‘Old Fart’ Thinking Is Too Much in Our Way | The American Spectator

It’s funny because for the longest time, it was conservatives who were faulted for embracing retrograde notions and ideas. But in 2025, it seems, the retrograde people are mostly on the Left.

Not solely, though. There is a contingent of people who call themselves conservatives who are, without a doubt, retrograde. We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, let me echo the excellent points made yesterday here at The American Spectator by David Catron, who castigated what he rightly called the “ridiculous” No Kings rally on Saturday. The rally, which supposedly drew some $294 million in funding from the Usual Suspects on the Left/Democrat side to turn out what its organizers claimed was seven million people (in actuality, it was more like one tenth that many) at some 2,700 sites, was a collection of nasty, unhinged, and bitter people, a seeming large majority of which were exceedingly old. (RELATED: The Ridiculous No Kings Protest)

Quite strange, the No-Kingsers. These people sure were ready to talk a lot of smack for folks who couldn’t defend themselves against air in a kinetic fight.

When overweight, unhealthy five-foot-two elderly women are out in public talking about killing Donald Trump and the people who work for him, it really does call into question what kind of out-of-touch mass psychosis we have allowed to infect the elderly in this country.

I don’t warrant that these pathetic boomers in their tie-dyed t-shirts and slip-on Skechers screeching for Trump’s head are representative of a whole generation. In reality, they’re more like half. But they certainly represent the worst of that generation’s thinking, and their perspective represents the establishment of that generation. (RELATED: Unraveling the Woke Left’s Bombast)

If you read my first political book, The Revivalist Manifesto, or any number of my columns in this space on the subject, you’re familiar with the theory of the Fourth Era. I’ll quickly run through this — we’ve had three distinct political eras in American history; the first began with Thomas Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, and it ended, and the second era began, with Abraham Lincoln’s electoral victory in 1860. And the third era began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first election in 1932.

That third era was marked by a number of things that are no longer true, which is why I’m theorizing that last year began the fourth political era in American history. (RELATED: The Revivalist Era Begins)

One is the power of mass media to shape public opinion. Another is a public consensus around the size and scope and purpose of government, established as it was by the New Deal and Great Society regulatory and welfare states. Things like mass immigration, forbearance toward crime, increasing sexual permissiveness, globalism, and acceptance of Marxism with respect to culture and environmental conservation are hallmarks of that third era.

Talk to people whose worldview was set into stone in, say, 2000, and they’re no more equipped to process the reality of 2025 than were the dinosaurs roaming the Yucatan when that meteor hit.

That’s what you saw with the pathetic old farts at those No Kings rallies. They think spewing charges of “racism” and “sexism” and the like at Trump or his supporters still has power. It doesn’t. The rest of us laugh at those things. We laugh at global warming alarmism, at the idea that a government shutdown is catastrophic, at the managerial class and its ESG/DEI dogma. (RELATED: Racism, Victimhood, and Louisiana v. Callais)

But the aging screechers at the No Kings rallies, willing dupes of Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America and the rest of the subversive rotter organizations who teamed up to put those fiestas on, can’t process the idea that America is moving on from their pieties. And they especially can’t process that all of the things they’ve insisted on have been proven not to work.

Most of the rest of the country is wise enough to recognize that successful politics is utilitarian, and while certainly core principles should be preserved, their application has to fit the times. For example, when there is a national labor shortage that we as a country are no longer willing to paper over with mass immigration (and particularly mass illegal immigration), the presence of a massive welfare state no longer makes sense. But don’t tell that to the septuagenarian leftists loitering in the public parks on Saturday, or they’ll accuse you of bigotry toward the poor.

Because 30 years ago, such an accusation would leave its victim in a state of catatonic reputational fear. Now? Meh. Nobody cares.

Nobody cares about the No Kings people. The smart money has it that the Democrats in the Senate are about to cave on the Schumer/Sombrero Shutdown because those protests were such a fizzle and a waste of money and effort. And the Democrats caving on the shutdown is all but the end of their party as a relevant political entity; what comes next is anybody’s guess. (RELATED: The Democrats Again Perform a Self-Own in Federal Shutdown)

We already know what came next in the Republican Party. The bulk of it moved on from third-era old-fart thinking.

Republicans of the third era were the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters. They fell for every gag, let themselves be tied in knots, and made a virtue of constant defeat. The great Sam Francis, who was called a bigot and a racist and every other terrible name for having refused to play along with the party’s failure theater, once referred to these people as the “beautiful losers” of American politics.

Sometimes the beautiful losers actually won. Other than in the case of Ronald Reagan, they generally managed to lose even when they did win.

Little wonder, after the post-Reagan stewards of conservatism drove the movement to such depths that the GOP was nominating John McCain and Mitt Romney for president, that someone like Donald Trump could mount a hostile takeover of the party with a little bit of media savvy and a lot of boldness.

Trump gave the people, particularly on the Right, what we were looking for. And in doing so, he routed the third-era “conservatives,” the people I call the Bush Republicans, out of the party’s power centers.

But they’re still around, on the periphery of power.

And just like the elderly dead-enders at the No Kings rallies, they’re screeching from the sidelines in favor of old-fart thinking which hasn’t been relevant in a generation.

Take, for example, former senator John C. Danforth of Missouri, whom I bet you’d forgotten all about. Danforth, who is the better part of 90 years old, put up a guest column at the Wall Street Journal pushing some consultant-driven grift of an NGO by trashing Trump and MAGA and claiming that if the GOP just went back to being the Washington Generals all will be well.

“America’s center has collapsed. But it can be restored if Republicans return to their roots.”

That’s actually how this thing started. The Left is in the streets demanding Stephen Miller’s assassination and celebrating Charlie Kirk’s, they’re burning down Tesla dealerships and taking pot shots at ICE agents, and somehow it’s Republicans who bear the blame. (RELATED: Charlie Kirk and the Shame of the ‘However’ Progressives)

Danforth goes on…

Both political parties have gravitated toward their extremes, but given our backgrounds, our primary concern is the GOP, which is firmly under MAGA’s influence. MAGA Republicanism is an incoherent form of populism — sometimes leaning right, sometimes left. It isn’t the responsible, conservative party America needs.

Yeah, OK, gramps.

We believe that a responsible, conservative party in this country can be defined by five key principles that Republicans have historically championed, whatever their other differences. MAGA has turned these tenets upside down. But they are our party’s foundation, and we have adopted them for Our Republican Legacy — a nonprofit advocacy organization we established last year as a home for Republicans in exile.

Danforth goes on to enumerate these five principles that MAGA has turned upside down.

The first one, he says, is the rule of law, grounded in the U.S. Constitution. And Trump and MAGA are responsible for the loss of the rule of law in this country. Not the myriad abuses of Barack Obama and his weaponization of government, not the abject chaos of our Democrat-run cities, not the Fani Willises, Tish Jameses and Jack Smiths of the world, not the partisan-hack judges issuing national injunctions. It’s MAGA’s fault. (RELATED: The Judicial Coup Is Collapsing)

Then he assails MAGA for trashing American unity by taking on “identity politics” of the straight white male. After a half-century of open hostility to straight white men as our culture crumbled, Danforth thinks the answer is to stick his head in the sand and ignore the LGBT Alphabet mob, the snarling third wave feminists, the Black Lives Matter communist cats-paws and the other cultural revolutionaries, every one of whom have steeped themselves in identity politics, for the damage they’ve done. (RELATED: Away With the Absurdity That the Left and the Right Are Equally Vicious)

Then comes a dissertation on Trump’s fiscal irresponsibility, as though Danforth and the Bush Republicans have any room to talk. They helped build the welfare and regulatory states which are the source of that irresponsiblity. Danforth even has the temerity to assail the Big Beautiful Bill as making the deficit worse while the Democrats are keeping the government shut down out of a demand for $1.5 trillion in spending the bill made go away. (RELATED: Democrats Think Trump Is Vulnerable on the Economy. They’re Wrong.)

It’s one thing to be unsatisfied with current efforts at deficit reduction. It’s something else for third era Republicans to whine about the fiscal mote in anyone else’s eye.

He gives the old advocacy of strong defense, as though this is somehow a failing of MAGA.

And finally, Danforth says MAGA is the party of big government because of Trump’s tariffs and the fact that the federal government has taken non-voting stakes in various corporations as compensation for favorable trade policies (which is something of debatable utility, but at worst it’s a side effect of the trade policy decisions themselves). Danforth is assumedly a “free trader” in making these objections, but one reason the Bush Republicans are such dinosaurs is that their policies put American industry at such a terrible disadvantage vis-à-vis a predatory Chinese adversary raking in rapacious profits using slave labor and 19th-century environmental protections that civilized nations wouldn’t allow. (RELATED: Trump Proved ‘Experts’ Wrong About Tariffs)

And he throws out this churlish line: “no administration should direct what universities can teach, where law firms can practice, or whom comedians can mock.” As though the elected head of the federal government is outside of his power deciding who that government will do business with.

Let the Globetrotters goaltend, travel and shoot from out of bounds. That’s what the public paid to see, right? Except the public didn’t pay to see it, which is why Trump was elected, to Danforth’s regret.

Danforth’s column is pimping for something called Our Republican Legacy, which is “the conservative alternative to MAGA populism.”

In actuality, it’s a grift intended to fleece aging Republican donors into the idea that electing more gormless John C. Danforths is the way to do battle with the AOC’s, Adam Schiffs and Zohran Mamdanis of the world.

The third era is over. That doesn’t mean dead-ender old-fart thinking won’t try to keep it around a little longer.

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