"Manifestly without merit"

"Manifestly without merit" is what the South Carolina Supreme Court called the arguments Mark Meadows put forth to avoid testifying before the Fulton County grand jury investigating Donald Trump's attempt to disrupt the presidential vote in Georgia.

But really, that phrase can be applied in totality to modern conservative thought.

Never-Trumpers can fume that Trump is "not conservative". They can say the same about the likes of Nick Fuentes, the Nazi with a Spanish surname. They can say the same about Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Steve Bannon, or any of the others who inhabit the modern conservative movement. They can deny them, but they're wrong.

These people are conservatism in America. And their ideological bedmates are conservatism in the rest of the Western world. If conservative thought ever had any merit—and one can argue both sides of the coin—it certainly does not now. The people which someone like David Frum disparages are, in fact, conservative. That conservatism has gone off the rails is neither here nor there; that it has been captured by the people this country defeated in World War Two is immaterial. The likes of Dinesh D'Souza are the motive intellectual force of modern conservatism. The bigotry of Viktor Orban is conservative orthodoxy. Vladimir Putin is a hero to the right not because he's a communist. There is no getting around that, no matter how much one applies "no true Scotsman" to the issue.

Yesterday we also saw the conviction of Oath Keepers' leader Stuart Rhodes for seditious conspiracy. Rhodes is not some fringe figure. He has over the years, especially under Trump, become one of the faces of conservatism. Its violent, genocidal face. Greene wants him and all the other January 6th coup plotters and shock troops to be freed. And a large part of the modern right agrees with her. One can say that it's not "true conservatism", but that is neither here nor there. So-called "mainstream" conservatives made a devil's bargain with the far right, as far back as Joe McCarthy. Barry Goldwater was not an aberration in 1964, but a prologue. Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 by averring that the South would rise again. They allowed religious end-time hucksters in for their reliable voting bloc. What the right is now has had a long gestation, its trajectory clear for decades. To say now that the likes of Fuentes are not welcome in the party is the definition of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. The GOP could have spurned the support of racist white Dixiecrats; instead the powers that be saw them as their ticket to that fabled permanent majority. Much like the Weimar conservatives who thought they could control Hitler, and replace him if necessary, these "good, decent" conservatives now quite predictably find themselves on the outside, the monster they fed turning on them. They dare not launch a counterattack; it's too late. They don't have the numbers; they're the minority. They can wail and bemoan, but the Boeberts and the Jim Jordans are the GOP now. And they're not even efficient fascists; the rollout of the coup attempt was a farce from start to end. The participants and ringleaders had camera crews trailing them, or recorded themselves on their phones trying to overthrow the government. Thank God for American narcissism. 

Manifestly without merit. Hopefully this will be this iteration of conservatism's epitaph.

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