Dr. Biden, I presume...

Ralph Alswang, White House 
photographer

Now eighty million American voters, well over fifty United States judges, and the electoral college have awarded the title of president elect to Joe Biden, mainstream conservative publications have a problem. Refusing to call Mr. Biden the president elect looks increasingly desperate, increasingly unrealistic, and with increasing clarity, it reveals a lack of respect for American democracy. At the same time, it seems evident a great many people with influence among conservatives don't believe in conceding with any grace. Perhaps they have internalized Winston Churchill's quote:

Nations which go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.

 Most of us can discern the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Democratic Party, but American politics has grown more extreme lately. Some conservative opinion journalists in search of a hill to defend have found one: they may have to call Mr. Biden the president, but to call the incoming first lady by her academic title of Dr. Biden: never.

It started with an essay in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal decrying Dr. Biden's use of her title, then spread to National Review, where one article gives the laxity of American libel standards a serious workout by suggesting, with no apparent basis save the writer's own opinion, the University of Delaware had chucked its standards to award a degree to the spouse of a senator.

It was a series of petty and hypocritical attacks on an accomplished woman for daring to use an academic title she has an absolute right to. It also refuted itself in an almost comic fashion, asking us to imagine the use of Dr. Biden's title suddenly mattered right after the courts swept away a series of lawsuits attempting to overturn the judgement of millions of American voters. The usual terms, such as patronizing and misogynist, certainly applied. I didn't have much to add to these until I happened upon a YouTube clip of West Wing.

In this clip, a choir sings the carol Little Drummer Boy while one of the staffers attends a military funeral he has arranged for a homeless veteran. What does this have to do with Jill Biden's doctorate? Only this: it reminded me of the way so many conservatives have abandoned any pretense at the principles they used to hold.

Remember Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of Humayun Khan? Humayun Khan gave his life for his country; his gold star parents,  Khizr and Ghazala Khan, spoke out against Donald Trump's scapegoating of Muslims at Hilary Clinton's Democratic Convention, and, to put it politely, Donald Trump brushed them off. Among all the standards and rules Donald Trump and his enablers and toadies have disrespected, that one still sticks in my memory.

Why? Because it used to be a principle of conservatives, everywhere, to honour the sacrifices of those who put their lives on the line for their country. It used go beyond the obvious, rational calculation: any country, any movement, with a belief in using armed force to support itself in any situation must respect those who fall in its defence. Conservatives used to assert this as a moral principle: a responsibility to respect the debt those who benefit from a soldier's sacrifice have to both soldier and survivors. Donald Trump paid that principle scant respect, and for me his contempt stands in for all the other American institutions and understandings he has loudly proclaimed his contempt for.

A hand full of honourable conservatives have opposed him. Some have resisted all the way; others, a few, have followed him part of the way down the path and then said one or other statement or action of his went too far. But the great mass of the conservative movement rolled with Donald Trump and his movement: rolled over one principle after another.

So now conservatives have planted a threadbare flag, a flag denuded of respect for elections, for limited government, for the rule of law, for fiscal prudence. The flags borne by Trump's followers do not stand for any consideration for those who have laid down their lives for their country, even to the point of indicating the most basic respect for the debt Americans owe to Humayan Khan, his parents, and by extension their community. But they have still planed a flag, and they still have a principle: the most petty of academic snobberies, a notion barely worth a snort or sneer in any faculty common room. They have a transparently political claim, one they rightly declined to spill a drop of ink or disturb a single electron with until Joe Biden won the presidential election. 

I would dare conservatives to try to come up with something more risible and pathetic, but I fear their Trump-induced quicksand has no bottom.