By: Damon Linker
Why aren't conservative intellectuals disgusted with the GOP?
Partisan liberals might consider it an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as a conservative intellectual. Indeed, I used to be one.
Though I've moved away from the right since those days, I maintain many friendships with highly educated, impressively smart conservatives. Their number is many, their intellects mighty. This column is directed at them, because there's something I genuinely don't understand.
I can't grasp how an intelligent, well-read man or woman, regardless of ideological commitments, could watch the Republican debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night and not come away disgusted. I certainly did. It was a familiar feeling.
I began to experience it regularly in the run-up to the Iraq War. That disgust propelled my leftward migration over the following years, and it's intensified since the rise of the populist insurgency known as the Tea Party.
Somehow, my friends on the right don't seem to hear anything troubling, anything intellectually offensive emanating from the mouths of the Republican candidates. And I just don't get it.
I don't just mean the obvious stuff. You know, the unprovoked and petty anti-intellectualism of Marco Rubio denigrating philosophers by contrasting them unfavorably to welders (and presumably people who work at other skilled trades as well). Or Rand Paul's nonsensical, conspiratorial musings about the Federal Reserve. Or Donald Trump's xenophobic promises to build a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and round up and deport eleven million undocumented immigrants. (If they're undocumented, how will we find them? House to house sweeps by armed agents of the state through poor and heavily Latino neighborhoods? That's either absurdly unfeasible, as Jeb Bush and John Kasich pointed out, or a program for American fascism.)
And neither do I merely mean the dumpsters full of dubious assertions that are by now so deeply embedded in conservative ideology that every candidate tosses them out without making even the most cursory effort to bolster them with facts. Like the claim that America's relatively slow growth rate in recent years is a product of our tax burden (when in fact tax rates were considerably higher during the high-growth decades following World War II). Or the related contention that taxes can be drastically cut without massively increasing the budget deficit because the cuts will spur such enormous growth that tax revenues will actually increase. Or the endlessly repeated alliterative vow that ObamaCare will be "repealed and replaced," while neglecting to admit, let alone defend, the fact that the replacements favored by the GOP candidates would almost certainly leave millions of those currently covered by the Affordable Care Act without insurance.
Actually, that's more than enough to leave me pretty disgusted.
And yet, at Tuesday's debate, there were so many other things that got me going more than usual. I'm talking about specific policy proposals that amounted to nothing more than transparent nonsense. Maybe a credulous viewer with no knowledge of history, public policy, economics, or how the government actually works could respond to these proposals with a nod and a cheer. But informed viewers? Educated men and women of the right? Conservative intellectuals? They should know better — and know enough to realize when they're being sold, or helping to sell, a bucket of BS.
The appropriate response to someone attempting to turn you into the victim of a hoax or a swindle is anger. It's insulting to be treated like a sucker, a chump. And yet, my conservative intellectual friends appear not to be bothered in the least.
And that I just don't understand.
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Why aren't conservative intellectuals disgusted with the GOP?
Stop talking about each other and address the topic.