Four years ago, Bret Stephens revealed himself to be a political defeatist without a clue. Now heading into the next election, he apparently thought his readers needed a reminder that nothing has changed.
The New York Times columnist wrote Monday that he’s setting aside politics (how noble) and voting for Joe Biden because even though he and the former vice president have nothing in common ideologically, he’s ready for things to quiet down a little, and a Biden presidency will accomplish that goal.
Gosh, what will conservatives do now without an influential warrior such as Stephens on their side?
“The success of liberal centrism,” wrote Stephens, “now rests on the success of Biden’s candidacy; if Trump defeats him in November, the party could lurch far to the left, just as Republicans lurched far to the right after the successive losses by the McCain and Romney campaigns. Conservatives who worry that a Biden win will empower progressive Wokesters should fear how much more empowered they’ll be should he lose.”
There’s a winning argument if there ever was one: I’m scared of what liberals and the social justice mob will do if we don’t put them in power, so just give it to them!
The piece is humiliating in its self-spanking. Stephens writes at one point, “Whatever else he does, Biden won’t expend his political capital belittling, demeaning and humiliating other Americans.” Sure, President Trump tweets mean things about the people who hate him or want him to fail. Why would that in any way be justification for handing the keys over to the AOCs and Ilhan Omars over America?
Stephens said that, no, Biden’s win means that, in fact, “even if the most vocal and visible sides of the Democratic Party have become more progressive, a majority of its voters haven’t.”
That’s not what happened. The voters didn’t rush to Biden. He went to them.
When Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington said last week, “As soon as we get him in the White House, and even before with these task forces that we had, we were able to significantly push Joe Biden to do things that he hadn’t signed on to before,” that’s what she was talking about.
Biden even got a full-throated endorsement from Bernie Sanders, something that the last Democratic presidential nominee didn’t get — even after giving Sanders a prime-time speaking slot at the 2016 convention!
The bottom line is that Stephens doesn’t like the fight, so his default position is to surrender.
He’s been that way for a long time.
In 2016, he wrote that “the best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president.”
In 2015, he wrote an open letter to “fellow conservatives,” advising they all “fast-forward past that sinking October feeling when we belatedly realize we’re going to lose — and lose badly.” (Trump ended up winning, and Republicans had control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in a decade.)
Immediately after the 2012 election, he wrote that “the GOP dodged a bullet with [Mitt] Romney’s loss.”
And at the start of that year, he wrote that “Republicans deserve to lose.”
When was the last time Stephens actually predicted or even rooted for the success of the party that is supposed to be, at the very least, an opposing force against the liberal excesses he criticizes?
Stephens admits he’s now a “Biden conservative.” But he’s also, in every sense, a loser.
