Plans A through F

Michael Anton's astute political analysis is always worth reading. This time he writes about why "They Can't Let Him Back In."  And you know very well who he is.

Anton writes:

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

To the point that Anton makes about what might be called a country club war on Trump's base -- and Neo's related thoughts about the January 6 subcommittee's quixotic quest for something to charge Trump with legally -- think of Rodney Dangerfield's character in Caddyshack: Like Donald Trump, Dangerfield's character ("Al Czervik") has money enough for membership at the Bushwood Country Club, but other golfers consider him uncouth. Attitude-wise, Czervik, like Trump, has more in common with Bill Murray's gopher-hunting groundskeepr than with the other people in his social class.

I'm tickled by that fact that Anton uses a nautical analogy near the end of his essay. I had a similar thought (seawater on the brain?) for this recent piece published by The Locke Institute's Carolina Journal, except that I was looking at progressive reaction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, rather than political machinery prepping for the 2024 presidential election.