"Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed" (Digby Parton), Christian Right version

It's been typical since 1992 that Republican voters began repudiating former Republican Presidents as soon as they were out of office. Trump, of course, is leaving under far more controversial circumstances than Bush I or Bush II.

Digby Parton has been saying for a long time that in the Republican worldview, "Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed." She also notes, "And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal." Political Religion Hullabaloo 02/20/2006.

(I got a twinge of nostalgia seeing that post again, coming as it does from the days when blogging still had a "insurgent" vibe about it.)

I was reminded of this reading this column by Bonnie Kristian, Humoring the President Was Not Harmless 01/11/2021, in the longtime conservative American evangelical Christianity Today. Kristian points out why someone could think from a conservative Christian religious-political that support of Trump looks regrettable in retrospect:

The madness in Washington last week was not created ex nihilo. It is the due result of five years of humoring deception, of falsely believing that truth could be brought about by lies. It is what happens when you embrace a president who is dishonest in the little things, and the big things, and just about everything. It is what happens when you “call evil good and good evil” for the sake of political convenience or power (Isa. 5:20). It is what happens when warnings about the importance of character are ignored. It is what happens when those who cautioned their fellow evangelicals against backing Trump—because he has lived a very public life of gaudy rapacity, vainglory, cruelty, dishonesty, and lust—are attacked and dismissed as “liberals” or accused of insufficient care for the unborn.

What we saw in Washington last Wednesday is what happens when the president insists he won an election he lost and, instead of telling him and the American people the truth, his allies go along with it. It is what happens when they file lawsuit after lawsuit without a whit of merit, pushing legal claims so bad they are dismissed in court after court, by judge after judge—including judges nominated by Trump himself.

It is what happens when they prioritize power over honesty and cosset mass delusion, even in Jesus’ name. It is what happens after two months of the president and his associates telling millions of disappointed, frightened, angry people that they were cheated, that the foundation of our representative government was undermined, that they really ought to do something about it, that maybe that something should be violent, and that they should “never concede.”

Unfortunately, this article's argument fit fairly easily into the "conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed" framework.

The Christian Right in the form we know it today first emerged during the Carter Administration and was instrumental in unseating a surprising number of Democratic Senators in 1978 and enthusiastically backed Ronald Reagan in 1980. Voters who identify as white evangelicals are the most important segment of the Republican vote, and have been for decades.

I haven't checked on Bonnie Kristian's public record on politics during the last decade or so. But the fact that people identifying in some way with a Christian Right brand of religion are now saying that, oh, Trump was a sinner with flaws, and, gosh, maybe supporting him enthusiastically wasn't the best idea doesn't actually mean a lot.

Republicans across the board pull this trick as a matter of course when their Republican President loses an election. It's standard procedure.

Another take on this from Michael Brown comes off as much more crassily cynical (Did we sell our souls by voting for Trump? Christian Post 01/14/2021):

Did we sell our souls in doing so? Did we compromise our values in the process?

For many of us, the answer is no, and we don’t need to go on an apology tour for our vote. Even if some of our friends were more prescient than we were, seeing that things would end badly, we acted with sincerity before God and man. And if in the years ahead, our worst fears are realized and our country lurches even further to the far left, we will remember why we voted as we did. [my emphasis]

Then he continues with his own version of "conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed."

In a two-party system especially, there are many ways that people can plausibly claim they were voting for "the lesser of two evils". But that also makes it easy for people who enthusiastically backed a candidate to claim afterward that they never really thought that much of the person and go on to the next heroic True Conservative who will one day have to be repudiated in a similar way.