After Trump | The Spectator

Cuckoo Q: are the QAnon crowd as crazy as they seem?

‘Have you guys been following 4Chan?’ asks Marjorie Taylor Greene in a 2017 video. A mysterious ‘patriot’ named ‘Q’, Greene explains, is prophesying the downfall of satanic ‘swamp creatures’ in Washington, DC, Hollywood and other liberal fiefdoms. Is Greene a kind of female Alex Jones? No: she is now a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia and, in all likelihood, headed for the House of Representatives. Only weeks ago, an investigation by Facebook discovered thousands of groups and pages, boasting millions of members and followers, dedicated to QAnon conspiracy theories. In July, Twitter banned more than 7,000 accounts associated with the movement.

Sohrab Ahmari

The right after Trump

Two broad camps divide American conservatism today: those who get it, and those who don’t — the woke and unwoke, if I may borrow a lefty term but give it a slightly different meaning. For the right to have any shot at taming liberalism’s raging furies, woke conservatives must remain ascendant and consolidate the movement. President Trump was among the first to get it, in his own intuitive, messy way. The ambitious Missouri senator Josh Hawley is likewise woke. So are Attorney General Bill Barr and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But too many credentialed conservatives don’t get it. What’s the it conservatives need to get?

Spectator Editorial

The right stuff

No matter what the pundits say, no matter how the polls look, November’s presidential election is very much up for grabs. In a year as chaotic as 2020, nothing is certain. In another sense, however, the election’s outcome is predetermined: even if he wins another four-year term, Donald Trump’s political moment has all but vanished. For the right, the time has already come to look beyond Trump. The last US issue of The Spectator asked what a Biden presidency might mean. This one asks what might happen to the political right once Trump leaves the White House — be that in 2021 or 2025. Donald Trump may be a real estate tycoon, yet his real skill is in marketing.

Charles Lipson

Playing with fire

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.

Toby Young

Make America Normal Again

To win in November, Trump should seek inspiration from President Alexander Lukashenko, the 65-year-old autocrat who has ruled Belarus since 1994. He trounced his liberal opponent in the presidential election in August with 80 percent of the vote. I’m not suggesting Trump emulate Lukashenko’s methods. Among other things, the man dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’ disqualified his three main political opponents at the beginning of the race, imprisoning two of them. He has never won an election with less than 75 percent of the vote, although none have been found to be free and fair by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an election monitoring body.

Bridget Phetasy

Why I won’t vote

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece titled ‘The battle cry of the politically homeless’ in which I lamented the toxic tribalism that’s infecting our politics and pitting neighbor against neighbor, sister against brother, parent against child. ‘Democracy doesn’t die in the darkness; it dies when politics become team sports, in full view of a bloodthirsty, cheering electorate.’ At the end I wondered, ‘We will return to the Dark Ages or we will evolve. Is that likely? I dunno. Have we evolved that much from the Roman Colosseum? Barreling into 2020 — it doesn’t seem like it.’ In the last year, the globe has been ravaged by a pandemic that put the ineptitude of American institutions and leaders on display for the world.

Solveig Lucia Gold

American Athens

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The future of populist conservatism

Laramie, Wyoming William Kristol, a Grand Poobah of neoconservatism, is leaving the Republican party to join the donkeys of the Democratic one. As Dorothy Parker remarked on being told that Calvin Coolidge had died, ‘How could they tell?’ Mr Kristol, of course, was never a Republican to begin with, only a conservative Democrat. Still, it is true that with Donald Trump’s election and ascendance to the Oval Office, the Republican party has changed considerably, at least for now. So has American conservatism. Whether or not the GOP remains the party of Trump after he steps down from the White House or is dragged out of it by his gilded forelock, conservatism in this country will continue to be Trumpist, and probably for a very long time.

Robert D. Kaplan

The return of the Blob

For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism. Not only were Democrats barred from the Trump administration, but so were the most talented of Republicans who, having assumed Trump would lose, declared themselves in opposition to him and thus disqualified themselves from work in his administration.

Amber Duke

Is Stephen Miller pursuing policy — or power?

What does Stephen Miller really want? His immigration obsession has shaped some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive policies, and he has clawed his way from speechwriter to senior policy adviser. But is his dream a restrictionist immigration agenda or, as sources close to the White House tell me, the pursuit of power, not policy? Is he taking Lady Macbeth’s advice and playing ‘the innocent flower’ to mask ‘the serpent under’t’? Miller is a true believer in the Trump agenda: they say he even praises the President in private. That might explain his survival in an administration with a turnover rate higher than that of a cheap motel.

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