The Daily Kos "Purity Wars" As Seen By The Right

How many times have we seen paragraphs like the following here?

If you are a [progressive], and if you believe that the way to reform American public policy is to elect [progressives], and you arrived at Election Day believing that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were, from the [progressive] point of view, interchangeable commodities, then you are either a fanatic or extraordinarily ill-informed. In either case, you owe it to yourself and to your country to be a better citizen, and maybe read a book. There are all sorts of good reasons to abstain from voting, but the preposterous notion that there isn’t much difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney isn’t one of them.

Now, that paragraph, while it MAY sound like Markos on a rant, is not from this site. Everywhere in the above paragraph where you see the word "progressive", the original word was "conservative".

This paragraph is from an article in National Review discussing the candidacy of one Donald Trump and the phenomenon it calls the "WHINO".

Kevin Williamson begins innocently enough:

What’s generally misunderstood on the left is that the tea-party movement did not arise as an alternative to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Democrats but as an alternative to the Bush-McConnell-Hastert Republicans, who were judged to have spent too much, warred too recklessly, and — most significant — to have been too ready to make themselves complicit in the bailouts.

What began as a bracing revolt quickly congealed into pasty dogma.

But then, in glorious NRO fashion, he tries to channel his inner Buckley and look down his nose at the base his party has created:

You know the RINO — Republican In Name Only — but you may be less familiar with the WHINO. The WHINO is a captive of the populist Right’s master narrative, which is the tragic tale of the holy, holy base, the victory of which would be entirely assured if not for the machinations of the perfidious Establishment. Never mind the Democrats, economic realities, Putin, ISIS, the geographical facts of the U.S.-Mexico border — all would be well and all manner of things would be well if not for the behind-the-scenes plotting of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their enablers, who apparently can be bribed with small numbers of cocktail weenies. The WHINO is a Republican conspiracy theorist, in whose fervid imaginings all the players — victims, villains — are Republicans.

Barack Obama? Pshaw. The real enemy is Jeb Bush.

As evidence of the stupidity of the WHINO, he says, he points to the current popularity of Donald Trump.

He then mocks the campaign "strategery" (his actual word) of these people by discussing an interview he had with a writer for Breitbart (more on Breitbart later).

At Freedom Fest, I did an interview with Matthew Boyle of Breitbart Radio, a nice enough guy but a pretty good example of the WHINO style in American politics. What about Romney? Boyle demanded. Romney, he said with absolute assurance, lost to Barack Obama because millions of conservatives stayed home, finding him insufficiently committed to their cause.

The first aspect of what is wrong with this analysis is obvious: It assumes that a “real conservative” who couldn’t beat Mitt Romney in a Republican primary dominated by “real conservatives” would have defeated Barack Obama in a national election not dominated by conservatives at all, i.e., that Romney was the weakest candidate except for all the guys who couldn’t beat him.

Naturally this all went over SUPER well at Breitbart:

Trump is surging for the same reason that Newt Gingrich enjoyed a brief bubble in the 2012 primary: he is taking on the media. Or, more accurately, he is being victimized by it.

The media’s over-reaction to Trump’s comments about Mexicans is of a piece with the “two minutes’ hate” against the Confederate flag, and the courts’ pursuit of Christian bakers. You don’t have to have a soft spot for billionaires, or like the Dukes of Hazzard, or enjoy beating the Bible to feel a sense of alarm at the media’s mob behavior. It is intended as a warning to the rest of us.

People are rallying around Trump even more strongly after the shocking murder of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle, who was gunned down by an illegal alien felon who lived in the U.S. due to the “sanctuary city” policies of the Democratic Party. Trump is perceived as speaking for the victims–and the potential victims, who include every single American.

The leading candidates of both political parties all support some form of immigration reform that will grant legal status to illegal aliens before the border is secure. Trump is finally giving voice to the opposition.

SNIP

Williamson takes issue with some of the queries put to him by my colleague, Matthew Boyle. Without commenting on, or for, Boyle, it is Williamson’s answers that seem more puzzling. The cautionary example of Mitt Romney, an “electable” candidate who went on to lose, is not an unfair one. Romney wasn’t just moderate: he was uniquely unable to challenge President Barack Obama on the domestic policy issue of the day, i.e. Obamacare. And when his moment came, with the Benghazi attack, he lacked both the guts and the media finesse to make it count. Trump has both.

It is true, as Williamson points out, that Romney beat all of his conservative opponents. But it is worth noting how close Gingrich came. He failed because he stopped fighting the media and started–like many of today’s pundits–lecturing the conservative base about how it should think and feel.

"See, Trump is surging because he's going up against the eebil librul mediaz that are so intolerant of us."

Or, to put it another way,

Herein lies the lesson and a cautionary tale. These articles, especially the Breitbart one, reveal how easy it is to manipulate the "base", especially the Republican base.

However, we too can be manipulated this way. And we must guard against it.