The Strange Death of the conservative Party

Encapsulating my point in lower-key letters, the conflict now prevailing (as, ever, before) in the organisation usually described as the Grand Old Party, heralding greatness but also a sense of putrefaction, of a thing crawled out of the skin of former glories.

The snake metaphor is old, of course. For once, long before Obama's raging and seemingly pastoral cries for "change", smoked in the image of youth, there was William Jennings Bryan: A man of lesser hair, but , whose fiery oratory of both fire-and-brimstone Old Testament-like fervour and a radical cry for fundamental and economic "change", equally strong and blasphemous against current orthodoxies in its cry that the United States, a government of, by and for the people, "should not crucify mankind on a cross of gold". Well, gone - one hundred years hence - was the gold standard, and it was a GOP administration that did it, but gone was also the old Bourbon Democratic party. It had, frankly, been swallowed by something else, amidst a popular torrent. (This can be disputed, of course.) 

Another point made by the equally once-illustrious The Atlantic, a name befitting the once-unconquerable ocean gone beyond the age of simply being trod over by the now-deceased Concorde, is that she has been a GOP firebrand for all of Trump's policies, meaning the hardest thunderbolt self-hurled at the Democrats "until the insurrection". Well excuse me, but since when has this thing, I mean critique (quotation marks being perhaps necessary, but then superfluous) been a thing of the age of Trumpism or "Trumpianism"? It would feel too obvious to I also don't grasp how much power the lie of the stolen election ("stolen" being a rhetorical, rather than a legal category, with many considering the elections of 2000 and 2016 stolen in every way other than the courts having affirmed it (the case of 1960, where Nixon actually can claim to have won, if yet a sliver, of the popular vote over Kennedy's, in my view only more sordid in its amelioration as by the fact that indeed it seems to have been). 

The equally ludicrous proposition, now swiftly forgotten, that Cheney's lesbianism (or her fathers more-than-tacit liberalism on the issue, which exceeded of President Clinton or former president-elect Gore) should necessitate a more progressive, or "GOP Classic" agenda - the Trumpista movement being, of course, hallmarked by its rampant homophobia, as exemplified by its prime scion's stance on equally ludicrous, or let's say solipsistic "questions" over Mr. Jenner's bathroom of choice, or the more groundbreaking proposal by a GOP candidate that a clerk who refused to endorse gay marriage in her office should go to jail (you ask whether Kerry, or indeed Bush could have escaped without notice over that eleven summers before) - has not been left wayside either, however. In this cosmic, dualist strife, there can only be loyalty to my issues on the side of good. 

One would thus ask, to ascertain whether the grand old conservative party, and party of the people at least at some of the time, has 

For if anything, American firebrand conservative thought has been nothing if not principled, and simultaneously ready to set those values aside. For if the heart and soul of liberty, as the well-spoken (if not very much else) Ronald, as good a candidate from the right for kingship if there was any, is liberty, then steadfastness is, from the perspective of liberty, a virtue. But what principles? If Cheney, a congresswoman from Wyoming - can get away with this in one of the most red, and ostensibly conservative states in the union, if one is to forego it's birthday advent of the female franchise, for example, half a century before its supposed enactment throughout the United States, one would be forced to answer whether these principles are principles at all. More serious, and more chillingly, is the issue of fundamental constitutional liberties. But foregoing the debate on abortion rights, whether such a concept as "substantial due process" should or indeed was invented, the unquestioned (well, even here there is a history, a question of scope, whose end we may yet see closed in different tones) liberties of speech, press, of assembly and petition, and 

What then is this new GOP? It has, clearly, no burden to show loyalty to with regard to the brand of conservative. And yet, anyone noticing or even hailing the Trumpist-Kekist usurpation of the red, and of red states, would still necessarily notice a certain symbios, if not exactly congruence between the Trumpists and traditional conservative interests. Indeed, while Justice Barrett may be a fascist firebrand, et cetera, she is not out of fashion as someone who could one day have been nominated by Bush Minor, and perhaps without much blood-curdling, to this highest court in the land, perhaps even in the universe. For even the most fragrant, flagrantly vitriolic opponent find the old, reeking conservatives in the mold of George Will and Bill Kristol a step up (or ten) over The Donald's strangely more natural hair. At the same time, the Trumpost popular appeal among certain core segments - unspokenly thought of as core, that is - is as unsettling as it is, so to speak, impossible. 

Salman's Arabia, revisited

 

With plenty spoken of the Arab in this month, I must first begin with a solemn, if painstakingly inadequate sense of having been right in my first assertions of the kingdom's already heralded third-generation monarch. And just as the scions and concrete checks of liberal democracy have gone into stagnation at home, we ought well observe the relation between the good, the liberal and the democratic as fickle and not - at all - the same thing. 

Anyways, this bin Salman (the patronymic being key) will be the next king, a statement so certain that he might as well be called - and is indeed treated as if he were - king in all but name, and custodian in fact of the two holy mosques, the foremost treasure of the Sauds once the oil is used up or expunged from the global economy. While his program has been reform 

How much influence, we can ask at first, does he hold? His father, it should be said, served already under the eldest (surviving) brother King Saud (numbers are superfluent) as governor of the Riyadh province in the 1950s. A veteran player in this game of princes - or emirs - and by necessity approaching death must have weakened his spirit and prestige, if not (as is so very popular to assume) his mind. And with the old scion and master gone, this prince must manoeuver by his own path. He certainly seemed to have done that fateful day in 2018, when issuing a bloody (if nothing else) writ of horror to the world; this fate will befall any so harsh a critic as this Jamal, without the kingdom of the Saud and Al Wahhab, as - very well known - within. 

This cannot entirely be true, of course. While repression in previous years - Faysal, not necessarily Abdullah - has never been gentle or subscribing to the proclamation of 1945 which, in earnest, the old warrior officially decried, it has been soft-spoken in its dealings with the greater, outer world, and confined not only to the kingdom's very established borders - the defeat of the Ikhwan that had ensured their power, ensured that - and often erratic rather than bone-chilling. Reactionary politics may be softer, or less hard in its repression, but while the peace of the period inaugurated in February 1929 and enforced by the oil wealth discovered in the the first years of the new kingdom which followed, nourished in the following decade, is now certainly over and closed, a creaking hinge to the screams of the martyrdom in old Constantinople. And as the great Guinness spoke, though not in Lawrence in Arabia, that a strike from power for the destruction of this foe would in fact make him immortal, has so far proven satisfyingly truthful, if not shattering the order that the bleating of the Arab Spring as well failed to challenge. 

Also the bounty of the desert kingdom... at least for a few more years. One of many proposals, focused on attracting the kaffir, has been to convert these seaside oil drilling platforms into tourist attractions. 

What, then, can possibly replace it? The great century of the Sauds, inaugurated in the 1920s with bloody battles against the Jabal Shammer and the moderate - we must presume, out of fear for the predominance of our worldview - Hashemites of old Arabia; the old aristocracy, if we are to relieve by omission the Sauds from that insult, is now definitely coming to an end. And while father has seen the intricacies and demands of dynastic succession for long enough to solve it, that was a legacy too. Imagine, for ninety years, such fates, and how good a promise it would have seemed when the last blood had been spilled. Now, as with everything monarchy, it will be worthless unless consolidated for longer - and this much is known to him, and his many disgruntled uncles and cousins, if not much else. 

The petrodollar economy has been most dramatically introduced into a burgeoning stock market, now culled yet again but to the benefit of this yet oil-and-gas-rich tyrant, in order to replace its core feature by the new. These investments are indeed drastic, hopeful and even innovatory, but as with the wealthy man of decadence and consumption, any strategic move must be weighted in light of the mind that places it's needs, as well as its ambition. And a near-century of gluttony has made the needs of these kings, pressing as they may be within the close of this decade and the kingdom's centenary in 2032 under King Muhammed, now perhaps the First. Dented and dulled, packed with the audacity of youth - that force which, we are well informed, is so strong both within and without, and now demonstrated to its full extent - is less a recipe for success as the judicious, yet self-sacrificing - voice of experience. Of this Muhammad I has naught, except for the second-hand smoke he has inhaled and the rigorous studies he hasn't endured in the school of government and administration (being, to what extent he may be called what he wants to be, a soldier, a military man) except for the men - and, yes, few women - in his ranks. 

Litmus test as this may be, the way he responded with the 2017 purge to the snatching of Khashoggi's life in 2018, and the momentous decision of father to keep the cub in the pathway of power. From this course, he may hardly be dislodged - the the defence ministry which was, cleverly, the Sudairi's bounty for its many years of growth, the staircase pressing the heels of Salman. Now the pup must be key in reading his future path into the desert... and possibly out from it. 

Arabian Thaw

 

The now very discredited Arab Spring, heralded well past due as over, entered into an Arab Winter of less clear - other than that, unlike real and proverbial winters, such was not necessarily coming, and certainly not without a summer; cyclical histories being not in the fashion in a post-Fukuyama age still heralding to Fukuyama-ish creeds and principles - proportions, awakens the question of terminology now seemingly abandoned in all but name. If the core events of late 2010 to early 2011, perhaps extended to the late 2011 with the full blowout of military auto-kleptocrats (or tawagit, to borrow the bountiful if not auspicious dictionary of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its clients and many, virulent metastases) into a reality of exile (Ben Ali), downfall (Mubarak), death (Qathafi/Gaddafi/Khadafi) or the consummation of democratic, multi-party elections reaching even the largest Arab state (as opposed to the multi-candidate ones of 2005, now expanded to even the other half of the old United Arab Republic) or the degradation of full-scale warfare, lasting much longer, and doom impending (Assad, Saleh), as well as the end of those who had undergone many of these and decried of as part of this fallen epoch, rather than the pre-spoken shards of its fallout - in name, citizen al Awlaki and the notoriously citizenshipless Bin Ladin - are to be described as a spring, and the part-predictable, part-parodically obtuse wall of concrete faced by this seemingly unstoppable truck of popular rebellion encourage (but alas, do not force) us to dwell on the question of this winter, and when - if the metaphor is intended as serious - a blazing and equally extended summer will arrive. The climatological being opposed to the political, in this sense. 

But if we are not of the Hegelian mold, as so very few Westerners are, we must consider the possibility not only that a wave of liberal, constitutional republics emerging - yes, even in Saudi Arabia, and finally displacing this third and presumably last state, and paragon, of the Sauds - but the continuous movements towards "something else" eeking out a cry of change, but not in direction of the west but inwards, towards a core Islamic myth or, dare we speak it again, another caliphate? 

Analysing the separate cases, we may see the bonds and scars of colonial and post-colonial division, with the individual states of the Arab League being as illogical as individually tragic, now with a long term of 

What then is the cry of "the people", and which promises are the river they are built to cross in this auspicious year? If bread, peace and land were the phrases that won the day in 1917 - and much of the century - for the Soviets, what is now in demand? As often, if not ever and always, the materialist notions are universal, and those to harness the dream of them, those surest to triumph. This is not least true of the Islamists, this elusive term, 

The days of glory. The days of hope. The best of times; may they now arrive anew, for what we sow may be yet too bitter to understand. Yet renewed waves of clashes with the authority now supposedly subservient to their wishes will not end, the bleating of the fickle throng never be made blank again. 

Never abed, never to rest. A night of vigil that spanned a decade. The tumultuous changes undergoing across North Africa and the Middle East began a new era, and whatever its merits have never truly died down, even in the poster child of the Arab revolutions of 2011 and beyond. When is the appropriate "end date" of these events, begun by a frustrated vegetable grocer in late days of the first decade? 

Was the promise of a blossoming Arab Spring then a particular case of Tunisia, and its positive vision only to be finalised there? We should be careful about the merits of this singular, surviving child of the groundbreaking (and very deadly) street protests of late 2010 and early 2011, which turned the old Caliphate on its head, and destroyed and severely mauled both its incumbents and many of its new names. 

It is unlikely, and must never be believed, that the Brotherhood would accept the Western-liberal-constitutional system now putting on such a show, with the best backing from Western military and diplomatic power, after such a thrashing, yet again. But if their credo, the cries for which so many have screamed into death - or at least offered suffused throat-gargling cries and kicking feet - would be a primitive emirate. The labels "Islamist", "Salafi" and similar are often used not even sloppily, and although they intersect - the parliamentary results of 2012 being key - with each other and with frequent jihadist activity, the yet elusive Mr. Zawahiri and his Egyptian Jihad once elevating the mediocre pharaoh Mubarak (an ill-fitting name) being a good old example here, and testament to the cross-membership in even these most dogmatic and virulent of civil society activity.