My Conservative Masquerade

The WSJ Boosts the Unconservative Trump

After cancelling my subs to the NYT and Washington Post in disgust, about a month ago, I thought if I’m going to be fed bullshit, let it be high quality bullshit. So I subbed to the Wall Street Journal, which came as a package deal with Barrons, Investors Business Daily, and MarketWatch. Plus it was cheap—just $1.50 a week until April, when I will cancel to avoid the price increase. Some time back I got the WSJ weekend print edition. I avoided the idiot columnists but enjoyed the book review section. There was one political reviewer whose reviews were reliably obnoxious, but the rest were pretty good, including the lead reviewer Tunku Varadarajan, who all things considered is even-handed and moderate.

The WSJ now has an editorial, unsigned, asking “How Risky Is a Trump Second Term?” basically endorsing the great orange Satan. I thought I should criticize this piece, but from its own conservative viewpoint.

The argument is animated by aversion to “the Left.” Kamala is said to be a California liberal. Surely the editors realize this is an exaggeration, said for rhetorical effect. More specifically, they speak of a “spending-fueled inflation that shrank real wages.” For conservatives, this is more or less an article of faith. We can pass by the premise that they actually care about wages. In any case, it is disputed by a wide range of economists, who instead point to disruptions on the supply side due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. There is also the little fact that by some measures, wages adjusted for inflation are up, compared to the halcyon, final days of Trump’s first term. Moreover, if spending fuels inflation (due to deficit finance), so do tax cuts.

More interesting is the editor’s alarm about “adversaries on the march” and “Trump’s praise for dictators.” Obviously their candidate is allied with these same adversaries. How do they get past that? They claim “enemies stayed quiet” and “Iran was kept in a box.” This “quiet” included Russia’s presence in Ukraine and the point that renouncing the deal with Iran gave a green light to their nuclear development.

The gaslighting on foreign policy is remarkable. And these are the smarter guys on the Right.

After brushing off the foreign policy contradictions and the “appalling” conduct on January 6th, 2021, the WSJ goes on to worry about Trump’s weak attachment to conservative economic tenets: free trade, regressive taxation, and a renunciation of any sort of industrial policy. The problem is, for the conservative viewpoint, that Trump’s attachment to tariffs, selective tax cuts, and individualized, personalized deal-making with corporations, all stem from his TV-based, self-conception as Mr Big, sitting at the head of the big table, first among equals, dictating ingenious strategems that bring great corporations to heel and intimidate foreign adversaries.

How conservatives focused on their own notion of the national interest buy this, I fail to understand. I don’t think it’s racism. That’s in the mass base. I suppose it is to stay onside for future influence until this whirlwind of chaos and viciousness passes on.