#WTH: The virtues of excommunication

Political, that is.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have always had fringy types. While social media and the internet have made the exploits of loudmouthed political weirdos and creeps common knowledge, the reality of history is that politics has always been a magnet for people with great vision, meh people looking for power, and some people who are not simply strange, but extreme. What it seems that we lack in this modern era is a gatekeeper, someone who can stand athwart the party and say, “Stop.”

This lament is not new. Every time a different iteration of a political party appears, establishment types bemoan the shift to the right, the left, the center — any change at all. That’s not what I’m talking about, and this isn’t a plea to return the GOP to the days of George H.W. Bush or the Ds to Bill Clinton. Nor is this a case to rewind to PT, pre-Trump, necessarily.

One more throat-clearing point before I get to the heart of the piece. People who enter politics, whether for the wrong reason or the right, are subjecting themselves to the will of the American people. It’s for that reason that I am less sympathetic than some to the whining about how awful Trump is, or, frankly, how awful Kamala Harris is. (OK, more sympathetic to how awful KH is because she isn’t actually the people’s choice; she’s the party’s choice. But that’s another article.) Donald Trump won the election in 2016 for a reason, and he’s the Republicans’ man for a reason as well. Many were not satisfied with what the party establishment's greybeards were offering. Fair enough.

All this said, Donald Trump is no gatekeeper, no guardian at the gates, and no tribune of the party per se. He’s about Donald Trump, and his judgment about people is… lousy. Yes, per the debate, he has fired a lot of people, but then again, a lot of people fired him in 2020. And now he seems determined to double down on some of the more loathsome elements of the Right. But, but Kamala, I hear you saying.

Kamala too has accommodated some of the most execrebable elements of her political movement, and has done so all the while pretending to be a combination of Betty Crocker, Hillary Clinton, and Beyonce. (Um, no thanks.) So let’s talk about the execrable elements.

I am a conservative, and as Marc so often says, I believe in policing my own. That doesn’t mean I’m handing a pass to the other side. It means my side is more likely to listen, and for me, the stakes are higher because I don’t want to see the far Left ascend to the commanding heights of government. So let’s talk for a moment about Laura Loomer. And Tucker Carlson. And their importance in Trump-world.

It’s no news flash that Loomer, the Trump-whisperer-cum-debate-partner-cum-Trump-Force-One-denizen is a total and complete fruitloop. She is a self-proclaimed "proud Islamophobe," a dumb bigot who posted that if Kamala is elected "the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center." She has worked for Class A nutjob Alex Jones (he of the Sandy-Hook-didn’t-happen lawsuit); like Jones, she often alleges school shootings are staged; didn’t like Lindsay Graham’s criticism of her bigotry, and called him a closeted homosexual; and there’s so, so much more. Those are just recent highlights. Google them if you don’t believe me, I’m not linking to her foul posts.

And then there’s Tucker Carlson. I am old enough to remember him when he was a kid. His dad was an anti-Communist freedom lover and a Reagan appointee. And Tucker used to be a solid and smart conservative of the more mainstream variety. Then he became Trumpy (though his emails at Fox suggest this was a pose: “I hate him passionately,”) which is not terribly shocking. It’s ok to follow the crowd; it’s ok to evolve as well. But then he got axed at Fox and lost the plot.

He went to Moscow, interviewed Putin, and suggested that in many ways, Russia was a better place to be than the United States of America. That was bad, and in too many ways, ceded a platform for manipulative propaganda for Putin. Nonetheless, this was near the top of the escalator for Carlson. Most recently, he decided to share his platform with a man whom he labeled “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”. This self-appointed “historian” has praised Hitler. During Tucker’s broadcast, he vilified Churchill, insisted that the Nazis did not plan the Holocaust, and claimed that Hitler had to act because Churchill wouldn’t work out “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”

Once upon a time, as my AEI colleague Matt Continetti has recounted beautifully in his book, The Right, William F. Buckley struggled with the question of what to do with dangerous cranks at the heart of his movement. Ultimately, writes Matt of the increasingly unhinged anti-Communist conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism of the John Birch Society’s founder Robert W. Welch, Jr, Buckley took a stand:

The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republican party and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different impractical emphasis from their own.

Barry Goldwater followed.

I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-communism in the United States would be to resign. We cannot allow the emblem of your responsibility to attach to the conservative banner.

This is leadership.

Buckley wrestled similarly with his own decades later when Pat Buchanan, a smarter Darryl Cooper with a genuine political pedigree, was rising in the political ranks, running for President. Pat Buchanan didn’t like Jews, and Buckley called him out for it:

I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it."

Buckley’s courage in calling out Buchanan (and fellow writer Joe Sobran) for antisemitism was the beginning of the end of Buchanan’s rise.

I asked Matt whether there was any real analog on the Left to Buckley’s morally driven effort to purge the worst of the worst from the Right. He reminded me of The Committee for the Free World’s break with Stalinism. More remember Bill Clinton's “Sister Souljah moment,” when the former president condemned the anti-White racism of the eponymous hip-hop artist in 1992. Doubtless, there are a few more examples, though finding such moments of courage — who will stand against the antisemitism of Ilhan Omar? who will call out Kamala Harris for her antisemitism-driven decision not to pick Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro as running mate? — is not easy.

Suffice it to say, neither party now has a gatekeeper of the kind necessary to excommunicate the Tuckers, the Rashidas, the Laura Loomers, or the vast left-wing leadership machinery of DEI, antisemitism, and bigotry.

One understands why the notion of an oracular voice that can affect the excommunication of any individual feels somehow undemocratic. But democracy has been the instrument of the rise of all too many anti-democratic forces — ahem, Hitler — and the truth is that having a universally respected icon who can at once bless or curse those who transgress the outermost fringes of the norms is not a terrible idea. The problem is that no such single person exists.

Our society has transformed since the Birchers were defenestrated and that Sister Souljah moment was 32 years ago. There are no oracular writers on the Right or on the Left; there is no “newspaper of record.” We have curated ourselves into a set of mutually exclusive political fiefdoms, on the Right, abandoning the idea that expert opinion and intellectualism are things to be respected; and on the Left, fetishizing elitism and hyper-intellectualism to the point that the erstwhile party of the little guy better represents the views from Harvard and Columbia than from Canton, Ohio.

Nonetheless, there are such things as norms for Left and Right, although they are regularly and triumphally transgressed. For the most part, however, Americans are good and decent people who neither admire Hitler nor Hamas. And it is not too damn much to ask that our leading political candidates have the courage to call out their own bottom dwellers.

I am not certain how we renew our sense of decency, or whether we can ever again crown a gatekeeper of the Buckley-esque variety. But I am certain that remaining silent is not an option. What do you think?