The New Right’s Stasi Fantasy

Politics today is a new brand of performative art. With the rise of social media and the ability of politicians to create viral videos, snarky tweets, and other red meat content for the politically addicted, it’s no wonder we have a barely functioning federal government. Why attend boring committee hearings, mark up legislation, do constituent outreach, debate policies, and propose legislation when tweeting and making Instagram videos are so much more fun? Congress has become merely another platform for niche celebrities.

For the life of me, I still cannot comprehend the unwavering loyalty so many on the right show towards Donald Trump. Yes, he won a fluke election in 2016 against the best possible candidate for him, Hillary Clinton. No one likes her. Outside of what he could do in four years (which most Republicans would have done anyway), he became a three-time loser. The GOP lost the House in 2018. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his stupefyingly ridiculous crusade to claim no one could trust the electoral process in Georgia cost Republicans the Senate. Do you want someone to blame for the American Rescue Plan and the lousy spending bill Democrats rammed through via reconciliation? Blame the former president.

Nearly every problem the man has is the result of a self-inflicted wound. I’ve lived across the Hudson River my entire life. I am old enough to have watched that charlatan rise through the ranks of the New York City elite in the early 1980s to the point where he became a pop culture sensation, meriting mentions on television shows and in the movies. He never cared about anyone or anything beyond himself. We’re talking about a guy who created fictitious publicists (John Miller and John Barron) to promote himself. In the late 80s and early 90s, Trump wanted nothing more than to appear on Page 6 of the New York Post.

He’s not a leader. Yet, some people out there behave as if they’d take a bullet for the guy. Would he do the same? Not a chance. He’d be Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone, holding up a baby in front of him for protection.

That’s why the completely over-the-top freakout regarding Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home getting searched by the FBI is so bizarre. The “new right,” as I suppose it is called (it is almost entirely unconservative), has fully embraced the sentiment of Trump as the victim. Now, don’t get me wrong. It is a compelling and intoxicating sentiment within a sizable portion of the GOP base, and that’s why the outrage was at nuclear levels almost immediately after the news broke. Still, it is Trump who creates these conditions. He makes it happen. No one is out to get him. He is not a persecuted person trying to do the right thing. He gets himself into his legal troubles because he doesn’t care about anything beyond himself, and when it comes apart, he chooses to blame everyone else.

Not that it matters all that much. The strain on the right that relies on outrage and anger to gin up its audience understands it and plays to that. The phrase “Keep your powder dry” is foreign to them. When the news broke that federal agents searched Mar-A-Lago with the authority of the Justice Department and a warrant, the reaction from the Trumpist right was swift and predictable: rage. Pure rage. They didn’t know why and they didn’t care. It was “banana republic” stuff. “This is what we expect to see in Cuba or Venezuela!” people cried.

The last time I checked, communist dictatorships didn’t rely on warrants and due process when it came to such matters. But again, the people know their audience and if one wants to infer that is an indictment of the audience, go right ahead. When Rep. Lauren Boebert found out Attorney General Merrick Garland signed off on the search, she said, “This is nothing short of a coup.” It’s a stupid and nonsensical thing for her to say, but she is smart enough to know her target audience.

Josh Hammer, the opinion editor at Newsweek, penned a ridiculous column in the wake of the raid entitled, ‘American Stasi.’ Now, leaving aside that it is poorly written dreck and filled with conjecture as the public hadn’t seen the warrant, it’s morally repugnant to compare the Justice Department and the FBI to the East German Stasi, a secret police organization. It arrested nearly a quarter million people as political prisoners. It spied on East Germans with impunity and engaged in Zersetzung, a form of psychological warfare against citizens that included gaslighting, harassment, smear campaigns, administering incorrect medical treatment, and more. The Stasi chose to do that when the international community scrutinized typical torture methods.

It’s not unfair to have some skepticism. We have a treasure trove of documented misconduct by law enforcement from the local level all the way to the federal level. That might have given Hammer a scintilla of credibility in an otherwise daft piece of writing. Except he gives the game away when he writes,

The imperative for conservatives is to respond not merely by tsk-tsking but by recognizing “what time it is” in this ailing, late-stage republic and to demonstrate a willingness to counter the Left’s brazen assaults with our own willingness to prudentially engage in escalatory, tit-for-tat, mutually assured destruction tactics. Sometimes, the only way out is through.

You see, it’s not, “We need to put an end to this for the betterment of the country.” It is, “We must win and then do the exact same thing to them!”

Such thinking stems from this bizarre confluence of left and right in which both sides claim they are “losing,” and it demands the use of raw political power to defeat the other side. That’s why the far left wants to abolish the filibuster, eliminate the electoral college, and turn the Senate into another representative body. The new right wants to maintain those institutional structures but tear the others down, get their people into power and use the law as a sword rather than a shield.

I have no skin in the game when it comes to the left choosing to destroy itself in a quest for raw power.

But on the right? I sure do. I still believe in the underlying principles of classical liberals such as Locke, de Tocqueville, and Jefferson. I still cling, for lack of a better word, to the conservatism espoused by Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley. I want a world where the economic ideals of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman lead the way.

I don’t want any part of what Hammer and his ilk want. So, call it whatever you like. What I won’t do is call it conservatism.