The conservative movement is full of rage and ominous potential, with the former president as its figurehead.

In the early years of the shebeen, we used to have a semi-regular weekly feature called What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days? It was a survey of the state of our national dialogue. The management abandoned it because, frankly, it didn’t want to watch the damn Sunday Shows anymore. (And because other people, most notably the formidable Driftglass, were doing it better.) But last weekend, a disturbing pattern emerged among the various gobshites that does not bode well for the crisis that presently exists in our democratic republic. Call it the Church of the Savvy. Call it the Both Sides Conundrum. Whatever you call it, this illustrates the fact that, among our elite political press, there is a disinclination towards—or, more accurately, an abject terror of—looking the monster in the eye and calling it by its correct name. The elite political press is not wired for that. It is something beyond its comprehension.

The monster is the Republican Party, and the modern conservative movement that is its animating force. If the Republicans are Medusa, the modern conservative movement is her headful of snakes. It is bound and determined to destroy the current constitutional order and replace it with an autocratic plutocracy, because that is its only clear mission now. It is a party bereft of ideas and driven by a movement that has as its only fuel a reckless, poisonous nihilism. It is a beast to which the Republican Party gave life, and which the institutions of American society and American politics abetted out of denial and fear, leaving the monster to cry out now, in the words of Frankenstein’s Creature:

Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.

Elsewhere in the book, the Creature warns that, "I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other."

A while back, instead of looking the monster in the eye and calling it by name, the New York Times went out on another one of its Trump voter safaris and, unsurprisingly, it discovered yet another group of people who feel unloved and, therefore, will indulge their rage without regard for the rest of us.

Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for keeping schools shut down during the pandemic, embracing progressive policies focused on race and removing Confederate statues and monuments. She called this an example of critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become shorthand for a contentious debate on how to teach race and racism in schools.

Confronted by the monster’s indulging in its rage, which it builds within itself by repeatedly declaring itself unloved, much of the elite political press hides behind politesse for which the monster has no respect anyway. Chuck Todd tweeted out a lament that the president hasn’t been able to cobble together a coalition with Republicans to pass voting-rights legislation, instead of noting that voting rights have no constituency within the Republican Party anymore. The monster has devoured it.

Or the elite political press chose to dance among the gargoyles. The Times columnist Maureen Dowd, now a grotesque of journalism, actually made an issue out of the current president’s going home to Delaware, where he often goes to Mass and visits the graves of his wife and children.

But the real problem is the president himself, who can’t shake the cobwebs of the Judiciary Committee that held its biggest hearings in the same ornate caucus room where he met with Democrats on Thursday. He is too in the weeds on process. He’s so lost in the snows of yesteryear that he is continuing his Amtrak Joe nearly-every-weekend commute to Delaware, albeit with better wheels, trading in the train for Marine One.

And if that indecency doesn’t work, one can always try to appease the monster, an exercise of which this CNN report is the beau ideal.

A lot has changed in the year since Trump left Washington. Though his presidency ended in disgrace, his endorsement remains one of the most coveted prizes in Republican primaries. His political apparatus, after sending cease-and-desist letters to three of the largest GOP fundraising outfits last March, has now amassed more than $100 million in cash and convinced the Republican National Committee -- one of the letter recipients -- to partially cover some of his personal legal bills. And Trump's once-dysfunctional operation, which nearly blew up the Ohio US Senate primary with a premature and unvetted endorsement last spring, has become noticeably more organized in its assessment of candidates under the command of GOP campaign veteran Susie Wiles, who has ensured that Trump is briefed on the latest polling and field research before meeting with endorsement-seekers.

The former president is the face of the monster. He is its avatar. He is its ominous potential. He is a threat sui generis to the constitutional order. He needs to be stopped. He needs to be rendered irrelevant. He needs to be disarmed, defanged, and destroyed as a political force. So far, I don’t see any of us as being up to the job. Love denied has become rage indulged, and the monster is now all unappeased appetite.