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WEST HOLLYWOOD—Here in California this past week, my city council voted to defund the sheriff’s department. But West Hollywood isn’t the only American neighborhood that’s given up on laying down the law. The sheriffs at Mar-A-Lago also appear to be off duty.
My late mentor Mark Perry called Harry Truman “more Democrat than American,” in reference to the revulsion by the 33rd president to his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, joining forces with the GOP. But Truman’s most notorious political observation extends properly to the party he hated: if you want a friend in Republican politics, get a dog.
Two months after former President Donald Trump looked to have the Midas touch, it’s open season on the American antipope.
We’ve been here before, with doubters galore of this Donald Trump guy. But, it should be said, it has not been quite like this in some six or seven years. Looking forward to 2024, the Republican Party seems poised for another open presidential primary.
The stark, sudden reality on this front reportedly has Forty-Five ginned up to declare his intention to become Forty-Seven—and right now, folks.
With late-millennial politicas denouncing the man in front of Congress, the Paladin of Palm Beach is not content to gut it out through what he sees as shaping up to be a low, dishonest summer. “They’re calling it the summer of Trump,” the future president beamed in 2015.
Is 2022 about to be an encore? Now, as then, Trump’s rivals do not care. They were dead wrong seven years ago; who’s right this time?
For one, has anyone gotten smarter? Are the alternatives to Trump anything more than “Bush league”? The Readers were subjected to my treatment of Florida Governor Ron Desantis last week. The intriguing (if doomed) prospect of a President Mike Pence will have to be saved for another.
Let’s dive in now on what I’ll call the “Republican third circuit.”
Governor Glenn Youngkin, of my native Virginia, is licking his chops to move to a (slightly) better river than the James in Richmond. It was just as a Youngkin associate, wearing a Youngkin hat, told me in the snack shop at NatCon II last autumn: the Governor has Potomac fever.
Youngkin would be the first president born in the Commonwealth since Woodrow Wilson, and only the second since before the state served as the damned headquarters of the wrong side of what Johnny Cash called our bloody brother war. Virginia, with some reason, feels it’s paid its dues for another turn at the White House.
And the former Carlyle Group co-CEO feels like he knows how to spot an opportunity: maybe filming some sort of commercial geared at becoming commander-in-chief, definitely booming up to New York for donor confabs, and wading into nasty politics at the venerable Virginia Military Institute. Youngkin has put his posse on the board of the state military academy, sniffing a chance at a conservative comeback two years after our national Summer of Love.
It’s an interesting fight to pick—one Youngkin evidently relishes: the fight over the schools. As a former board member of a Virginia state university and product of the Commonwealth’s public schools, I can attest to this much of a Jeffersonian legacy in that land: don’t mess with education. Left-wing overreach in the learning domain got Youngkin elected. And he’s hoping it could get him promoted 100 miles up North. He’s no Trumpist, but Trumpists cheered his victory last autumn. Youngkin’s appeal is weirdly singular.
Speaking of military academies, a bonafide product of a citadel of our national defense would like to be president more than just about anybody. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—originally of Orange County, but more notably of the famed West Point “class of ‘86”—is showing every indication of, at least officially, running against his former boss. He’s got ads out not in New York or California, but in Iowa and South Carolina. He’s tanned, rested, and less enormous. No one can outwork him.
And speaking of The Citadel, former Palmetto State governor and Turtle Bay grandee Nikki Haley says not to count her out. I’ll bet big money she’s not the Republican nominee, but that doesn’t mean she’s not personally working to ward off recession through purchases of plane tickets to Iowa. Thank you, Madam Ambassador.
What the hell is going on? Two main theories.
First: anyone not named Ron DeSantis is banking, contra 2016, that a consolidated opponent to Trump will emerge before the primaries (which are still a year and a half away) and that it won’t, for whatever reason, be the Florida governor. But, perhaps second: this tranche of players is betting, for all the bluster, that Trump is actually remarkably bad at being enduringly petty.
Trump-Youngkin 2024? Trump-Pompeo? Trump-Haley? All more likely if they run.
The post Is Glenn Youngkin Running for President? appeared first on The American Conservative.
WASHINGTON– This is not an endorsement.
I plan to write at length on the 2024 campaign, which promises to be the greatest show on Earth. When I was on the primary path earlier this spring, Senate and governor’s primaries had presidential energy, an inevitable byproduct, one supposes, of not having a campaign to speak of in 2020. Donald Trump’s protestations about the result that year clearly have political staying power in part because of a generally felt sense that that year was unconscionably off. This has damaged everyone. President Brandon’s—er, Biden’s time in the White House, it is plain now, lacks some real punch.
Another rival to the 45th president appears to be emerging, whose name isn’t Joe Biden.
Two basically superb treatments of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were published this week. They were written by liberal journalists and DeSantis himself did not comply with the coverage, but they’re pretty good. If interested, you can read the palatial “Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s Combatant-in-Chief?” by Dexter Filkins, and Ronny & Nancy of Tallahassee from Tina Nguyen in Puck, which expands on prior coverage of the impossibly powerful presence of DeSantis’s wife, Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis. That relationship is compared there, of course, to Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The assertion is that their Floridian pairing has taken on the appearance of a true Sunshine State duumvirate. DeSantis’ old Yale, Harvard and military chums seem less important.
Close perhaps only with his wife, the 40th president and former California governor was shrouded, ultimately, in enigma, and that comparison is now being made to the current Florida governor. Such relationships in politics can be a double-edged sword: enviable stuff in good times (who wouldn’t want to be in love?), but the source of all evil in bad times. If DeSantis was less successful, this duo would be compared negatively to the likes of the unknowable leftist president Daniel Ortaga and his spouse Rosario Murillo of Nicaragua, and not to a legendary Republican predecessor. Indeed, what is probably most unusual about DeSantis, now a major contender in the presidential arena, is that he is a certified introvert.
Now to assert some “street cred” and a disclosure: Your writer voted for Trump in the 2016 primaries, and presidential elections, and if needed, one can poll my friends, girlfriends, and family as I shocked and awed them with enthusiasm from July 2015 on. In fact, I took him seriously from about May that year on, when front-runner Jeb Bush was running on trade protection authority for President Obama, or whatever. Trump presented what I felt was a more accurate snapshot of the state of the union: “This country is a hellhole.” I remain today much the kind of voter I was then: If history had played differently, I would have gladly voted for Bernie Sanders over Jeb Bush, or whatever version of Marco Rubio we were on back then. But that time changed it all: My generation would be defined by a miserable street fight between right and left, not anti-establishment versus establishment. Besides, today the left is the American establishment, par excellence.
And yet, doubts about Trump’s ability to change this country for the better surfaced from the beginning: the endless personnel carousel, the insidious refusal to play the ultimate presidential Trump card, appearing above-the-fray. Then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Weekly Standard upon his August 2017 ouster: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. … It’ll be something else. … And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.” And true enough, it was something else, and the world since March 2020 has made 2017-2019 seem like a pleasant hallucination, surely the main fount of Trump’s enduring appeal. Times were pretty great, even if we didn’t know it.
But back to the future.
Times columnist Ross Douthat sees a 2016 redux. Citing a very positive single poll for DeSantis in New Hampshire, Douthat diagnoses, “I read this as evidence DeSantis is consolidating the ideological, high-information conservative voter — the ‘movement’ bloc that Cruz won in 2016. Trump still has more of the disaffected, less-political, populist bloc.” I could not disagree more, and would gently remind the very talented Mr. Douthat that he picked Marco Rubio as the winner of the 2016 primary. DeSantis’s appeal is far less “Bible-thumping” (putting aside how religious Cruz really is, and putting aside the crude hatred of the faithful in corners of this country) than was Cruz’s image. DeSantis’s culture-warring is far more suited for new American fault lines, if you buy the now-infamous “Hochman Thesis.”
Now, to “steelman” the DeSantis case.
Florida in the age of the coronavirus has become a true countermodel, known not only in the rest of the United States, but positively notorious as well in Europe, as a place to collectively escape Western hysteria and do some business. Every day brings news of a fresh relocation, the latest being Ken Griffin’s bad boy hedge fund, appropriately named for these purposes Citadel, which is packing up from Chicago and getting on I-24 full-speed to Miami. Even Trump now lives most of the year closer to the Gulf of Mexico than Manhattan. Covid-19, its still-unexplained origins, and the schizophrenic reaction to it from the American establishment have supplanted 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2016 election as the touchstone of most Americans’ political lives. Especially conservatives. Especially younger votes. I turned thirty in July 2020, certifiably marking the closure of my childhood.
And so, politically maxed out, DeSantis is not Ted Cruz circa 2016 (please) but rather a combination of Trump in 2016 (a proven fighter) and Glenn Youngkin in 2021. He won’t revolt suburbanites, at least not in the same way. Aesthetically, DeSantis’s classic smarts and non-boomerism, played correctly, could engender him broader respect, or at least a less catatonic response from people who do not vote for him. One imagines him a relatively more palliative choice, one that won’t up the ante still further on America’s increasingly egregious gender divide.
The rap on DeSantis from the hardcore, though, is that you can’t trust him.
Indeed, as Douthat’s audience on Twitter correctly responded to a poll he put out, opposition to DeSantis may intellectually come most passionately from “early Trump adopters.” In the most extreme critique, they see a Bushie in a nationalist’s clothing. The most incendiary condemnation surfaced in the Filkins dispatch is that the Florida governor is standoffish, impersonal, cold, imperious. That has not been my limited experience. In my one interaction, he was social, drank Cabernet Sauvignon, answered all questions politely, even when he began to doubt the response out of Washington on the pandemic, a lockdown response one reminds that was originally led by President Donald Trump (‘”late March [2020],’ DeSantis answered quickly, on when his doubts surfaced”). Sure enough, news of that fissure broke months later, with DeSantis saying he only wished he doubted Trump sooner.
It is probably true enough that DeSantis would not have moved the “Overton window” on what is possible in American politics as Trump did in 2016, putting an end to the stale Obama-era paradigm, drearily Fukuyaman in its own way. But if my coverage and sporadic access to political VIP’s has taught me anything, it is respect for an open will to power. Politicians are not philosophers, and if they are, they cannot be philosophers first. Results matter. DeSantis may have not been the man for 2017-2019, but in the Covid-19 complex (and attendant cultural revolution), the Florida governor found his crisis. He did not shrink from it. Despite his elite background, he distrusted the elite when it mattered most.
The knock on getting through Harvard and Yale is not that that you are naturally stupid or evil (of course not, if anything the opposite), it’s that to get through those institutions today you have to become stupid or evil. But at age 43, that DeSantis comes out of those places then is a testament to his work ethic and discipline, not his ideology. By all evidence, a DeSantis administration would not be trojan-horsed old medicine. Not the “realism” and “restraint” of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Not the “nationalism” of Ted Cruz (that speech happened).
If one had to close out this case, age would be the determining factor. Now 76, Trump remains hilariously energetic for a man in his eighth decade. But the difference between the two men’s ages is greater than this writer’s lifespan. Finally having a president young enough for the job would feel like a jump off the high-dive. In the end, competence matters, too. If it really is the “Flight 93” era, then it would seem incumbent to remorselessly pick the most-skilled pilot.
The post A Defense of Ron DeSantis, Professional Politician appeared first on The American Conservative.
HOLLYWOOD— Everyone knows the credo of Oliver Stone’s all-time villain. “Greed is good.”
The director’s unmatched portrayal of the 1980s’ man-on-the-make in Wall Street‘s Gordon Gecko is the stuff of legends. To political poindexters, Gekko’s sermon at the board meeting would seem the most famous and obvious homily to a kind of anarcho-capitalism.
Stone’s archvillain (or is it antihero?) is Milton Friedmanism incarnate. In other words, the market is justice.
Less often considered today is the full set-up to the fictional financier’s diatribe.
Gekko: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re not here to indulge in fantasy, but in political and economic reality. America, America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions.”
Gekko then gets flirtatious with industrial policy: “Now, in the days of the free market, when our country was a top industrial power…”
Gekko goes on to assail bureaucracy, in all its forms: “One thing I do know is that our paper company lost $110 million last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents.”
“The new law in corporate America seems to be: survival of the unfittest,” Gekko proclaims. “Well, in my book, you either do it right, or you get eliminated.”
And then he closes with his famous lines, the stuff frankly of modern Shakespeare (in terms at least of contemporary political relevance):
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Now to crib from perhaps the second-most famous film about Wall Street in the Eighties, I’ll invoke American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman: “Is that Donald Trump’s car?”
Admittedly, the concept of a paleoconservative Gordon Gekko is a novel one. The man is supposed to be the “libertarian” dream. Add in Gekko’s dubious ethnicity (the consensus seems to be probably atheistic Jewish from a working-class background). Mix in the fraught history between sectors of the “paleos” and some American Jews and the state of Israel, and the intellectual pairing may veer to some on the truly absurd.
But in this era of species-level existential crisis, cryptocurrency crashes, and political realignment, it is worth noting the coalitions of old are ultimately indecipherable to anyone who did not live through it (and this writer did not, the 1980s). The past is a foreign country. And more importantly, money isn’t real. With the first inflation shock since before Gekko’s heyday, that everyone seems to be in agreement on.
As by now most seasoned readers know, “deregulation,” in the Fukuyaman sense, was supposed to create an implicitly center-right society: desultory narcotic use would be naturally discouraged because it would harder to show up to the office; large family formation was impressive and a way to get ahead in your career; power in the hands of private companies meant minimal bureaucracy; the “upward surge” of the society as Gekko put it, would be undisputedly felt, even by the haters and losers. The fact that involved a country, “a corporation” as Gekko called it, with an industrial capacity and rules of behavior, seemed self-evident to Gekko.
And what is Francis Fukuyama up to these days, anyway? Frank is predicting on his blog that Vladimir Putin is a sure goner, unbowed by the years, 1992-2022. Trust the process.
Potshots aside, it is worth re-exploring the nature of 1980s right-wing criticism of what has come to be summarized as “Reaganism.” Gekko’s soliloquy occurs in 1987; while he probably voted for the man, and personally thrilled and benefited from Reagan’s optimism and successes at human liberation, Gekko hardly sounds like a totally happy supporter of the 40th president, his assessment of the country being then still quite dour.
Let’s cast aside the comparably unremarkable sequel film from 2010—what would Gekko say now? Well, shifting back to Bret Easton Ellis now, Bateman’s crony Timothy Bryce (in the film version) remarks of Reagan: “He makes himself out to be a harmless old codger.” Another right-wing critic of Reagan’s interpretation of laissez-faire? The 45th president.
“But this…is the last chance for these ideas,” Pat Buchanan told Tim Alberta in the early Trump years in power. At bottom, Gekko Gordon is a political animal like “Pitchfork Pat,” who was of-course the co-founder of The American Conservative. The man of the film is drawn toward macro-philosophizing like Buchanan was drawn to the presidency.
One does wonder what Buchanan thinks now. In the second-most famous monologue of the film, a more baleful Gekko comes to an end by saying: “Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy?”
The post Where Gordon Gekko and Pat Buchanan Meet appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lost in the farrago of an economy careening toward recession, the ever-continuing war in Ukraine, and the flat-out boring spectacle of America’s oldest-ever president, a man who is never boring cashed in his seventh or eighth life last week.
“Across the pond,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived a Conservative Party no-confidence vote. Seemingly the political version of Dick Cheney or Henry Kissinger, obituaries of Johnson’s premiership have been pre-written since the day he ascended to office in July 2019. Yet he never dies.
This practice of assuring the reader that it’s over for “Boris,” has picked up in earnest since the advent of “Partygate.” That is, the revelations (and photos) of Johnson and his staff repeatedly living it up during the lockdown days of 2020, even as Johnson’s government spearheaded a severe crackdown in the face of the Coronavirus. Indeed, the virus reportedly almost (literally) killed the man himself two springs back, and so no wonder by summer, he wanted to enjoy some Chablis with friends (note: even as he scolded others for doing so).
Calls for Johnson’s head, so to speak, have abated somewhat since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The British elite, ever in denial of the Empire’s end, has been pound for pound more bellicose on the peripherally important theater than their kin in Washington (though, it should be said, they’ve hardly matched the Americans Pound Sterling for Pound Sterling.)
So, the vote this week had the feeling of old business. Ouster might have been more plausible if it had been held over the winter, before events once again intervened to save Boris Johnson.
The result: Johnson—the former London mayor, foreign secretary, Spectator editor and Telegraph columnist—has hung around in the global headlines now for over twenty years, or about as long as the man in the Kremlin he now so bellicosely sets himself against. (That wasn’t enough to stop Johnson from reportedly demanding members of parliament show him their secret ballots in the no-confidence vote… democracy in action).
Johnson’s European rival, French President Emmanuel Macron, is more commonly assailed for his Machiavellian mutability. But it is Boris Johnson who has pulled off the feat of first cheaply attacking Mitt Romney at the Olympics, then consulting with Steve Bannon and allowing himself to be portrayed as a “Trumpian natonalist,” then pledging with Joe Biden to “build back better,” all in the span of ten years.
As the battle for Ukraine has shown, Johnson’s reflexive militarism is a clear enough core conviction. A perusal of the prime minister’s Telegraph archive tells the same story. Johnson has long agreed with his on-again, off-again friend, British M.P. Michael Gove (who had to be restrained in August 2013 when the British passed on a round of Middle East airstrikes) about the need to “do something” whether it be in Syria, or Iraq, or the Donbass.
And it certainly fits the scribbler-statesman’s plain desire to be seen as a latter-day Churchill. At the very least, Johnson has a penchant for simultaneously living in luxury and poverty, as of course did Britain’s wartime leader. Although in Johnson’s case, it appears the hold on the bank account is more alimony than ascots, more indeterminate number of children than Pol Roger champagne.
But this writer’s fusillade is mere set-up.
Despite headlines to the contrary, one can see a more plausible path today for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s long term political survival than at any time since his smashing 2019 general election victory. On the eve of the vote, Freddy Gray laid out in the Spectator both what I think is the reality of the man, as well as the ludicrous paucity of available alternatives:
I have a childhood memory of the hatred many people felt towards Thatcher. The mass loathing of Boris… is different. Thatcher didn’t mind being hated because she had fixed beliefs: an ideology, for better or worse. Boris’s political philosophy has always been far looser. And that’s why the popular rage against him is more like contempt: people hate him for not believing in anything. … They hate him now. They’d miss him soon after he’s gone. Jeremy Hunt? Liz Truss? Ben Wallace? Tom Tugendhat? Come on.
Johnson biographer Tom Bower has reported that Johnson, at his core, is a loner.
Perhaps similar to Elon Musk in this way, with the basic exception of his paramour du jour, Johnson “doesn’t have friends,” says Bower. Johnson is a disloyal human being. It’s a marked contrast from other world leaders, who often ascend the ranks with almost mafioso omerta when it comes to friends and allies. It’s notably different from predecessors in “Number 10” like David Cameron.
Another interesting morsel in the Bower reportage is that Johnson and his new wife, Conservative operator Carrie Symonds, desire ten years in power. That would put him, in the prime minister’s mind, in the ranks of Thatcher, Tony Blair, and yes, Churchill, in terms of executive longevity. Though there are murmurings of an early election, Johnson doesn’t have to call an election until December 2024 (what an autumn that’s shaping up to be), and after that, could serve straight through to 2029 uninterrupted.
In addition to differing with Johnson over Ukraine, Henry Kissinger this month indicated that he doubted Johnson’s overall style of leadership.
The old American wiseman credited Johnson with “altering the direction” of British society. And, surely, an arch-realist can admire a sheer will to power. But Kissinger gestured at the general unease with Johnson—that he might not be another Churchill, as much as the center-right answer to Blair. That is, like Blair, Johnson’s skills and penchant for survival are not in question. What is less clear is what anyone else on the planet has to show for his talent.
The post Ten Years of Boris Johnson? appeared first on The American Conservative.
LOS ANGELES— California used to be as red as its pinot noir.
Which is to say: slightly, but decidedly and famously. The launchpad of Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as latter-day projects such as “the Governator,” that all seem like yesterday’s news in 2022. Yes, large swaths of the Golden State outside of the major metros are quite conservative. And indeed, America seems poised to soon swap one Californian speaker of the House, a Democrat from San Francisco, for another, a Republican from Bakersfield. Also true, many of Donald Trump’s team in office (from Steve Bannon to National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien, Stephen Miller to Orange County’s own Mike Pompeo, to the wider media ecosystem) had bonafide California roots.
But Trump as a candidate, and as a president, hardly visited the place…and who could blame him? But large numbers and lands of wonky promise are weird things: Trump literally received more Californian votes for president in 2020 than any other Republican presidential candidate has. And despite its reputation as a leader of resistance, California saw “more pro-Trump crowds than any other state during the president’s term in office,” the Los Angeles Times grimly noted on the day Trump was booted from Washington in 2021. Still, Bannonism would seem an odd fit for Laguna Beach, or as the former White House chief strategist himself once said, on why he stopped residing in the area: “Bad vibes.”
But could California Republicans and independents be the ultimate beneficiaries of “the vibe shift”?
There has been cautious optimism from Democrat haters before, only for them to swiftly suffer humiliation. Case in point: the disastrous performance of California conservative eminence grise Larry Elder, “the Sage of South Central,” in last year’s gubernatorial recall. Still, that was before the full fallout from Afghanistan, the comeuppance to the White House on inflation, eight-dollar gas, and the astonishing sight of the parked-ships supply chain crunch I saw firsthand dotting the paradisiacal sunset in Huntington Beach last fall.
Agitants in a more conservative direction caution that any “return to form” may take election cycles, and not just this one. Still, the state’s demographics are striking: notably Hispanic and Asian at a time when the Democrats are plainly bleeding those votes. And the state-level and national mood is as sour as ever. As a contemporary in San Francisco once remarked, “California is still the future. The future just sucks.” Or as Republican candidate for Senate Jon Elist told me, “California is worth fighting for.”
Elist, 37, is potentially in poll position in Tuesday’s “jungle primary” to take on appointed incumbent Alex Padilla, a Democrat, in the general election in the fall. He told me he’s been somewhat frustrated by the apathy of conservative bigwigs in the state, loath to dispense with resources in a Blue Mecca, considering themselves exiles in their own land. He attributes Elder’s poor performance, yes, to a vibe shift so to speak, but also to a high number of Republican voters who stayed home in 2021, believing the election integrity frustrations out of Mar-A-Lago. It is a line I’ve not heard so much before in real life. It is, of course, always the anxiety of Mitch McConnell, or a Mitt Romney, and the voter fraud narrative did plausibly cost the GOP two Senate seats in Georgia. But Elist says he cares about the subject on two fronts: you’ve got to vote, and the establishment has to care about making election integrity a priority: “voter ID,” “poll observers,” the works, “this should not be partisan.”
As anecdotal as it gets: Most Americans seem unhappy, but what, exactly, does opposing the Democrats mean?
Conservative elites, such as they are, can’t even agree on the subject, the whole “vision thing” as George H.W. Bush once put it. Rising star Nate Hochman posited in the New York Times over the weekend that the Culture War is alive and well, but this time, it is far less religious. It’s a piece you should read.
Hochman himself in the piece denounces “the Republican porn star,” Brandi Love, who caused a minor brouhaha by both attending and then got booted from a right-leaning event last year. But he concedes his religious conservative side of things is but a coalition partner, and not necessarily the one calling the shots, in any effort to overthrow Democratic hegemony. And, indeed, the Culture War is different this go ’round, and potentially one the right can win: not gay marriage and national abortion bans, but should we teach transexuality in preschool?
Hochman the native Oregonian knows his neighboring California. Elist, a Princeton and Stanford graduate who was mentored by Condaleeza Rice, is now in an interesting niche of medical devices sales. As Elist told me: he is “going to have to sell a lot more penile implants” to make his mark.
For now, for many Californians, the order of the day is the first thing they see in the morning when they step outside their doorsteps (if they’re lucky to have one): a society in disrepair. Homelessness. Off-the-rails drug use. Anomie and alienation. Everyone knows it; it’s only a matter of if they deny it. Ever the cultural Machiavellian, comedic grandee Bill Maher’s guests over the weekend here in the City of Angels were Douglas Murray, the elegant author of the subtly-titled The War on the West and Michael Shellenberger, the independent gubernatorial aspirant and author of San Fransicko. If Republicans won’t seize this mantle, anyone willing to call themselves not-a-Democrat, or all but, will.
Elist says he could surprise against Padilla, who he notes has abysmal name recognition for a man who has been in politics for a quarter-century. Padilla, frankly, seems like sort of a non-entity. More prominently, ex-Republican billionaire Rick Caruso, a nominal Democrat, is the favorite to take the L.A. mayor’s mansion in downtown. His is a law-and-order message, backed by Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk—say what you will, the duo have an eye for winners.
The conservative Hoover Institution’s own Lanhee Chen is making a concerted effort for California controller and looks like the man to beat, winning even the L.A. Times’ endorsement. And in a development that would warm the late Andrew Breitbart’s heart, ten years after his stunning death in Beverly Hills, literal Weather Underground scion Chesa Boudin, the Sorosist D.A. of San Francisco, looks poised for downfall in the world’s most beautiful and benighted city.
There are, of course, other races here too. There is even another Nathan Hochman, who thinks he’s got a shot at being state attorney general. Once upon a time, in the last Republican midterm wave election, one Kamala Harris almost blew this race. And Southern California is a panoply of promised land for the GOP. For anyone who dreams of a “working class, multiethnic party,” there are conservative Asian American congresswomen and Hispanic veteran House members galore. And take Kevin Kiley, like Elist also 37, but from up north near Sacramento, who passed on running for governor again this year and instead is gunning for Congress. In my own view, he’d be a rare cogent voice in the nation’s lower chamber.
For a Republican Party toying with making “nationalism” its official credo, it might not be insane to include its most populous, most powerful, and politically disparate state. Certainly, Californication is never the boring move.
The post Is the Red Wave Starting in California? appeared first on The American Conservative.
It is a little tough to decide what anecdote to reach for.
Perhaps it is the one from seven springs ago, when I’m sitting in steerage in one of Washington’s sundry public affairs firms, and hearing a campaign man from Bush for President, 2016. The primary is a done deal, kid, we’re living as large as liege lords down in Miami, that is, Jeb H.Q. Come along, it’ll be a breezy summer and autumn as we prepare for conservative coronation, and onto battle against Camp Clinton. This is America, haven’t heard you? And the American people love little else more than a totally irrational dynasty. Don’t want to come on the campaign? The Political Action Committee is even more flush; it’s called “Right to Rise.” It should be called “Right to Rule.”
Three Christmases later, and the foremost rag of Jeb’s brother (“We Were Eight Years in Neoconservatism”), the Weekly Standard, is closing its doors. Posters of the coarse caricatures that once emblazoned zine sheets, pillorying any doubter of the “War on Terror,” came down as swiftly in Northwest Washington as the Saddam statue in central Baghdad. Unable to contain my cheerfulness, my editor at the time remarks, “They’re not exactly opening new magazines every day.”
So it is with this bittersweet mix of emotions that I greet the political demise of Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Jeb’s son. The younger Bush was positively blown out-of-the-water this week in a benighted bid against a Trumpist attorney general, Ken Paxton, himself hunted by Johnny Law. It wasn’t exactly a recount in Florida circa 2000. General Paxton won by some 36 points, lapping the last hope of Kennebunkport. Today, Miami is either the home of Trump for President 2024, or DeSantis 2024/8/, or whatever it is that Senator Marco Rubio does these days. Florida has long ceased to be “Bush Country,” as John Podhoretz appallingly once wrote of Red America all the way from Manhattan.
It would seem now that Texas, where “Poppy Bush” made a mean fortune in Midland and where “43” wandered around in an alcoholic haze until he turned 40 and then decided to become president (the coolest thing about him), is no country for the last of WASP dynasties either. George P. Bush, himself half-Mexican American, would appear the Romulus Augustulus—the last, anonymous emperor of “Rome”—of the Old Guard WASPs. Today, the most plausible future WASP president is probably a “Hillbilly” convert to Catholicism. And ironically enough, the Bush family name would probably be best fielded in Connecticut, where this woebegone American political tale all started, back when senators (or people) were named Prescott. Richard Nixon once, essentially, called Bohemian Grove the gayest thing he’d ever seen. And today Skull and Bones is “woke.”
Reporting on the sad state affairs of both the United States as it nears 250 and the careening power of the Bush line after extreme prominence for at least a third of that time has a purpose. Accepting the Republican nomination in 2000, future President George W. Bush told the gathered, “My friend, the artist Tom Lea of El Paso, Texas, captured the way I feel about our great land, a land I love,’ … He said, ‘Live on the east side of the mountain. It’s the sunrise side, not the sunset side. It is the side to see the day that is coming, not to see the day that has gone.’”
Bush, the born-again, would remark in similar fashion about his disinterest regarding history from the White House. He was “the decider.” On “history”? “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
George P. Bush will not be Texas attorney general. Jeb is not president. President George W. Bush is retired in Dallas these days, horrifyingly confusing Iraq and Ukraine, a final insult to all who lived under his rule, or worse, beneath his sword, or still worse, the millenarian evil he empowered. As the families five hours south and west can attest, living on the sunrise side of the mountain is no refuge for a country dominated by repellent anomie.
Sitting in West Hollywood, I myself look back east, toward my country. But Americans could do worse than to live more on the sunset side of the mountain, and take honest stock of what has become of this country, not live in denial, or under the guarantee of a better day. They didn’t want to be, but I suspect the Bush family, as this week showed, already lives there.
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