"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.

Rick Perlstein, impeachment, and invoking ideals of the past

This is an informed commentary from historian Rick Perlstein, who specializes in the history of the conservative movement in the US, Rick Perlstein on the History Behind the Impeachment Inquiry Amanpour and Company 11/15/2019:

This is a notable excerpt:

... one of the things that Nancy Pelosi who's done some great things over the years and I respect her a heck of a lot has said is that she, when she was talking about how, you know, maybe Trump would just impeach himself and we didn't want to push this thing, the only way she wanted to pursue an impeachment inquiry is that they could somehow convince Republicans with the weight of the facts, because otherwise it would be too divisive.

Well, you know, the civil rights movement was divisive.

The suffrage movement was divisive.

Justice is divisive.

You know why it's divisive?

People who don't want justice are going to make us think and I think we're in one of the exitential movements for the nation where we're facing a choice.

Either we get own to brass tacks and fight for the values that the nation was founded on or we worry about divisiveness. [my emphasis]

Rick's reference to "the values that the nation was founded on" especially caught my attention, because he's using the very flawed past to point to shared aspirational ideals that can and should be applied to the very flawed present.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was great at doing that, on polemical, political, religious, and philosophical levels. Franklin Rossevelt's famous 1936 "Rendezvous with Destiny" speech is a classic example of invoking the struggles, aspirations, and accomplishments of the past to create a left-populist political framework. I'm continuously frustrated to see how difficult it seems to be the left and center-left to do that today, despite excellent models like MLK and FDR.

Since conservatism tends to look to restoring the past or preserving existing conditions, or at least to "make haste slowly" toward progress, it may be inevitable that the right will be more comfortable praising an idealized past than the left. But that doesn't mean people on the left have to just give up on the effort!

Frances Coppola on a sentimental justification for bad public policy

Frances Coppola took a look recently at the reality of family care for dependent elderly relatives in A lack of compassion Coppola Comment 02/23/2019, with special reference to Thatcherite conservative dogma in Britain:

The evidence from around the world, throughout history, is that extended families don't support elderly relatives or their carers. Both the cared-for and the carer end up impoverished. In some cases, the elderly person is abused, neglected or abandoned.

Nor does relying on families to care for relatives reinforce social and community bonds, as Fraser imagines. Both the cared-for and the carer often feel socially isolated. Depression is common among unpaid family carers. Young carers, of whom there are many, can also find it difficult to continue in education, with devastating consequences for their future. Wrecking state and professional care services by slamming the door shut on immigration can only make matters worse for families with caring responsibilities.

This is a good example of how sentimental-sounding political rhetoric about the "traditional family" can serve as promotion for negligent, even cruel, public policies.