The dream of all partisans, whether players or pundits, is to engage in the great political battles.
The need to pick sides and to find those who share their convictions is a fundamental need of most human beings, as crucial as shelter and perhaps as important as well.
This being so, picture the shock of some center-rightists who awoke on the morning of Nov. 8, 2016, to find not that their side had won or been beaten but that their side no longer existed. What’s worse, it might never have been there at all.
Had Hillary Clinton won, it would have united Republicans seeking to contain her, putting Trump and his temperament behind them in the past. A Clinton win would have let the party go on with its job of trying to tend to its own coalition, absorbing Trump’s populist followers into its conservative frame to the extent possible.
But when Trump won, to his own surprise and that of most others, the party broke open into unequal parts. There were the intense Trump supporters who thought dissent equaled treason, the centrists or realists who tried to respond to events on a case-by-case basis, and a small group of foes who called for resistance and spent most of their time in MSNBC’s studios, calling most of their old friends complicit in evil.
Of these, the first and third seemed pleased, if not thrilled, with the roles they had taken. But the center-right, which tries being transactional, seems unhappy whatever it does.
On their left are those who believe in “hate speech” and “safe spaces.” They think race is definitive and gender a choice. They want to put Chick-fil-A and Masterpiece Bake Shop out of business because of the owners’ religious convictions. They want to keep Catholics off the Supreme Court if “the dogma lives in them.” They pose with a pretend severed head of the president and produce plays in which actors made up to look like him are dramatically murdered on stage.
On their right are the goons who shove people at rallies, boo at war heroes when Trump bids them do it, and cheerfully swallow the Confederate relics and rallies, the uncalled-for vulgarities, and the white supremacists he somehow may draw to their side. The center-right hates building up either side, as it so dislikes both, but sometimes there’s not much it can do.
Aside from the problems of policy issues, there’s always the matter of friends. Ties of years’ standing are strained, stressed, or broken because one party or the other leaned too far in the direction of Trump or his critics for the other’s peculiar but finely-honed taste.
Some people have stopped talking, some shun certain topics, some tiptoe on eggshells, lest a word may offend.
An article published this year about a party at the home of a long-time conservative showed he had dropped his old friends for a new set of people, far to the left of the prior contingent, under the stress of events.
What will become of us all as this process continues? Will we know who we are at the end of it?
