A month ago, I asked Twitter, “When did ‘never Trump,’ morph into ‘only Democrats’? What is conservative about working for Democratic majorities?”
There were many rebarbative replies, it being Twitter. But one superficially logical response was that the party deserves obliteration because almost no Republican has stood up to President Trump; they’ve all become his creatures, “playing team sports with politics,” siding with their guy rather than holding him accountable.
To this, there are at least two obvious and reasonable replies.
First, do you really think politics became a team sport only with Trump? Check your selective memory and see if you can recall any Democratic senator voting “guilty” at President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial for offenses he obviously committed. Democrats 22 years ago followed their leader’s conclusion that they’d “just have to win.” Simple as that.
Second, it is cynical to assume that Republicans who stick with Trump are acting in bad faith. Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist of Maine, and conservatives such as Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Cory Gardner of Colorado choose to avoid a breach with the leader of their party. Yes, there is a niggling, unavoidable thought that if they had done otherwise, Trump or his supporters might punish them. But even if such considerations are part of what is weighed in the scales, they might actually do themselves an electoral favor by distancing themselves more from the president — it’s not unprincipled to decide against repudiating the leader voters chose in 2016. Yet the Never Trump crowd, supposedly conservatives and Republicans, attacks them all indiscriminately as sycophants and Trump toadies. As a Washington Examiner editorial noted recently, the “broadly conservative” Lincoln Project egregiously called Collins a “fraud.”
The Lincoln Project is named to imply a return to Republican values, but it is working not simply to elect Joe Biden but also to defeat Republican senators and give the Left control of both sides of Capitol Hill. Why would conservatives grease the skids for Biden’s agenda, which is acknowledged to be the blue party’s “most progressive” ever by the Justice Democrats, an extremist organization that promotes such militants as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley?
Wouldn’t it make sense for supposed conservatives who can’t abide Trump to work hard as dammit to keep the GOP’s Senate majority? To a true Republican conservative, that outcome would make Biden’s election more palatable. His agenda would be blocked until an acceptable conservative could be elected on the Republican ticket in 2024.
But Occam’s Razor suggests instead that many, though not all, of those who present themselves as Trump-hating conservatives and Republicans aren’t either of those things anymore. Some never were. The Lincoln Project gets much of its money from super-rich longtime Democratic donors. It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck — it’s a Democratic organization, and it is deceptive about it.
There’s another point that will be unwelcome to self-identifying conservatives who wish to extirpate the GOP in November. It is that they are acting quite a bit more like Trump than they’d care to admit.
Sometimes, a sledgehammer is the best tool for the job at hand, and Trump is a political sledgehammer. He irrupted into the Republican primary in 2015, smashing norms as merrily as his most fervent supporters could desire. And he has continued to do so in office. Many of those who elected him in 2016 yearned to destroy the two-party dispensation which, with justification, they saw as brushing aside their concerns about illegal immigration, depressed earnings, and an overweening politically correct culture. They wanted to punish the class of politicians who had visited these predations upon the middle and lower classes.
Now, Trump’s most savage critics are doing the same thing. They don’t desire only to get rid of him but also to punish those who made him possible. They have for years threatened vengeance on anyone with the temerity to disagree with them and serve the president. Answering the call used to be thought admirable; it was called public service. But the insouciant caste discomfited by Trump four years ago now wants to salt the earth in which Trump flourished and make sure nothing ever grows there again.
This is what the ancient Romans, according to legend, did to exact their revenge and make sure Carthage never rose again. These days, salting the earth remains familiar enough, but it comes in a new variety. Those who don’t acquiesce must be broken. Disagreement is excoriated as unpardonable evil. It’s called cancel culture, and it’s very à la mode.
