(PresidentialHill.com)- Jack Butler, a writer for National Review, believes that 2012 might have been the last chance for normal politics in America.
2012 was Butler’s first Summer as an intern in D.C.
On a late June morning, the judgment in NFIB v. Sebelius, the case examining the legality of Obamacare, would be rendered. He was present on the Court’s steps to witness what was going on as he lived near enough to the Supreme Court to partake in a bizarre tradition of post-congressional politics: the swarming of the Court on decision days by people dressed in crazy costumes.
After some initial uncertainty, he discovered later that day that the Court decided 5-4 to maintain Obamacare. Chief Justice John Roberts’ managed to preserve the legislation on the books (after he effectively rewrote it, of course).
As a conservative who appreciated the candidate merry-go-round that characterized that nomination process, Butler was not entirely convinced of Mitt Romney as the nominee for the 2012 Presidential election. He was excited by his choice of Paul Ryan as VP.
He enjoyed Romney’s evisceration of President Obama at that famous first debate, and he was perplexed that Joe Biden’s boisterous behavior at the vice-presidential debate was considered a “win” over Paul Ryan’s Midwestern politeness.
When the results came in, Butler was naturally unhappy, like many of his friends on the Hillsdale College campus, where he was a sophomore. However, some of the most unsettling repercussions of the 2012 election took time to permeate our political system.
Butler explains that the early pessimism about the prospects for the Right in the wake of Romney’s defeat was gradually overcome by the sense that Romney did not “fight” hard enough, which was not unwarranted. That crystallized into the “middle finger” of Donald Trump in 2016. That middle finger owed a large part of its appeal and potency to the trolling and triumphalism that the left, convinced their coalition was ascending, started to exhibit as Obama’s second term went on. This was especially true after Democrats lost the Senate and the Left began looking elsewhere, both in the workings of the state and in the apex of culture, for victories.
Butler believes the 2012 election was a series of lost chances. The Romney-Ryan vision for America was far from flawless, and he has moved past the childish, imperfect affection he once felt for them.
Regardless of who won in 2008 and 2012, the truth is that both R and D are in a political uni-party clique in which Donald J. Trump will never be accepted.
