to both the party and the country. Would the GOP and country be better off if the Republicans held a Senate majority? Political actors like the Lincoln Project dynamited that prospect out of their opposition to Trump.

    Goldberg’s argument is rather weak, anyway. He starts reviewing a very old, very bad, very cross-party idea and immediately jumps into “stupidity” as a good thing because it means preferring old ideas to new, because old ideas are tried. He implicitly excludes the old idea he started with, although he implies that any old idea that lasts so long must be “tried” and therefore somehow worth defending.

    The defense of boring, “grown up”, politics is on sounded ground, but Republicans have tried that for decades and lost because of it. Democrats paint boring as the systemically racist status quo, and traditionally adult behavior as the embodiment of white supremacy. Boring and adult loses elections.

    Case in point: Biden talks the cause of order, but his actions support the agents of disorder in his party, and further their goals. Democrats want to crank up the money printing presses. And if Biden appoints a wartime general, that general is much more likely to wage war on conservatives than on coronavirus.

    • “The defense of boring, “grown up”, politics is on sounded ground, but Republicans have tried that for decades and lost because of it. ”

      Republicans have tried this, but soon after the Reagan/HW Bush terms were over, Newt Gingrich began the process of tapping into something else entirely. Rush Limbaugh emerged as a social force, and a thousand copycats bloomed. Whatever you may think of Bill Clinton in general, at the time, he had the Democrats moving generally more center.

      Perhaps it was the emergence of Gingrich that created the conditions where boring, “grown up”, politics couldn’t win. Republicans should have seen that the lesson was that you needed some charm to sell conservatism, that Reagan could work, but HW couldn’t. Instead they went in another direction, with Gingrich types on one side, and a series of snoozy old school leaders on the other.

      The Republicans split off their nut-wing first.

      The country is set up into thirds. Registered Independents are the middle and vote in whatever primary they want to. Adults can still win if we can just find one.

      • “Newt Gingrich began the process of tapping into something else entirely. Rush Limbaugh emerged as a social force, and a thousand copycats bloomed.”

        100% revisionist history. Please go back and read “The Contract with America” and the background on how it came to be. Fully consistent with Reaganism and not the least bit nutty.

        Hint: just to pick one issue; was the balance budget amendment in any way inconsistent with Reagan’s desires?

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

        • The nuttiness on the Republican side is never about policy. That’s always the BS bailout, even with Trump today.

          It’s about tactics and stoking disrespect and outrage. Its about how to demonize other side. That’s what made Gingrich different, not what policies he wanted to pursue.

          Strangely enough, policy is a major problem on the Democratic side. Most of the anger on the democratic side is a counter-reaction.

          Conservatism could have dominated the last 30 years if only there were leaders with the ability to sell it. There was a Reagan approach, a Busch approach and a Gingrich approach for how to do that.

          Republicans chose the Gingrich approach because they hated the Bush approach. What they really needed another Reagan but they couldn’t find one.

          • Bush was a silly out-of-touch one termer. He fully deserved his fate after having the Iraq victory as his number one campaign issue…no one gave a f*ck when the country was in the midst of a recession. Go visit his library at Texas A&M if you’re feeling nostalgic.

            But, to suggest that Gingrich or Limbaugh were somehow out of the mainstream conservative movement isn’t remotely accurate. I watched and listened to Limbaugh daily back in those days (remember the tv show anyone?). It was completely mainstream fiscal and social conservatism.

          • “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

          • Good golly, you’re gonna repeat a meme that I’ve seen a dozen times in my Twitter feed the last few days? Zero points for originality, but many positive points for plagiarism.

            If you’re suggesting that the Republicans just bend over like HW did, then you’re outta luck and that’s the wrong strategy. Reagan wasn’t willing to bend over and that’s one of the primary traits that separated him from the one term loser in addition to his bullet proof charisma. The latter day saint (pun definitely intended) of HW is Romney. No thanks, won’t work in these times.

          • Hans — I have to push back on your statement, “He fully deserved his fate after having the Iraq victory as his number one campaign issue…no one gave a f*ck when the country was in the midst of a recession.” One of my biggest gripes at the time was that the US was NOT in the midst of a recession during most of the campaign. The recession was quite clearly over, by all indicators, and yet the press kept writing articles as if we were still in the recession. That was an example of the media warping the news to favor getting a Democrat elected.

          • MikeW

            Thanks for the pushback. Agreed and and I should have been clearer about the recession’s start/end and the complete media bias that was part of the process. But, hopefully you can agree that he was an extremely weak out-of-touch candidate trying to navigate a political world that he didn’t understand.

            BTW – very thankful for the Clarence Thomas nomination and the willingness of the HW administration to see it through. We didn’t need a Bork 2.0. For me, the pivot point in politics was probably Bork and not Gingrich.

          • Hans, quotes are generally not original.

            All I can do is give you some advice. If something upsets you, like how Bork or Thomas was treated, you probably shouldn’t take the very thing that you hated most, distill it down to 151 proof and drink it for breakfast every day. Just saying.

          • “All I can do is give you some advice”

            Thanks Tom for the advice; it truly means a lot to me. Free my pillow sleeper topper for you for all of your graciousness. But, I’m gonna go ahead and look in a different direction. Good luck to you and the tired fish stories that you borrowed from Twitter.

    • “I think there is a stronger argument that Republicans who strongly oppose Trump are doing more damage to both the party and the country.”

      The trouble is, they are not mutually exclusive, and both arguments are strong. The leaders are bad and the masses are bad.

      The GOP and ACME are caught in a pincer double-envelopment that was foreseeable and avoidable, and it was foreseen, but not avoided. Both rival bads are bad in different ways and cause different kinds of bad consequences.

      A single dose of either kind of bad is lethal, and a double dose only kills you faster. It’s just not a good argument for one kind of bad to argue that the problem is the other kind of bad, and if you get rid of that other one, things will be just fine. No, you still die, just with a different cause of death on the post-mortem.

    • “Would the GOP and country be better off if the Republicans held a Senate majority? Political actors like the Lincoln Project dynamited that prospect out of their opposition to Trump.”

      The GOP would have held onto the Senate if Trump and people like Lin Wood hadn’t made the Georgia runoff election all about Trump.

      • There is a case to be made that Trump behaved poorly in GA.

        But you know when Trump was on the ballot Purdue got 2.462M votes, and when he wasn’t on the ballot he got 2.214M, which tells me that the problem here isn’t Trump. I could run some similar numbers in lots of other races.

        That is the problem with all of these “it’s Trumps fault” explanations. The math just doesn’t hold up.

        I’ve got a newsflash for you, which you don’t seem to have processed yet. Romney lost in 2012, running against a mediocre and intransigent Obama that had few legislative accomplishments to be proud of and none of them bi-partisan.

        Romney’s entire worldview lost. He re-assembled the Reagan coalition, and it lost, because demographics have changed since the 1980s. When Obama won a second term, The Great Awokening began, the loss of zombie Reaganism being the sign that it was time to drop the pretenses.

        Romney and his ilk still don’t know how to win or what to do with it. If they did know, they wouldn’t be so afraid of Trump the only way they can think of to beat him is to not let him run.

        • You’re obviously overreaching in your conclusion. Things happened between the November election and the runoff other than Trump no longer being on the ballot. Betting odds trends support the claim that Trump hurt the candidates in Georgia during the interregnum. Also, Romney in 2012 outperformed Trump in 2020 despite not having the advantage of incumbency. This ‘only a Trump can win’ position is no longer very plausible.

          • I agree that Trump behaved badly between the November election and the Georgia runoff. I disagree that he is the primary cause of the GOPs weakness or loss of the election.

            Mitch McConnell spent most of that month arguing that we should have a $900B stimulus bill full to the brim with pork, but throwing a hissy fit over the $165B of it that actually went to constituents instead of interest groups. When Trump tried to give him a way out of such boneheadedness, he didn’t even bother to take it.

            “Also, Romney in 2012 outperformed Trump in 2020 despite not having the advantage of incumbency.”

            Romney got 60.9M votes.
            Trump got 62.9M and 74M votes respectively.

            He also got the votes where they mattered a lot more, rather than a bunch of useless votes in non competitive states. In the end, he lost the electoral college in 2020 by something like 85,000 votes, slightly more than he won it by against Hillary.

            Romney did indeed put together the Reagan coalition in the sense that he won about the same % of the various groups as Reagan did.

            Romney won 59% of whites, 7% of blacks, 29% of Hispanics, and 27% of Asians.

            Reagan won 56% of whites, 14% of blacks, 37% of Hispanics, Asian not listed (Reagan’s share amongst minorities would decline in 1984, but whites put him over the top).

            GHWB in 1992 got 60% of whites, 11% of blacks, and 30% of Hispanics. Almost exactly Romney’s numbers. He won 426 electoral votes.

            The problem is that there are a lot fewer whites. That’s it. That is Romneys problem. That’s the GOPs problem. They caused this problem themselves. They have absolutely no idea how to dig out of it. The Romney GOP literally bottomed out with minority voters.

      • P.S. So far the only thing the Senate Republicans have accomplished is to make me ineligible for the last stimulus check. That’s what they’ve done for me lately.

    • And the stock market is hallucinatory? It’s easy to bet on that, but I’ll bet you’re not doing so.

      • The rise in stock prices is based on more than hallucinations. It’s based on the Fed and Congress pumping money into an economy that has no place else to put it.

        Inflation will kick in as the vaccines roll out and the economy fires up. Eventually the Fed will be forced to put on the brakes and that could bring the markets tumbling down.

      • I think stock market valuations are for the most part reasonable.

        Nominal GDP grows around 4% per year in a typical year. Profits should track that over the long term. With buybacks, we can probably expect 5% long term EPS growth (short term a bit less with higher corporate taxes).

        The dividend yield on the S&P is around 1.5%.

        Put that together and if current valuations hold, you can expect a 6.5% annual return on stocks, in a world with 2% 30 year treasury rates. In addition to the 4.5% return premium, bonds are less attractive as the after-tax after-inflation expected yield is now negative, and there’s a quasi-floor on rates which limits the upside in a falling rate environment.

        Does anyone here have money they don’t need in the next 5-10 years invested in bonds?

        • Note that this is different Justin from the one who commented on inflation.

          Speaking of inflation, I think there could be inflation pressure but if I had to bet, I’d expect inflation to average between 1.4% and 2.6% on average during the 2020s.

  3. This morning, quite early this morning, after a long Kafkaesque ordeal, I finally got my parents vaccine appointments. They have to drive five hours each way to get it, but they are getting it.

    Why are they getting it? Donald Trump.

    I will leave others to talk about Operation Warp Speed.

    I’m going to talk directly about why I could get an appointment. In January, Donald Trump got the CDC to change its guidance on the vaccine to include people over 65. Previous “deplorable” uproar had gotten people aged 75+ added after Critical Race Theorist tried to exclude the old entirely, but my Dad is 72 and while every doctor agrees that his health conditions mean he’s more like 100 in risk years, he was out of luck.

    In addition to getting 65+ added, teeth were added by the Trump admin. My county health board has made it clear that the conditions of getting vaccine allocation are:

    1) That it be used quickly
    2) That 50% at a minimum go to age 65+

    They don’t want to do this. Every single Democratic constituency and all of the local politicians have gotten the vaccine first. The appointment I got, through CVS, was restricted to 65+ only. It’s clear that this is the avenue they used to meet that 50% quota so they can keep giving it to teachers that won’t teach or whatever other Dem coalition member can grab a slice.

    This is but one example. Do you think I give a shit what Jonah Goldberg thinks is “respectable”. Respectable told my parents to drop dead. Deplorable is making it so they can leave the fucking house.

    The divide between Trump Supporter and Never Trump has always been a divide between results oriented thinking and respectability oriented thinking. To the extent Trump supporters are disappointed it’s with people that don’t get results. And you know, Trump isn’t even that good at getting results, but he’s better than the Never Trumper’s and he’s better then Biden.

    Romney, the quintessential Never Trumper, proved how little results his kind get in 2012, and the broader decades surrounding it.

    Goldberg wants this is be about Qanon because if it’s about who stood up to CRT and got my parents that vaccine, his set completely failed and has been failing for a long time.

    • The idea that Trump’s insanity is necessary to give vaccines to old people is cargo cult thinking. Any Republican would’ve done almost everything Trump did, in terms of policy, except for tariffs. What separates Trump from normal Republicans has been an impediment, not an advantage, to ‘getting things done.’ Even this idea that Trump was good at winning in 2016 is dubious at best. Normalized for population growth, he won essentially an identical number of votes as Romney. He won because of weak democratic turnout for a very weak candidate, not because he was a good candidate.

  4. I’m seeing a more than insignificant risk that the Republican Party splinters with Trump residing over some newly formed third party. That scenario is instant doom for conservatives like myself and probably also for the libertarians. The crazy left would then have the ability to go whole hog with their agenda.

    Based on this, I’ve got two suggestions:

    1) Hope and pray that Trump gets formally defrocked in the Senate even if it’s 100% kangaroo court (and it will be). The orange boogeyman served his purpose and I see zero benefit in his trolling and ego tripping going forward. Time to find a Trump 2.0 candidate, but without Trump.

    2) the reds need to find a way to stick together. I’m not one for the nutty conspiracy theories, but hear these folks out and try for some policy reforms can alleviate their concerns. I continue to believe that QAnon is a numerically insignificant movement, but no the voter fraud conspiracy movement. Prove me wrong.

    PS – the risks from running with scissors is overrated. I was warned time and time again, but yet I did it a lot and lived to tell.

    • I would probably not vote for Trump in a primary, though if his opponent was odious enough who knows.

      I would certainly vote for Trump in a general against any Democrat (I would probably vote for Bill Clinton, but I mean any Democrat today even Biden).

      To convict Trump without convicting the Dems that incited BLM is to engage in unconditional surrender. “No Justice, No Peace.” I’m against impeachment.

      If the GOP is so worthless they can’t win a primary challenge by Trump in 2024 it deserves to die. Are they so utterly pathetic they think that the only way they can think of to stop Trump from getting the nomination is to keep him from running? How pathetic do they consider themselves that they won’t even make a case to their voters that they are better? If you want Donald Trump gone, beat him in a primary fair and square. I would vote for a good alternative. I won’t vote for a cuckservative who felt he could only win if the opposition was made illegal.

    • “Hope and pray that Trump gets formally defrocked in the Senate even if it’s 100% kangaroo court (and it will be). The orange boogeyman served his purpose and I see zero benefit in his trolling and ego tripping going forward. Time to find a Trump 2.0 candidate, but without Trump.”

      Doesn’t game theory suggest that any Republican that harbors any ambitions on running for President should vote to convict and bar him from office? Doing so gets rid of a prime opponent to winning the party’s nomination. Imagine Cruz, for instance, saying during the campaign yes the election was stolen but the rule of law, yada yada yada…

      Or instead of seeming to two-faced, with backroom strategizing find 17 R votes to convict; from the never Trumpers like Romney, those retiring like Portman, those that are in safe states, those not up for re-election for 4 or 6 years, and those without any further ambition.

      The risks are that Trump continues to hold rallies, splits the party, or finds his own Medvedev to stand in his place. Can’t be his wife though since she is foreign born.

      • The risk is that the GOP is so weak, pathetic, and unworthy of leadership that it thinks its only hope of defeating a 78 year old Trump is to bar him from running.

        If the GOP is that exhausted, just die already. Its not that hard to beat Trump in a primary (if he bothers to run) if you aren’t so terrible that you don’t deserve to win anyway.

  5. Arnold, I think you continue to overestimate the power of the far left within the anti-Trump coalition because you overestimate the degree to which anti-Trumpists are motivated by the oppressor-oppressed axis and underestimate the importance of the civilization-barbarism axis. Biden already gets credit for standing up for civilization because his most visible opponents are a Confederate terrorist paramilitary mob who tried to violently overthrow the government and murder its officials because they deluded themselves into believing that an election they lost had been stolen. Lots of people in his coalition are not in any way Elect adherents (to use John McWhorter’s apt term) but fear, with reason, that Trumpist terrorism is a far greater threat to liberal democracy than the Elect.

    • “but fear, with reason, that Trumpist terrorism is a far greater threat to liberal democracy than the Elect.”

      It is completely unreasonable to think the Trumpets terrorists are a greater threat to liberal democracy than The Elect. Go ahead. Make the case. With logic and evidence. I’d like to hear it.

      • The coup attempt of January 6th and the bogus attempts to choose Trumpist electors in states Biden won make the case. Left-wing political candidates supported by the Elect, however obnoxious they may be, don’t attempt to violently overthrow the government when they lose elections. Nor do they attempt to overturn the will of the voters by quasi-legal means using obviously false allegations of fraud as an excuse, which most House Republicans and half a dozen Senators did with their “objections” to electors; nor do they attempt to rewrite voting laws to disenfranchise the other side, as Republican officials in dozens of states are now attempting to do. The modern US left respects the basic procedural norms of liberal democracy; the modern right does not.

        I’m not blind to the damage done by bad Elect ideology: I am (for now) a public school parent in San Francisco watching enraged as my kid’s school is undermined by a self-parodying Board of Education. But I can trust that if I and my fellow angry parents organize an opposition slate to the current Board of Ed at the next election, and our slate gets more votes than the incumbents, they will not attempt to have the election result overturned based on bogus claims of voter fraud, or incite a terrorist mob to kill the opposition candidates. I can’t trust Trumpists to do the same.

  6. If Trump had been Rand Paul, Goldberg would be writing the same essay. Ninety percent of self described libertarians and classical libertarians in the establishment will find an excuse to suck up to establishment democrats regardless of whom ever the Republicans nominate. Has George Will ever found a Republican nominee that he could get behind. USA establishment punditry is vapid, boring, forgettable and pointless. All that should matter is whether peace, prosperity, and the personal autofocus the private citizen are advanced or not. Nothing suggests that they will be anytime soon.

    • You’re just making stuff up. Goldberg was consistently supportive of Republican candidates before Trump and has, what’s more, been consistently critical of Democrats as well during the last four years. What you’re doing is a textbook case of ‘splitting.’

    • I actually went back and looked at Reason’s (that alleged bastion of closet leftism) ‘who we’re voted for’ piece in 2012. Out of 28 writers, how many would you guess voted for Obama? 0. Not even Dalmia.

  7. taking the most charitable view of those who disagree

    QAnon is supported by a very tiny fraction of Trump supporters. The coverage of QAnon is almost exclusively motivated to tar and vilify Trump supporters with an uncharitable view. I would not agree that Kling takes a remotely charitable view regarding Trump supporters he disagrees with.

  8. Government and politics are two independent industries. People in each are paid differently. They have different incentives. And, our administrative state as currently organized relieves politicians of the duty to legislate carefully or seriously. All legislation is symbolic. There’s a reason that the young congresswoman said she was “organizing staff around comms, not legislation”.

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