Pegggy Noonan - eyes wide shut

Add Peggy Noonan to the list of conservatives looking for fault in all the wrong places, thanks to an image of the Republican Party that just doesn't fit the facts.

Peggy remembers that the GOP of her younger years as a party that focused on regular people, "the party of Main Street."  Excuse me while I stop roaring with derisive laughter. In its earliest days, those days when it produced a singular man who helped lead his nation out of the scourge of slavery, maybe.  By the end of the 1800s, it was clearly the party of Wall Street, which is clearly remains today. 

On one point, she is absolutely correct.  During elections, the party has always presented itself as looking out for the disenfranchised who lack the wealth of the !% & the entitlement of the poor.  Politicians blatantly pandered to that base, with lots of talk about Main Street, but somehow pre-election promises were blithely abandoned once the last polling place closed. 

 

Peggy sees "GOP elites and intellectual cadres, ...the Beltway intelligentsia" as the cause that regular people find no longer pertinent.  She points - with a wildly inaccurate aim - at the Bush administration allowing "party intelligentsia to muscle critics & silence needed dissent, making the party narrower, more rigid and embittered."   
 
Fact check - a narrower, more rigid & embittered party didn't take root during Bush 43.  It was proudly planted over 20 years ago, since Newt Gingrich & 
Dick Armey penned The Contract For America & spelled out for all Republican legislators & staff that the only acceptable way to respond to Democrats was with disrespect & derision.  

Yes, that rigid divide has become more unbending, with the introduction of "purity" tests & primarying anyone the base didn't consider conservative enough.  It's not the "elites & intelligentsia that muscled dissent, but Tea Party members who savaged careers with the RINO label, who gave the boot to anyone who didn't rate high enough on their scale of party purity.  The people who pushed moderates out of office & welcomed only the most ideologically narrow.  

I almost gasped with shock when Peggy shared a story about being buttonholed by a mega wealthy man who was upset at something she'd written.  She seems to see him as an example of what has lead to her party's myopia  -  "I felt in a sharp new way that my criticisms of the donor class had been right.  Inevitably they see to their own enthusiasms & policies priorities.  This was how the GOP became the party of We Don't Care What Americans Think About illegal Immigration."

 

Reading those two sentences, I began to wonder what in the blazes Peggy was writing about.  And where has she been for the past forty years.  

Ms. Noonan finds great hope in the Journal of American Greatness,  "a sophisticated, rather brilliant and anonymous website that is using this Trumpian moment to break out of the enforced conservative orthodoxy of the past 15 years... Its contributors ask questions that need asking and make critiques that sting."

The blog believes that Reagan was totally on the right track in everything he did & it supports the Trumpian ideals of secured borders, economic nativisim, interests-based foreign policy, and "above all judging every government action through a single lens: does this help or harm Americans?"  

The writers at JAG are brilliant, interesting writers.  However, I am at a loss as to how they are going to make their ideals translate into workable realities.  Consider just one paragraph:

For one might question Trump’s style, Trump’s motives, Trump’s record, Trump’s temperament, character, and Trump’s ‘proposals’ (to which we give quotation marks as they seem to be either off-the-cuff suggestions more than proposals or bombastically stated proposals of conventional wisdom ... or rehashings of health policy talking points generated at the AEI and Heritage Foundation). But it is much harder to criticize Trump the critic.

Okaaaaayyyyy...  Lucullus & Plautus seem to agree it's sensible to question Trump's style, motives, record, temperament, character -and- "proposals" (which they presume "to be either off-the-cuff suggestions more than proposals ~or~ bombastically stated proposals of conventional wisdom... ~or~ rehashings of health policy talking points generated at the AEI & Heritage Foundation").  All that, which should disqualify him as a presidential candidate to even a marginally reasonable mind, they brush aside because he stands shoulders about all others when it comes to being a critic, in which he singularly excels.


Peggy, you wound me.  I admired you so much when you were a young, brilliant speech writer for Ronald Reagan.  There you were, in the inner circle of power, showing everyone what could be achieved.  What does it say that you believe a person can be totally unqualified to sit in the same office as President Reagan yet be elected on the basis of his willingness to be an oversized, loud-mouthed critic?

 

 

 

JAG - and I assume Peggy - are thrilled to find in Donald Trump someone who calls out "both the foreign policy and economic policy of the post-Cold War United States. Trump’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy is probably his boldest and most original political gambit." 

 

The JAG bloggers are particularly over-the-moon that Trump calls out the 1973 invasion of Iraq as a mistake. They do realize that President Obama agrees with them, that he voted against it as a senator?  

 

They find sense in Trump's reasoning - because Hussein “was a 10 at catching terrorists,” that he believes the war was lost because we “didn’t take the oil”.  Oh, they acknowledge this is seriously muddled, but they brush off that, too.  

 

Why do they support Trump?  Because he "speaks to a more general critique that most Americans have come to intuitively understand but which no one has dared articulate."  He appeals to their gut, their intuition - reason has no place here, thank you.  Please set it aside with the rest of so many clearly outdated assumptions.

 

"In claiming that America imprudently attacked the enemy of its enemy and got nothing in return, (Trump) is conducting the discourse surrounding American foreign policy on an altogether different, and more solid, basis than it has been conducted at least by the last three U.S. administrations – even if he is doing so using facts and logical leaps that are sometimes suspect or wrong."

Excuse me, Peggy - you don't have a problem with that closing thought?  Seriously?

 

If I was shocked & dismayed with how the GOP base has acted over the past eight years, reading Peggy's column & checking out the Journal of American Greatness leaves me quaking in my boots for their sheer dim wittery.  It's one thing to think that Peggy - one of the Beltway intelligentsia she derides - is blaming everyone else for the fine mess in which her party finds itself.  It's another to think she is encouraged by the rise of a blog that acknowledges every terrifying aspect of Donald Trump, but balances all those negatives with his willingness to act as critic, even if he does "so using facts & logical leaps that are sometimes suspect or even wrong."  

I started writing this posting with the thought that Peggy Noonan was simply pinning the blame for the fall of a literate Republican base & the rise of an ideology that makes sense of Donald Trump on Bush 43, a president true conservatives never considered one of their own.  I saw her, a woman I've admired for years, as simply having eyes wide shut.  

Now, having written my piece, experienced her pinning blame on the wealthy, the powerful, the GOP elites & Beltway intelligentsia, am confused.  She weirdly seems to see herself as a JAG wanna-be rather than a card-carrying member of the very political 1% she so clearly scorns for leading her party down such a compromised path.  Turns out it's not a matter of "eyes wide shut," but instead a tragic case of apparent pathological self loathing.