Being a Conservative or Republican Has Always Been Cringey

T he writer formerly known as Allahpundit, Nick Catoggio, takes to the Dispatch to ask “Aren’t You Embarrassed?”

He means, by the Trump-era GOP, by the fact of belonging in some way to a political party or movement that associated with Trump, who last week associated himself with Kanye West — the obviously needful-of-mental-health-treatment rapper mogul who has turned antisemitic in recent weeks — and Nick Fuentes, a far-right, antisemitic sh**-stirrer.

My answer: no more than usual.

Frankly the question is kind of weird. On the first level, I’m not embarrassed by sins I did not commit — only the ones I have. I never voted for Trump, though I gave it a little thought in 2020. I remained critical of him throughout his presidency, as I remained critical of George W. Bush and Barack Obama throughout theirs.

Catoggio runs through the list of things to be embarrassed about, including Mike Lindell ranting about voting machines and hawking pillows, and Sean Spicer bragging falsely about Trump’s inauguration crowds, and the trashiness of Turning Point USA. All in support of his thesis that “it’s become immensely embarrassing to be a conservative in the United States.”

Which brings me to the second problem. Why the present tense? It’s always been embarrassing. Probably my first political memory is of the vice president from the “Stupid Party” misspelling the word “potato” in front of middle schoolers.

I mean, where were you before 2016? You didn’t cringe during the Clint Eastwood thing? Were you not embarrassed by Senator Wide Stance? By the K-Street Gang making money on both sides of casino scams? By the congressional-page sex scandal? You realize that before Tucker Carlson was on Fox News — a man who, whatever you think of his politics, seems to actually read books — he was preceded by Bill O’Reilly, a best-selling author who gives no impression of having read the books he is said to have authored. In the years before Trump conservative media was awash in scuzzy scams — whether selling boner pills, gold, or reverse mortgages.

I can assure you that whatever is humiliating about Turning Point USA, it was fully in evidence in the bowels of CPAC years before, somewhere in between Flipper the Dolphin and the commemorative-coin people. You know all those horribly embarrassing fund-raising emails you’ve been getting? Well, it was conservative direct-mail fund-raisers who pioneered the paranoid, overly familiar, hands-in-your-pocket style of buck-raking. I’ve always found it distasteful in the extreme.

You want cringe? I’ve been a reporter and commentator on this side for a few decades. Ever go to Christians United for Israel’s major conferences in Washington, D.C.? You can watch Republican after Republican suck up to the grossest oil-slick televangelists while Pentecostal musicians mishandle Jewish shofars.

The conservative movement was home to men such as Rush Limbaugh, who taunted the president’s preteen daughter as a “dog,” and a great deal of the organized Right that is too sniffy to deal with Donald Trump called that pill-popping maniac on the microphone “an intellectual.” Yes, it’s awful that Trump dined with those guys. It was also awful when Ronald Reagan got guffaws out of Nixon by joking that African delegations to the United Nations were “monkeys” unused to wearing shoes.

But there were deeper embarrassments. As bad as Trump has been — and it’s been real bad — nothing he’s done, not even his infamous Thanksgiving-week dinner with antisemites, was as appalling as watching George W. Bush joke at the 2005 White House Correspondents’ Dinner about how he seemed to have misplaced the weapons of mass destruction, the casus belli for the war in Iraq. “Nope, not here!” I don’t care what unnamed intelligence officials allege that Donald Trump said about veterans when no one else could hear him — nothing short of spitting or open vandalism of their graves could equal the disgrace W committed that night.

Were you embarrassed when a political party nominally dedicated to the eternal things became possessed by a utopian crusading impulse for global democracy and then almost instantly crashed into the reality of having become an apologist for the reintroduction of torture as a weapon of war?

I don’t say any of this to demoralize anyone. Quite the opposite. The Republican Party has been an embarrassment to itself from the very beginning, when Lincoln was so overwhelmed by the office-seekers his campaign had ginned up that he threw up his hands and declared there were “too many pigs for the teats.” Trump is no Lincoln, I agree. And he’s no Reagan either; Reagan’s three Supreme Court appointments weren’t ready to overturn Roe.

I’m a conservative because my intellectual convictions and predispositions group me with the Right — at least a certain strain of it. In a democracy, that means being, in some strange way, in the company of scores of millions of people, many of whom find each other intolerable bores, embarrassments, or alien in some way.

You can’t quite get away from it just by joining the other side. You can run away from the closet-case foot-fetish megachurch pastor/lobbyist, and you’ll wind up with the bullying trans-bureaucrat/luxury-luggage thief. That’s the glory and shame of democracy. If you want to feel good about the political company you keep, join some august court of aristocrats. Until then, America is still the country of crazy frontier people, wild religious enthusiasts, cheapjack showmen, doomsdayers selling gold, and gold merchants selling doomsday.

It would be cool if the Right were cool. But it never was. And I’m over it anyway.