It’s a movie we’ve seen over and over again in US politics. Centrists engage in respectful discussion with a thoughtful conservative[1], only to discover they are actually talking to a dishonest troll. Yet, just like Charlie Brown lining up to kick Lucy’s football, they keep coming back for another try.

Examples include Paul “policy wonk” Ryan, JD “voice of the heartland” Vance, and most recently Richard Hanania, for whom I can’t come up with a suitable nickname. Hanania’s public writing has always skirted the edge of outright racism, so it was no surprise when it turned that he had published far worse stuff under a pseudonym. That was enough to lead Bari Weiss to cancel him, but the majority reaction among his interlocutors was to accept a redemption narrative.

Hanania rewarded his backers with a tweet so breathtakingly dumb it’s still hard to believe. Challenged on his opposition to aiding Ukraine, he asserted that the US was spending 40 per cent of GDP on such aid, and laid out some of the alternative ways the money could be spend (years of funding for social security, for example).

This claim was so absurd that lots of people looked for an 11-dimensional chess explanation. Sadly, the prosaic explanation appears to be that US aid is equal to about 40 per cent of Ukraine’s GPD. Hanania must have read this number and misinterpreted it. That could only be done by someone utterly clueless about economics and public policy, but Hanania hasn’t needed a clue to become a big fish in the small pool of rightwing intellectuals.

Why do centrists keep falling for this? The answer, to paraphrase Voltaire is that, since no-one like the imagined intelligent, honest conservative exists, they have to be invented. In reality, intelligent honest conservatives, are either ex-Republicans (for example, David French and the Bulwark group) or open enemies of democracy (Adrian Vermeule).

But once they recognise that there is no serious thought to their political right, centrists would have to recognise that they themselves are the conservatives. That would entail an intellectual obligation to engage with the left, which is the last thing they want.

All of this was true well before the rise of Donald Trump, though Trump’s rise crystallised what was previously part of a mix of competing ideas. As I observed in 2013,

Pluralities of US conservatives believe, or at least claim to believe, that:

• The President of the US is a socialist Muslim, born in Kenya
• The earth is less than 10 000 years old
• Mainstream science is a communist plot
• Armed revolution will likely be necessary in the near future

The last of these has gone from prediction to actual insurrection, with more threatened..

No one who openly rejects these propositions, and others like them, can last long in the Republican party, or in the mainstream of the conservative movement.

The centrist project is to engage in serious policy discussion with conservatives while treating such delusional statements as mere shibboleths. Long experience shows that this doesn’t work.

fn1. This term isn’t really satisfactory, but neither “rightwinger” nor “Republican” works well either.