Pretty much every single self-identified conservative writer in a national newspaper will tell you some version of what the New York Times‘s Ross Douthat wrote just this week — that Republicans actually win when they lose!
Douthat said Monday that Republicans should, in fact, “welcome” a defeat in the two deadly important Senate runoff races in Georgia this week.
That puts him squarely in line with George Will of the Washington Post, Bret Stephens also of the New York Times, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, etc., all of whom call, or have, at some point, called themselves, conservatives or Republicans, and all of whom have cheered for Republicans to lose basically every race since 2016. (Stephens is in a league of his own, having rooted against Republicans as far back as the start of 2012.)
Douthat’s reasoning is pure, even if naive. “Somewhere between the wipeout of the Republican Party that I once expected and the 2024 Trump restoration that I fear, there’s a world where the party spends the next four years very gradually distancing and disentangling itself from its Mad Pretender and his claims,” he wrote. “And since that scenario becomes a little more likely if Georgia goes for the Democrats, I think that not only liberals, but also those Republicans who want a conservatism after Trump, should welcome that result.”
What, because the Republican Party was doing such a bang-up job on winning before Trump? They failed to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, even amid widespread discontent and an agonizing, glacial “recovery” from the Great Recession. They embarrassed themselves by failing to halt Obamacare, no more so than the time they tried to do it with a government shutdown and caved on that stunt, too. So impressive was the “deep bench” of Republicans set to run for president in 2016 that all it took to flatten each one of them was a reality TV businessman with a big mouth.
That guy took office and cut taxes, moved the Supreme Court appreciably to the right, kept us out of new wars, and confronted our all-too-comfortable allies in the European Union in order to get them to stop mooching off of us for their defense.
Douthat wants Republicans to distance themselves from that record with haste because he’s part of the “Republicans win when they lose” crowd.
