Jack Butler writes for National Review Online about Americans’ questionable political choices 10 years ago.
It’s difficult to improve upon Dan McLaughlin’s exhaustive documentation of the 2012 presidential election campaign, and more difficult still to dispute his thesis: “If 2016 exposed the destruction of the post-war American political order, 2012 was the election that broke it.” I just want to add a few observations of my own about that time, as I’m young enough for it to have been the first presidential election I followed as a reasonably educated and informed adult, and to add a related thesis of my own: 2012 might have been America’s last chance for a “normal” politics. …
… Like many conservatives, I was also not completely sold on Mitt Romney as the nominee, having enjoyed the candidate merry-go-round that prevailed during that nominating cycle. (I even held out for Mitch Daniels, but he demurred.) But once Romney won, negative partisanship sufficed to make me share the journey of Romney’s presidential campaign, mostly by checking National Review, of which I was already a reader. …
… So when the results rolled in, I, of course, ended up disappointed, as did many of my friends on the campus of Hillsdale College, where I was then a sophomore. But it took a while for some of the 2012 election’s more destabilizing effects to wend through our politics. The perception — not entirely unjustified — that Romney did not ‘fight’ hard enough eventually overcame the initial pessimism about the possibilities for the Right in the aftermath of Romney’s defeat, ultimately congealing into the ‘middle finger’ of Donald Trump in 2016. That middle finger owed much of its appeal and potency to the sort of trolling and triumphalism that the Left, convinced its coalition truly was ascending, began to display as Obama’s second term proceeded — especially after Democrats lost control of the Senate and the Left began looking elsewhere, both in the machinery of the state and in the commanding heights of the culture, for victories.
