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On Tom Nichols and politics as spectacle


Last night, Governor Tim Walz debated Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, a man who lies as well as his Sith master.

Gov. Walz is not a natural debater. And unlike Trump, Vance isn't gone mentally, and wasn't going to be pummeled into submission the way Trump was by Vice Presiden Kamala Harris. But Gov. Walz got in his points, and Vance was generally perceived to be a smarmy liar.

However, we live in an era where style is greatly valued over substance, even if that style is one of unceasing lies and obfuscations.

Enter Never Trumper Tom Nichols. If one read his timeline on Twitter, one would think that Gov. Walz was a drooling idiot in the face of Vance's easy lies. Here are some of his observations:
And so on, and so on.

People like Nichols, who have never run for office, who snipe from the sidelines incessantly, are part of why politics are so degraded in this country. They see Vance's lies as effective, and Gov. Walz's honesty as weakness. Nichols spent the entirety of the Obama Administration excoriating him as weak and ineffectual. He blocked me on my previous Twitter account. He may hate Trump, but he's no friend to us. Like the Berniestas, he has mountains of advice for Democrats, but still maintains that he's "non-partisan", as if feigning neutrality is a good thing. It's not. It's sneering from the sidelines. And his opinion is as informed and valid as, well, this blog writer's.

While Nichols was fretting, the exchange where Vance refused to say that Trump lost in 2020 is becoming the takeaway from the debate:
That was an error forced by a man that Nichols says missed so many opportunities. Because, perhaps, in this instance, the substance of a man refusing to admit that his running-mate lost the previous election matters more than a serial liar's glibness.

Quite simply, Never Trumpers like Nichols favor spectacle over substance. They think they know best how to defeat Trumpism. Which is odd, as they allowed Trumpism to subsume their party without a shot fired. It's not as if Trump had to fight his way into taking over the Republican Party; the party gave itself to him, freely, with wanton abandon. It gleefully was grabbed by the pussy, and asked for more. These people couldn't save their own party, but now have thoughts on what Democrats must do. And if Democrats ignore them, then they're fools dooming us to a thousand-year Reich.

These are impotent people, bereft of a party, not welcomed into our party. All they can do is cavil and kvetch. They're not Democrats; they're Republicans kicked out of the home they had known for decades. They can't shake that good old GOP yearning for authoritarianism. Because make no mistake: the desire for a strongman is a through-theme of Republican ideology since the days of President Franklin Roosevelt. We saw it in how Joe McCarthy became de facto GOP leader during the early 1950s Red Scare. We saw it with Richard Nixon and his welcoming disaffected Dixiecrats. We saw it with the hagiography which grew around Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump is merely the logical conclusion to this cacophonous concerto. We should keep men and women like Nichols at arm's length. They are useful as temporary allies. But know that they had no problem with horrendous GOP policies before Trump turned the party into a personality cult. They were fine with a personality cult around the deified Ronald Reagan, even bruiting repealing the 22nd Amendment so that he could run for a third term. They don't hate authoritarianism; they merely want it on their own terms.

Tim Walz did fine. JD Vance is an incorrigible liar. And Tom Nichols needs to figure out why neither Republicans nor Democrats want what he's selling

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