‘Slouching Towards Tyranny’: Conservative Outlet Issues Rare Editorial to Rebuke Trump Over ‘Pursuit of American Decline’
The Dispatch, the conservative outlet founded by former Fox News contributors Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, issued a rare editorial rebuking President Donald Trump over his “pursuit of American decline” on Thursday.
Under the headline “Slouching Towards Tyranny: On a dark hour for the American right,” the publication’s editors lamented that the “old rules” of “American global leadership, free markets, limited government, fidelity to the Constitution,” have been set aside in favor of “new and fresh ideas.”
“What are these new and fresh ideas? For some, they are literally monarchism or autocracy. For others, they are mercantilism and a division of the world into ‘spheres of influence,'” they continued. “In short, their foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century.”
The editorial went on to assail Trump over his foreign policy views and trade policy before submitting that “nowhere is the evidence of the new right’s willful decline more obvious than in its rejection of fidelity to the rule of law and the Constitution. As the Trump administration ignores due process, encroaches upon press freedom, and subverts the independence of the judiciary—all central pillars of self-government—top executive branch officials and Republican members of Congress turn a blind eye, or cheer it on.”
“Again, we have not yet arrived at unalloyed tyranny,” conceded The Dispatch. “But we are getting closer, and that is bad enough.”
“On the biggest questions, Donald Trump’s second administration has already proven it will be a stark departure from his first, and no more conservative—ideologically, dispositionally, philosophically—than Joe Biden’s or Barack Obama’s,” it concluded. “The sooner elected Republicans come to terms with that reality—in public, not just in conversations they have with us when the cameras are off—the better off we’ll all be. Because just as Trump’s pursuit of American decline is a choice, so, too, is refusing to object to it.”
The Dispatch is just one member of a chorus of right-wing critics of the Trump administration in recent days that includes National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and various other conservative commentators.
