2 right-wing books give same wrong answers

Normal human beings read thrillers or romances on vacation; newspaper columnists assign themselves political polemics.

Judged by their covers, the two books that I chose to spoil my August days seem as different as their authors. Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake’s “Conscience of a Conservative” is the lament of a “NeverTrump” politician for his party’s loss of principle and honor. Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left” is a jujitsu exercise that argues that only Donald Trump’s GOP can “denazify” a United States in thrall to liberal totalitarianism.

But the two books also are sometimes weirdly similar, making them respectable and disreputable embodiments of the same crisis in the rightwing mind.

Flake borrows his title from Barry Goldwater’s 1960 statement of libertarian principle, a foundational text for the conservatism that elected Ronald Reagan. For Flake, as for many GOP critics of the current president, Goldwater-to-Reagan conservatism is the true faith that Trump has profaned, to which the right must return if it wishes to be public-spirited again.

Flake’s imagined GOP would no longer need to “ascribe the absolute worst motives” to liberals, “traffic in outlandish conspiracy theories,” or otherwise engage in the kind of demagogy that informs, well, D’Souza’s recent work.

D’Souza’s title isn’t false advertising: His book really does attempt to pin just about every crime in our nation’s history, plus certain German crimes as well, on the left and Democrats (categories used interchangeably and ahistorically throughout).

But because D’Souza has become a hack, even his best material basically just rehashes Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” from 10 years ago, and because D’Souza has become a professional deceiver, what he adds are extraordinary elisions, sweeping calumnies and laughable leaps.

D’Souza’s book embodies the outrageous rightwing style that Flake’s book condemns. Which makes it all the more striking when D’Souza comes around to many of the same economic policy prescriptions as Flake: Conservatives need to ... cut social programs in order to cut taxes on the rich.

That striking agreement distills conservatism’s crisis. A simple “cut the safety net to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts” agenda is both wildly unpopular and a nonresponse to our present socioeconomic problems.

The GOP has two options. It can follow Flake’s lead and be a high-minded party of small-government principle, disavowing bigotry and paranoia — and it will lose elections because purist libertarianism plus supply-side economics is not a winner in the current crisis.

Or it can follow D’Souza’s lead (and Trump’s, now that his populist agenda seems all but dead) and wrap unpopular economic policies in wild attacks on liberalism. Winning this way is a purely negative achievement for the right, a recipe for failed governance extending years ahead.

But for Republicans to escape this future, they need their leaders, activists and donors to have an intellectual epiphany, and to realize that the way up from Trumpism requires rethinking the policies where Jeff Flake and Dinesh D’Souza find a strange sort of common ground.

Ross Douthat He writes for the New York Times.