What
is commonly referred to as “the conservative movement”—an alliance between
Republican politicians and media polemicists—is what I call Big Conservatism,
or the Big Con.
The movers and shakers of the
Big Con, though styling themselves as an alternative to the left are, in actuality, an alternative-left, the alt-left.
That
Big Conservatism is an alternative-left is gotten readily enough by their
respective stances on a range of issues.
Ben
Shapiro, widely hailed as a rock star of the Big Con, is a classic case in
point.
Shapiro is talented. There
can be no question about this. After all, it’s quite the feat for one so young
to have mastered the talent that many in the Big Con have labored decades to
nail down: Shapiro, despite the fact that he is a left-leaning neoconservative, has convinced legions of Americans,
particularly younger, college-aged Americans, that he is not only a
conservative, a man of the right, but a cutting-edge, risqué conservative.
Inasmuch
as the men and women of the Big Con are distinguished on account of their
ability to excite their base—voters, readers, listeners, and viewers—while
simultaneously currying favor with the official left, Shapiro is its
posterchild.
A Slate cover story from earlier
this year is revealing. Slate, mind
you, is a well-known left-wing publication. Yet the “progressives” who run it
see in Ben Shapiro a potential ally in their “resistance” to Donald Trump and
his army of Deplorables.
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Seth Stevenson, the author of
“The Many Faces of Ben Shapiro” (anything but an inapt description of the
piece’s namesake), interprets his subject through what he himself characterizes
as a “psychoanalytic narrative.” Shapiro, Stevenson explains, was bullied
terribly as a child. This experience, he suggests, could account for why
Shapiro despises Trump. “In my opinion,” Shapiro remarks, Steve Bannon,
the former editor of Breitbart, for
which Shapiro once wrote, “is a bully” who “sold out” the “mission” of the
outlet’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, “in order to back another bully, Donald
Trump.”
Breitbart, Shapiro
continues, was transformed into “Trump’s personal Pravda.”
Stevenson writes that because
Shapiro defended Kim Fields, a reporter who claims to have been assaulted by a
member of Trump’s entourage during the campaign—a claim for which Florida prosecutors
concluded they had no grounds for prosecution—he was then besieged with
“anti-Semitic” tweets by “alt-right bullies” who, according to the
Anti-Defamation League, made him the most attacked “journalist” that year.
Because
Shapiro is “among a dwindling cadre of Trump-averse conservatives at a time
when the mainstream GOP and its media apparatus are following (and sometimes
leading) our cretinous president straight into the muck,” Shapiro, Stephenson
writes, is among those “influential right-wing figures” upon whom he can see
himself “relying” to help the country “hold the line” should Trump choose to
“roll his tanks (metaphorical or otherwise) over the ramparts of American
democracy [.]”
Shapiro was all too happy to
grant Slate the opportunity to use him so as to contrast
his reasonable, principled conservatism
with the vulgar, unprincipled, “racist” and unthinking pseudo-conservatism
shared by Trump, many of Shapiro’s media colleagues who support President
Trump, and, of course, the tens of millions of Americans, mostly traditional
Republican voters, who constitute Shapiro’s audience and who came out in droves
to vote for the President.
Shapiro
was all too happy, in fact, to highlight the chasm separating the two.
Ben
Shapiro is among those “conservatives” who has earned the approval of the
left. He is part of the controlled-opposition, a “rightist” who has been
deputized by the left.
Let’s
review some of Shapiro’s record:
For starters, let’s recall
that for all of his caterwauling over Trump’s “bullying” tactics, Shapiro has
always been a loyal Republican whose support for George W. Bush was
particularly adamant. This is revealing, for Bush, along with
Congressional Republicans and Democrats,
used false pretenses to embark the United States upon a
path to war that continues to the present day.
Shapiro,
along with his colleagues in the Big Con, vigorously argued on behalf of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Collectively, these invasions have come at
the cost of trillions of dollars, the loss of over one millions lives, hundreds
of thousands of orphaned children, and hundreds of thousands of human beings
who have been permanently maimed and traumatized. Far from ushering in a
new Democratic Age throughout the Middle East, the Big Con’s wars radically
destabilized the latter, unleashing fundamentalist Islamic terrorist
organizations like ISIS while decimating ancient Christian communities and the
communities of other religious minorities that received some measure of
protection from the secular rule of men like Saddam Hussein.
The
Big Con generally and Shapiro’s voice in particular were instrumental in making
these wars happen.
And yet Trump, to hear NeverTrumpers like Shapiro tell it,
is supposed to be the bully.
Shapiro and his ilk wax
indignant over what they regard as Trump’s crass tweets and oral remarks—even though they used
their resources to support politicians who wielded their power in ways that
have caused incalculable bloodshed, pain, treasure, and death for legions of
human beings.
The
Iraq War is today recognized as arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster in
our country’s history. The Afghan war, of which few people any longer
even speak, is our country’s longest-running war. Neither an end, nor victory,
is in sight.
Shapiro
has never apologized for his role in advancing these disasters.
To his credit, though, and
unlike some of his fellow travelers, Shapiro at least did admit at the time
that the wars to export Democracy to the Middle East were necessary features of
a larger scheme for American empire—something in
which he believes.
In 2005, Shapiro wrote an article in which he castigated
“impatient isolationists,” i.e. the majority of Americans who had already, by
this juncture, turned against the war in Iraq. Since, following the fall
of the old Soviet Union, America is the world’s only remaining superpower, the
only remaining “empire,” it has a “duty” to preserve itself as an empire.
This,
in turn, means that America has a duty to engage in pre-emptive wars, for
pre-emption “is the chief weapon of a global empire.”
In
other words, it doesn’t matter that Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction. It doesn’t matter that Iraq posed no direct or imminent
threat to the United States. In “toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing
Iraq,” America “prevent[ed]” Hussein’s “future ascendance and end[ed] his
material support for future threats globally.”
By
this same principle, the principle that pre-emption is indispensable to
advancing America’s “global empire,” America should be considering invasions of
“Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and others.”
This
Big Con celebrity argues that while advancing empire promises to secure
America’s “future security,” it is also a worthy end inasmuch as it consists in
“forwarding freedom” throughout the world.
In another place, Shapiro asserts that “America
must be defended and her liberties spread abroad when possible.” The only
alternative is what Shapiro calls “kowtowing” to “international
multiculturalism”—which he equates with “a relativistic sea.” This last
alternative is no alternative, for “international multiculturalism” leads
inescapably to “tyranny.”
In 2003, Shapiro called for the removal of the
five million Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from “Judea, Samaria, Gaza and
Israel proper.” “It’s an ugly solution,” Shapiro wrote, “but it is the only
solution.”
In
response to the charge that such a policy is Nazi-esque, Shapiro has a response
ready at hand: “There are no gas chambers here. It’s not genocide; it’s
transfer. It’s not Hitler; it’s Churchill.”
Because
Winston Churchill approved of the forcible removal of upward of nine million
Germans from the Polish territory that the Allies created by slicing off a
portion of Germany, there is nothing objectionable about the Israelis forcing
millions of Palestinians from the only homes that they’ve ever known.
Churchill,
Shapiro notes, shared his own view that when “two populations are constantly
enmeshed in conflict, it is insane to suggest that somehow deep-seated
ideological change will miraculously occur, allowing the two sides to live
together.”
As
for those who are reluctant to accept his proposal, Shapiro cuts to the quick:
“It’s time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not
genocide. And anything else isn’t a solution.”
In March of 2016, Shapiro
wrote: “I will never vote for Donald Trump.
Ever.”
He proudly
declared: “I stand with #NeverTrump.”
To
hear Shapiro tell it, Trump is the anti-Shapiro: “I will never vote for Donald
Trump because I stand with certain principles,” such as “small government and
free markets and religious freedom and personal responsibility. Donald
Trump stands against all of these things.”
Shapiro
stands with “the Constitution of the United States,” the Constitution’s
“embedded protection of my God-given rights through governmental checks and
balances,” and “conservatism.”
Trump
stands against such things.
Trump,
rather, stands for, among other odious things, the “targeting of political
enemies,” “an anti-morality foreign policy,” “government domination of
religion,” “nastiness toward women,” “tacit appeals to racism,” and “unbounded
personal power.”
The
patent silliness and hysteria of Shapiro’s remarks should now leave even the
most casual of observers incredulous. He also forecasted that “Trump will
get blown out in a general election.”
And in the event that this
prediction materialized, it is not NeverTrumpers like himself who would have
deserved the blame but the Deplorables, those who secured for Trump his party’s
presidential nomination. It is not on “our consciences,”
the consciences of NeverTrumpers, that the guilt of a Clinton victory would
deserve to fall. “It’s on the consciences of the people who went along
with this nomination.”
Today, nearly two years after
Trump defied, and as he continues to defy, the Never Trumpers—the alt-leftists
and the official left—Shapiro no longer self-regards as Never Trump. Now he calls himself a “Sometime Trumper.”
Perhaps it is precisely
because this is such a meaningless moniker that it is perfectly suited to cover
the bases of one who has been as spectacularly wrong as Shapiro has been
throughout his career and extending into the era of Donald Trump. No one,
including those who have supported his candidacy from the beginning, backs
Trump in all instances, just as few people unequivocally support anyone.
“Sometimes Trump” is meant to simultaneously fulfill two purposes: (1)
conceal Shapiro’s belated recognition that he had been just as wildly
irrational and melodramatic over the prospects of a Trump presidency as his
fellow NeverTrumpers and those on the official left continue to be; and (2)
prevent Shapiro from having to confess that he
had been wildly irrational and melodramatic.
To
see that “Sometime Trumper” is as rhetorically deceptive as it is logically and
substantively useless, consider it in light of an analogy. Imagine a man
who spends his time issuing one unequivocal condemnation after the other of
capital punishment, i.e. a man as zealously anti-capital punishment as Shapiro
was anti-Donald Trump. This same man, though, over time and upon the
development of events, begins to soften his original stance. He now
realizes that perhaps there are indeed some classes of criminal offenders that
are deserving of the death penalty.
Yet rather than simply admit
that he is now a proponent of capital punishment, he says instead that his
position has not changed substantially, that the only difference between where
he stands now and where he stood in the past is that he now supports the death
penalty only in some instances. In most
cases, the man continues, he still opposes it.
It
should be painfully obvious to all with eyes to see that this thinking is
painfully confused: Not even the most adamant proponent of the death penalty
supports it in all cases (whatever this is even supposed to mean). Anyone
who supports the death penalty for any crime is a supporter of the death
penalty.
Shapiro’s
stance on Trump is no different.
But
we shouldn’t expect for this Big Con/alt-left celebrity to ever acknowledge
this.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
