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How do we get out of this?

Thats the question preoccupying the right these days. The specific this varies, but what unites all the concerns is the mess Donald Trump has made.

For Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the this is the embarrassing mess in Georgia, where many gettable Republican voters believe theres no point in returning to the polls for the Senate runoff next month.

Hence one of the great ironies of 2020: For two years, Democrats falsely claimed that Republicans had stolen the governors race from Stacey Abrams with voter suppression. Now, because of the presidents tantrum, Republicans are poised to give away two Senate seats and control of the Senate by actually suppressing their own vote with equally false claims of fraud. Even Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the Trump loyalist who defeated Abrams, is now said to be in on a conspiracy to hand the state to Joe Biden.

For the Republicans whod like to be president, the this theyre trying to extricate themselves from is Trumps captivity of the party.

In 2016, the GOP was trapped in a game-theory version of the parable often attributed to Aesop of belling the cat. Its in the collective interest of all the mice to put a bell on the cat, but its not in the self-interest of any individual mouse to be the one to do it. Each Republican presidential candidate wanted Trump out of the race, but none wanted to volunteer for the political suicide mission to get rid of him at least not until it was too late. By threatening to run again in 2024, Trump has put the presidential hopefuls in the same predicament they faced in 2016.

Even if Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and the rest actually believes the fawning things they say about Trump, none believe them so strongly that they would like to see him maintain his hold on the party and block their paths. But none of them wants bell duty because Trumps ability to slaughter mice is far greater than it was in 2016. They helped build a better mousetrap and now have no idea how to dismantle it.

But this doesnt end there. As Trump and his apparatchiks pull the party down around them, theyre lashing out not just at the democratic system, but at the right itself. Fox News (where I am a contributor) is now a hive of villainy in Trumps eyes for not reading from the approved script. The thinking seems to be that what America and the right need most in the years ahead is a right-of-center media fully committed to a definition of conservatism that begins and ends as a Trump cult of personality, eagerly trafficking in the conspiratorial phantasms that sustain the soon-to-be-former president.

Among many conservatives, Trumps destructive response to his defeat is seen as the problem. That is certainly a problem. But its downstream of the original sin of embracing Trump in the first place. To borrow again from Aesop, it was clear he was a scorpion from the outset.

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be, C.S. Lewis observed. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

The best solution to the rights predicament is to turn around and head back in the right direction they skipped in 2016. But politics is the art of getting the crowd to follow you. And the people who followed Trump down this path understandably fear that if they turn around now, nobody will follow them.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch

Categories:Jonah Goldberg Columns | Opinion

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