The Never-Trump Moral Choice and the Trajectory of Bulwark Conservatism

A thing spins out of control, but look who’s riding it.

I’m repeating myself a bit to get started, but I’ve been stuck for days on House Democrat Betty McCollum, whose words have dug into me like a tick:

A seventy year-old woman, who is both a longtime state and federal politician and a former high school social studies teacher, has asserted with confidence, in congressional debate, that warriors can’t make it home safely from the battlefield if their children can’t get publicly funded drugs and surgery to live as trans teens. When Congress funds pediatric castration and colon vaginoplasty for young boys, they’re winning wars. It’s the support our troops need! They can’t even serve without it!

“I said I sure hope my little boy is getting his vagina sewed in right now, sergeant!”

And it’s at least the tenth time this week that I’ve thought the Democratic establishment has just disappeared into its hall of mirrors, living so entirely in a set of performances and projections that it can’t see anything but the signs of its own performance. They occupy physical space — I’m told you can pass them on the sidewalk in their apparent human forms, though I have not yet dared to attempt it — but they don’t live in it. They live in a world of stranded symbols. You can read similar observations this week from Martin Gurri:

The political obsessions of the elites—open immigration, energy “transition,” race- and sex-based “equity”—are at best irrelevant to the public’s concerns, at worst highly unpopular. These pet projects can only be imposed from above as moral imperatives—as electoral issues, they are losers…

But if the Democrats and their institutional allies are no longer able to vilify populism, and at the same time are deprived of the progressive agenda, what is left for them to do or say? The catastrophic failure of the Biden-Harris experiment has brought elite politics to the edge of a stark ideological wilderness, where the only justification for power is the will to attain it.

We seem to be transitioning to a moment when everyone discovers that the “mainstream” formation of media plus academia plus Democratic officials is entering “a stark ideological wilderness.” See also this discussion: “It takes little imagination to recognize how brittle the progressive monolith has become.”

Living in locked compartments, the “mainstream” can’t seem to notice how astonishingly far it’s rocketing outside the mainstream. This Luigi kid may really be on to something, explain…United States Senators. Chris Murphy recently taped a talking-into-your-phone video like a TikTok kid, explaining in response to the murder of a CEO that private health insurance is inherently tainted by the presence of profit — the existence of which proves the moral degradation of a system. Did the almost-human Chris Murphy performance object think through the implications of a moral rejection of markets and profit? I don’t mean that as a real question.

The throttle is stuck. The Democratic mainstream is trending at increasing velocity toward trans everything, but especially trans children, a rejection of markets and private enterprise, and a willingness to really slow down and ponder the folk wisdom of people who shoot CEOs in the back. They’re out of their minds, and they have no idea. They’re not even being more careful about how they say anything.

And so I’ve been thinking constantly about this:

The cottage industry of true conservatives who bravely vote and speak only for Democrats in order to “save conservatism” — the Bulwark plus the “conservative” voices on the op-ed pages at the New York Times and the Washington Post, more or less, and the one idiot at The Atlantic, and I guess the Dispatch still exists but I don’t really want to check — seems to have placed a bet: that Trump would lose, and that they were aligning themselves with the winners, and that they would emerge with access to the winner’s circle as the patrons were opening the champagne. The maneuver smells transactional. Double this for the lawfare era, when that horrible orange devil was for sure going to prison.

The never-Trumpers got on the ride when the mainstream knowledge was that Trump was a farce, a loser, a passing fad; then they stayed on it, gleefully, when they knew his convictions would remove him from the stage forever, opening an era of permanent Democratic rule, with access to the royal banquet hall for “true conservative” gimps and clowns. Now we’re in a second and less polite Trump transition, while they’re locked in with Elizabeth Warren et al — trapped by the absurdity of keeping up this “true conservative” game as their patrons race into their decadent era. We’re true conservatives, so we stand with the Democratic, uh. Um.

I support the use of public funds to sexually transition children by drugging and cutting their healthy bodies, because I’m a true conservative.

I support the march to $50 trillion in federal debt, because I’m a true conservative.

I stand with the elected officials who denounce markets and profit, because I’m a true conservative.

I think DEI and trans inclusion is the most important focus for a trillion-dollar military that can’t beat the Houthis, because I’m a true conservative.

And on and on, into absurdity and irrelevance. I mean, into more absurdity and irrelevance.

The moral and intellectual derangement of the Democratic Party is, in the nearish term, the practical death of the “I’m voting for Harris” minstrel-conservatives, a mentally limited gang of Quisling truck stop prostitutes. They’ve yoked themselves to pending death. At some distant point, a nation that assumes the existence of a two-party system to make our politics work will have to drag the Democratic Party back toward something rhetorically middle-ish; the party won’t die, because we can’t admit to having a one-party state, so deranged-but-spoils-focused politicians will figure out how to not be open Jacobins. “I only want to sew fake vaginas into young boys a little bit,” or something.

But the never-Trump “Republicans” can’t make that rhetorical turn. They’ve locked themselves in. Their existence is opposition, ugly and constant and mindless, like the cackling of geese:

Go read their stuff. What are they for? They’re for this:

And this:

This is where their project goes: Trump appointed Tom Homan, Tom Homan is bad. Trump appointed Tulsi Gabbard, Tulsi Gabbard is bad. Check back tomorrow to find out who else is bad because Trump. By the way, true conservatives think Daniel Penny was being mean for no reason:

The Bulwark is dead, and all of its idiot sisters. They’re still moving a little bit, but whatever. Throw dirt into their grave and move on.