The ordinary Republicans who supported President Donald Trump in 2024 are just plain “rotten,” according to the editor of TheBulwark.com, a Substack for the NeverTrump activists who were hurled headlong from the GOP when they rebelled against Trump’s coalition.
“What if American society is rotten?” wrote Jonathan Last, the Bulwark’s editor, who tracks the dismal situation that surrounds his vanquished crew of anti-Trump rebels:
This happens. Just as a matter of history, we have seen societies fall apart, or tear themselves apart, because the people were no longer capable of sustaining them. All empires fall, eventually. Why would American society be impervious to degeneration?
His article portrays Trump’s election as a horror story: “American Cthulhu: Staring into the abyss that is The People.”
“Cthulhu” is the name of a fictional horror monster worshipped by cult members. The imagery of the Cthulhu story was shaped by the English poet, John Milton, whose 1667 poem visualized the Christian story of Satan’s defeat by Saint Michael, titled Paradise Lost.
Last’s torment is made worse by the recent defeat of populist parties in Canada and Australia, where both national establishments united to suppress public criticism of their poverty-expanding policies of economic-growth-by-migration:
The citizens of Canada and Australia recently proved that they are capable of self-government. Faced with a Trumpist threat, these modern, advanced democracies repulsed it. Overwhelmingly …. is it that, at present, the character of Canadians and Australians is equal to the demands of self-rule in a way that the character of Americans is not?
Yet if our fellow citizens are no longer virtuous enough to sustain liberal democracy, then what? We cannot dissolve the people and elect another.
Strangely, Last and his companions have still not recognized that their faction did try to dissolve America’s character, society, and prosperity into a vat of global migration. For example, in 2017, Last’s current boss, Bill Kristol, deemed Americans to be disposable and declared that population replacement would be best for the D.C. elite’s exercise of national power around the globe:
Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? [I hope] this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse. You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico.
That ambitious aim of population replacement was loudly echoed by a host of envious progressives and by Republicans who have been seduced by Wall Street’s money. But their revolt against America was defeated and sent to ruin in the 2024 political battle.
Now in their political dungeon, Last and his companions show no sign of repentance or change. He and his allied crew have declared an unconquerable will to reverse their defeat with a mix of guile and political force, saying:
Act as though [rotten American] people can be reached. Assume that they are helpless naïfs who lack agency—but are virtuous at their core and would act on this virtue if only the precisely perfect set of conditions would allow them. Then work to create that perfect set of conditions.
Because if the people are rotten, then our society is lost anyway.
“I think I’m right about [the rotteness of] our fellow Americans,” he wrote, adding, “I understand that even if I am [right], we should carry on as if I’m not.”
Milton’s poem described Satan’s defeat and his subsequent vow of revenge:
He trusted to have equal’d the most High,
If he oppos’d; and with ambitious aim
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Rais’d impious War in Heav’n and Battle proud
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,…
[Satan speaks] The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
… Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven.…
[and] To wage by force or guile eternal War
Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe
