A young man who is active in Republican politics engaged me in conversation last weekend at the True Texas Project conference in Fort Worth. He was deeply disturbed that “radical Democrats” were taking over the city council in Austin and mentioned how hard he was working to make sure “moderate Democrats” would win local elections instead. Since Republicans were not likely to prevail in these contests, it seemed to him that the next best thing was to support “moderates” on the other side.

When I asked my interlocutor why he thought this was the best course to follow, he was nonplussed. He simply assumed an alliance between conservatives and what looked like the less nutty elements on the left was a reasonable step, if his side couldn’t win.

I then asked why he thought the so-called moderates were less noxious than the radicals. After all, these moderates help bring the radicals to power and they are much more likely to form alliances with the radicals than with anyone on the right. At the time this conversation took place, I didn’t think of something Chronicles’ assistant editor, John Howting, just mentioned to me, which is that one critical reason the “moderates” oppose Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates is that the radicals sometimes sound like right-wing populists.

For example, when a DSA candidate opposes foreign wars because we are spilling blood and treasure in conflicts that don’t benefit the American people, that person sounds more like Pat Buchanan than either Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or National Review’s Rich Lowry. The question is not whether the DSA member’s argument is entirely true. It’s just not something that a typical leftist like AOC or a neocon like Lowry would be likely to say.  

Unfortunately, even those with whom I agree on other matters seem wed to a political paradigm that is entirely obsolete, but in which establishment conservatives are deeply invested. We see that paradigm on Bret Baier’s Common Ground series on Fox News, which shows apparent evidence of cooperation between “moderates” from both national parties amid “rising political tensions.”  On Baier’s show, we encounter smiling Democrats who happen to be working on some project with bland centrist Republicans, like state control of the internet to make it safer for minors or keeping a certain drug in or off the market. This, we are led to believe, is the wave of the future, if only all of us would embrace this sort of “moderateness” and understand that American democracy requires the present two-party system.

But what do we do if one of our national parties, won’t consent to a law like the SAVE America Act ensuring that only citizens may vote? What if this party wants to pack the Supreme Court with Democratic stooges, and incites riots to keep as future voters 10 to 15 million illegals, whom they brought into the country and now subsidize? Wishing to make “common cause” with such a party, outside of a few pedestrian issues, may be unrealistic in our current critical situation. Moreover, it was the same moderates who were in power under Joe Biden who caused all the mischief I’ve described. Why should we on the right lift a finger to help them now?

I’ve no idea why anyone would trust these rogues, since they would likely go on pushing their woke agenda while trying to reopen the borders. These bridge-builders to the left bear the same relationship to the DSA militants as the allegedly less radical Girondists who paved the way for the more radical Jacobins during the French Revolution. It was the Girondists who declared war on “counter-revolutionary states” and started persecuting “enemies of the revolution” even before the Jacobins succeeded to power in 1793.

One obvious reason this obsolete paradigm won’t go away is that it serves obvious neoconservative ends, not least of which is that these so-called moderate Democrats are friendlier to Israel than the DSA. We are supposed to imagine that we have a centrist politics, with moderate conservatives and a moderate left with which we can share common ground. Fox News and other Murdoch outlets underline this theme nonstop, arranging for paid Democratic and left-of-center opposition figures, who yap affably with GOP regulars on our TV screens. Occasionally, some of Fox’s conservative stars, like Tucker Carlson, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter, stray off the ranch, but there are other certified conservatives to take their places and schmooze with Juan Williams, Jessica Tarlov, and numerous other obliging Democrats.

This is the neverending Potemkin Village that the Murdoch family provides for our edification, and it is meant to indicate who the conservative establishment wants us to believe are the good guys and gals in American political contests. These acceptable adversaries do not include the “radicals” or anyone to the right of the establishment media. All these nice people support Middle Eastern wars and, in some cases, would like to enlarge them. Everyone in the authorized conversations is for woke moral positions, providing they don’t involve gender-affirming surgery for children or overly exhibitionist gay pride parades. None of this has anything to do with our raging ideological polarization or the fact that many Americans (including this writer) stand outside of the permissible range of political and cultural opinions presented by the Fox News “moderates.”

Addendum: On Tuesday I reached for my barf bag as the Murdoch-owned New York Post explained one last time that “Democratic centrist Haley Stevens” is fighting the “far leftist” Abdul El-Sayed for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. As I explained in another commentary earlier this week, while the woke chatterbox Stevens, who is the AIPAC candidate, could beat her Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, El-Sayed would probably lose by several points. Please point me to the real center, assuming it exists!