When You See Your World Crumbling...

     ...you tend to go a little berserk. Some go a lot berserk.

     Anyone who’s followed the news since the fateful elections of 2016 is aware that the Democrats (and a gaggle of NeverTrumpers) have schemed and plotted the impeachment of President Donald Trump since before his inauguration. The original impulse was probably fueled by anger over their electoral rebuff. After all, the voters had told them that their chosen one, “the best qualified candidate ever to run for the presidency,” was inferior to a complete upstart, a coarsely mannered Queens real-estate developer without any political experience. That had to sting, especially after a year and more of assurances from all their luminaries that “Trump can’t possibly win.”

     They took balm for their wounds from their certainty that the Trump Interregnum would prove disastrous. They waited for events to impress those who’d voted for Trump with their folly in having done so. But despite their confidence, things...got better. And better. And better yet. Today, except in the one area where Congressional obstruction has been effective – the border wall – President Trump has made good on all of Candidate Trump’s campaign promises.

     They’d been angry about losing. They’re incandescently furious about being exposed as fools. While there’ve been no reports of exploding brain aneurysms among top Democrats so far, more than thirteen months of campaign remain before us.

     So they’re groping for a stick with which to strike back.

     Groping is the word. The “Ukraine phone call” pseudo-controversy is the weakest hook I’ve ever seen a political thrust hung from, and I’ve been following politics closely for four decades. But what else do the Democrats have? The “Russian collusion” gambit has failed them. There’s no substance beneath their repeated allegations of obstruction of justice. And now we learn that Michael Flynn has been exonerated, and by a directed acquittal at that! Judges are notoriously reluctant to do such things, which makes them all the more impressive.

     So they’re groping. They need a stick with which to flail Usurper Trump before he can humiliate them with a forty-state sweep, which at this point looks more likely than not. But it seems like every stick they lay their hands on turns out to be a stinging insect. The venom this Ukraine business packs could prove fatal to a number of them.

     As Glenn Reynolds has said more than once, all the Democrats need to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even manage that. There’s entertainment to be had from this. But spare a moment or two to pity them, if that’s still possible.

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     The C.S.O. and I have greatly enjoyed Amazon’s recent production Carnival Row, starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne. It’s set in a fanciful republic named Burgue, which is the grudging host to a large number of fae refugees. Those fae were driven from their original homes in Tirnanoc by a war in which Burgue sought vainly to defend them. The consequences have included familiar-seeming tensions and conflicts between the normally human Burguish natives and the fae, who differ visibly from the natives. One of the conflicts is, of course, political: factions in the Burgue parliament stand on opposite sides of the “refugee question.”

     Toward the end of this excellent series, the leaders of the two factions – dramatically enough, both of them in their positions because of the deaths of their fathers – ally with one another, surprising virtually everyone. Their motive, as one instructs the other, is to create chaos. In the confusion and disorder they hope to provoke, opportunities would exist for new powers to arise and displace the old ones.

     The Democrat Party is currently in a state of chaos. The titular powers in that party are being revealed as lacking power. They can no longer guide events according to the preferences of the party’s strategists. That has produced opportunities for the rise of new powers.

     The new powers most prominent at this time are on the far Left: socialists all, verging in some cases into outright communism. Their bid for supremacy within their party looks uncertain at best. Indeed, the party regulars still have a good chance of putting them to flight. But the chaos that has arisen in the wake of the Democrats’ failed attempts to destroy President Trump has made an insurrection possible, and the insurgents have chosen to make their play.

     It seems unlikely, even if the socialist insurgents should gain complete control of the Democrat Party, that they would be able to parlay such an ascendancy into electoral victory...at least, outside such hard-Left redoubts as Berkeley. But winning control of their party is a step forward. Remember how long it took Britain’s Labour Party, after it had been suborned by the Fabian Socialists, to rise to national power.

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     The wild card in all of this is the Republican Establishment. They don’t care for their party’s standard-bearer. Indeed, the senior members of the GOPe dislike Upstart Trump almost as much as the Democrats’ kingmakers. He’s “shown them up” by doing the unthinkable: keeping his campaign promises and pursuing working policies with all his accustomed vigor. However, they know that for the foreseeable future, Trump is their leader. Their fortunes are tied to his. They cannot afford to undermine him.

     That doesn’t mean that the less farsighted among them won’t try. We’ve already seen some of that from the Dishonorable Mitt Romney and the certifiable William Weld.

     The chaos among the Democrats is not mirrored by anything comparable among the Republicans. Yet there are opportunities. In the current circumstances, conservative activists at the local and state levels have their best chance of rising to higher estates by explicitly and enthusiastically backing President Trump and his agenda for the nation. Whether that’s happening to any great degree is unclear...but the opportunities are there.

     While it’s at least somewhat misleading to call the Trump wave “populist,” it is explicitly pragmatic: Do what works, even if it appears to contradict conservative dogma. If politics, as R. A. Butler has told us, is “the art of the possible,” then “what works” is the golden ticket to political success. President Trump’s pragmatic approach to the treatment of our national maladies has trailed long coattails. The moral “should” be “obvious.”

     Smart persons have always studied and emulated the successful. We’ll soon see how many smart persons there are, awaiting a turn in the spotlight, in the Republican Party in this year of Our Lord 2019.