The reason NRO is shit is because it continually rectifies the past to service the current identity politics of social conservatism while (1) denying it, (2) abhorring the insane retrograde belief structure that has formed from the crazy alt-history that it perpetuates. If you can only comment on Harriet Tubman within the frame of “she’s okay, but these awful feminists and race hustlers shouldn’t have pulled this off” the the point of the article isn’t Harriet Tubman as person, it’s Harriet Tubman as yet another excuse to re-iterate that all liberals and stupid and evil and deserve nothing.

Much like the beneficent of mythos of Ronald Reagan and William Buckley airbrushes the ugly aspects of past conservatism so that present conservatism can be presented as not just the same reactionary shit, but some kind of boldness and honesty. The joke being, the rest of the world isn’t supposed to notice that the Reagan-esque condescension that NRO sells is what begat the angry fuckwittery of people like Limbaugh, which begat the mindlessly hateful shit of Breitbart. All have the same “we’re correct, and Right, and we’ll work backwards from that” premise.

Keeping in mind that the fundamental dishonesty and lunacy of this kind of rolling anachronistic cynicism is crystallized in “Liberal Fascism,” in which the horror of Nazi Germany is appropriated to demonstrate how awful and dangerous American liberals are. Because that is “serious thinking” if you’re willing to be fundamentally dishonest, disingenuously, and cynical. And those three adjectives are what keeps coming up with regard to NRO. It’s the pseudo-intellectual branch of the “can fail, can only be failed” worldview that’s been propagated.

Hence the joke of stuff like “Against Trump” and the Williamson screed about Trump voters: they set the stage for this solipsistic politics by their own revisions and myth-making. They encouraged anti-intellectualism as a basis for culture war issues as long as it seemed containable in the lower orders, while the leading class did “serious” stuff like read David Brooks columns about how “serious” they are. They’re con men, in that they wish to cynical use the paranoid style, and to move a “base” whose fear they inflate to insane levels, but they’ve gone all Hubbardian and started to believe their own hustle: hence this kind of endless loquacious game of Pin The Tail On The True Scotsman, where there’s always a new Serious Conservative Hope about to break out and change politics.

Well, that particular rainbow-shitting unicorn has failed to manifest, so now that failure has to be explained away because can’t fail. So Trump is a secret liberal, and those dedicated party bloc voters who used to be lauded as bedrock are shitty meth-addled, unemployed proles.

Marginally longer sentences and patrician affectations don’t actually conceal that they’re just selling the same hubris as the other hucksters.