Over Memorial Day weekend, the president* announced that he would be bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom upon Arthur Laffer, the man whose ruinous economic nonsense has been the cause of so much of the country's fiscal miseries over the past 40 years. The father of "supply-side" economics, Laffer's theories have been tested and they have failed everywhere they've been tried. But he and his fellow fantast, Stephen Moore, wrote a book praising the economic policies of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, so he gets an important bauble hung around his neck, where it will contest for space with what Laffer's theories wrought in Kansas under Sam Brownback, which should hang around both of their necks like a dead possum until the last trump sounds. I can't believe Erich von Daniken isn't also on the list, and where's Alex Jones, anyway?

However, the idea of honoring Laffer at this time fits right into an inauspicious time for America's conservatives, for it was the Reagan Administration's adoption of Laffernomics that was the critical vector by which the prion disease entered the conservative—and, therefore, the Republican—brain. If you can believe that, you can believe that a zygote is an individual human being, that there are Iranian "moderates" to whom you can sell missiles, and that there are lagoons of deadly poisons somewhere in the mountains of Iraq. It was swearing allegiance to Laffer's crackpot ideas that the first guide-wires attaching American conservatism, and the Republican Party, came undone. If you can believe that cutting taxes invariably raises revenues, you can believe anything, and conservative Republicans have been believing anything until, now, over the past two years, their long road has ended in downtown Crazyland. They're wandering around, blinking, and asking guys playing with their toes in the mud how to get the hell out of this dead-end town.

Laffer's economic theory served as the critical vector for the prion disease as it entered the conservative brain. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

Stipulated: the Republican capacity to believe anything, encouraged by the modern conservative movement, and the conservative media's unmatched ability to monetize it, made someone like the current president* not only possible, but also inevitable. We can count ourselves marginally fortunate that the guy in the low-water golf pants is so bad at what he's trying to do. The main event in American conservatism over the next several years is going to be a monumental pissing match over the best strategy to consign these obvious truths to the same memory hole where they stashed the events of 2000-2008 and the detritus of the Avignon Presidency. And the first real brawl in this existential pie fight is going on right now.

If you've been anywhere near the electric Twitter machine over the past few days, you likely have been deafened by the salvos occasioned by a guy named Sohrab Ahmari and a guy named David French, who ran for president for 11 minutes in 2016. Basically, Ahmari, who is the op-ed editor of the New York Post—and yes, you too, friends, can have a career in hazardous waste disposal!—made the case that French was not colossal dick enough to be a True Conservative in the era of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. This came as something of a surprise to those of us outside the lodge who remember such silver-studded highlights as this one from Mr. French in the National Review:

While the vast, vast majority of abortion-rights supporters don’t identify with Satanists and would recoil from comparison with the Church of Satan, prominent Satanist involvement in the abortion debate does have a clarifying effect. A person who is willing to kill another person for the sake of preserving their own prosperity or emotional health is declaring that their life is supreme — their existence is at the center of all things. This is the core of Satanist theology. So when Satanists declare their creeds, they strike uncomfortably close to the rotten core of the abortion-rights regime.

Dunno. Anybody who can peddle that swill should be colossal dick enough for any conservative hootenanny. But Ahmari is not backing down, and he is puffing himself up into a dick so colossal that it blots out the sun. From First Things:

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” (What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.)

So, the intellectual mainspring of the former Wingo Bugle is triggered by something that happened in a library an entire continent away? Looks like snow from here. But the winner at our game of Bobbing For Stupid is one Matthew Schmitz, who lined up against French and tweeted that French was a hypocrite because, while writing against our national fleshpots, he also watched Game of Thrones, which had nekkid ladies. I'm telling you, the level of debate here is Lincolnesque.

Donald Trump is the inevitable product of a conservative movement that would believe Laffer’s theories. Getty Images

(Also, it should be noted that this isn't the first time that First Things, the legacy publication of whackadoo Father Richard John Neuhaus, has hinted at the need for civil war. They once ran an entire issue that came dangerously close to recommending armed sedition over Roe v. Wade. Neuhaus was a convert to Catholicism, as is Ahmari, and as is Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist. It is incumbent upon all cradle Catholics to warn our fellow citizens of the dangers to the public order posed by people who joined HMC because they like the authoritarian legalisms and the Renaissance set decoration.)

Look, reading through this stuff, I feel like Lemuel Gulliver, except I don't know if I've washed up in Lilliput or in the land of the Houyhnhnms. As far as I'm concerned, they can all find a deserted island and hash this stuff out, Lord of the Flies style, while the rest of warm to the task of putting the country back together again. Maybe they can bring George Will down from the mountaintop as some kind of shaman to cast a spell over them so they can all forget that American conservatism wandered into bedlam with its eyes open, and its hands out. Will has no more immunity to the prion disease than the rest of them do.

Here he is in a recent condensation of his latest book-like product, talking about the now-famous "You didn't build that" riff that Barack Obama copped from Elizabeth Warren.

Warren, like Obama, was energetically refuting propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context and all attainments are, to some extent, enabled and conditioned by contexts that are shaped by government.

Hold on there, walking antimacassar. The Republican Party, at its 2012 National Convention, dedicated one whole night to asserting that proposition. I watched an endless parade of speakers assert that they did indeed Build That. Many of them got their start in a big government program called the United States Army, but never mind. The night culminated with a speech from Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, who baldly asserted that Oklahomans built their state with little or no help from big government. Homestead Act? Cavalry eliminating those pesky Natives? Oil depletion allowance? Bosh. Oklahomans built Oklahoma, dammit. This, of course, is insane.

Will was on MSNBC on Monday morning, explaining to the gang there that Donald Trump is no kind of conservative. No, sir. Not him. Somebody should dust the president* for Will's fingerprints.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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