Never Trumper Agonistes

As you may have noticed, most of your Never Trump allies are heavily into eye rolling the rest of the political universe for not being as wise and savvy as they are.  By their lights, Republicans are fools for not taking any of the dozens of the "Leaving Crazytown" Trump off-ramps they've been offered, and Democrats are feckless dopes who don't know how to run a political party.

Literally all they do is bitch and bitch and bitch about everyone else, pat themselves on the back for figuring out at some point between 2016 and 2020 that their Republican party was -- gasp! -- full of Republicans, and (on their many, heavily promoted podcasts, op-ed columns, books and round-the-clock cable news appearances) complain that no one listens to them.  

Which, over in the Better Universe, might make for an amusing minor work by Tom Stoppard or a grim minor work by Samuel Beckett.  But over in this universe these goobers have so thoroughly colonized cable teevee and the op-ed pages of major publications that nary a contrary opinion can be heard.

Except here.

Here we are free from the Never Trumper's "Remembering Pre-2016 is Off Limits" Procrustean bed of analysis and can explore the long, wide and clearly marked trajectory that all Republicans have been on for decades that finally led to Trump.

And the common trait shared among all Republican taste-makers and Conservative media barons-- the trait  that has sustained them through all trials and tribulations of the past half century -- was their indestructible smugness.  Their capacity to float safely above all the rage and racism of their party as it actually existed on the ground -- above all the chaos and ruin their policies were causing real people in the real world --  on a fart-cloud of their own moral superiority.  

Thumb through the yellowing pages of the Before Times editions of respectable and influential journals of their public intellectuals and strategists and what jumps out at you is how remarkably similar they are in spirit to what Limbaugh and his loathsome imitators were doing on radio for decades and, later, on Fox.  The same steady barrage of Liberal demonization as America-hating, terrorist loving, commie dupes and depraved baby-killing monsters: the language was softer and the syllables-per-word count was higher, but the unified message from across the Conservative propaganda constellation was the same -- anyone to the Left of us is a degenerate threat to civilization, and anyone to the Right of us, no matter how clearly, bugfuck crazy they are, is an ally.

The "No enemies to the Right" ethos that has held the modern Right together since Goldwater, and put the Right on an inexorable path to Trump.  

As we join this conversation with Messrs Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols note how these two products of a Conservative political and media culture that has been fueled for decades by continuously demonizing and slandering Liberals like you and me in the ugliest terms imaginable.  

Nichols: I think those go hand in hand -- cowardly and venal -- and simply saying, "Well this is just my default setting."  Because the other thing they've done -- and you and I have talked about this -- they have all internalized the dogma that any Democrat winning anything anywhere is the end of civilization as we know it... Even though they know better the dogma in the Republican party is Donald Trump, David Duke, Benito Mussolini, Juan Peron ... hey, as long as the guy is not a Democrat, y'know we'll take our chances. I think it's so they can look at themselves in the mirror and say gosh I'm not really this venal and craven I'm doing something important and big...

What's mind-blowing is Nichols -- who is a highly educated man -- implying that this "dogma" that "any Democrat winning anything anywhere is the end of civilization as we know it" is some brand new thing.  And that only those mentally stunted Trump Republican zombies over there have have been taken in by it.

This is why recently-former Republicans like Sykes and Nichols would rather shit out nine porcupines sideways than put up with some mouthy Liberal with receipts talking about the state of their Superawesome Republican Party before 2016.  

Because, as some wag pointed out (just three short paragraphs ago) for decades, the go-go juice that has powered the political and media culture that created these men -- the ideological noosphere in which they have been steeping for their entire adult lives -- has been exactly that kind of continuous, escalating demonization of Democrats as America-hating, civilization-ending buffoons.   It was so ubiquitous that, at some point, they just stopped noticing that these were the filthy waters that were sustaining them. 

It was such the mother tongue of these motherfuckers that they still can't stop shitting on Liberals.  

And the idea that the Left was actually right all along?  While they were so, so very wrong?  Well that is too horrifying to even contemplate.

Which is why goofs like Nichols and Sykes are so rabid about either not remembering the actual past at all (Comedy Central videos are no longer embeddable, so if you want to revisit Jon Stewart's epic Potato Day rant from 2009, you'll need to go here.) --

-- or just completely inverting the actual past Jeanine Pirro-style.   Blue Gal double double dog dares you to make it past the first minute of this 2016 video without shutting it off in disgust.

Here is a bit of the transcript:

We have a new president elect…. His name is Donald J Trump. So move over Barack. Move over Hillary, Harry, Jill and all you namby-pamby pathetic losers still crying in your grande double shot skinny lattes...

There was a time in this country when we united behind the flag in celebration of America's new president, our new leader. We all did so in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected.

We had high hopes for a united country, irrespective of our politics.

And it’s time for the left, assuming they are capable, to show the same dignity and class to the 45th president-elect.

Back to Messrs Sykes and Nichols. 

Sykes: I'm going to make just some distinctions here that some people might not like and and that even I am uncomfortable making. That there's a certain mindset that was necessary to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 which I rejected, but you could at least hope that he might be something different, right?

Nichols: Right 

Sykes:  Right 

driftglass:  Wrong.  100% fucking wrong.

Sykes: By 2020 you knew, completely who he was and what he would do, okay. But certainly there's the, I guess, the inertia of going along with the incumbent.  But think about the mentality that it takes now to support Donald Trump for 2024. 

If you have listened to Never Trumpers over time, as I have, you will have noticed how the threshold for Republican ouchless absolution keeps moving.  Keeps getting dragged further and further towards the present.  

First it was 2016.  If you voted for Trump in 2016, you were dead to me!

Then it was, well, OK, but if you supported him in 2020, fuhgeddaboudit.  

Now it's, OK, well, maybe in 2020 you had derp derp inertial reasons.  But 2024?  Not great Bob!

Sykes:  After his shambolic term.  But also after his attempt to overturn the government. To say after January 6th, and everything we've learned about January 6, everything he has said, all of his bleats... to say now that we would support his return to the Oval Office requires, I would say, a much more corrupted mentality even than the vote in 2016 and 2020. 

Nichols:  It's a moral failure.  And I, y'know. I took a lot of flack as you did in 2016, right?  People like you and I were saying, "Look, we get it, but this really is a test of character, y'know.  That you got to be able to see through this guy."  But, okay, fine.  Even I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt for a while. I mean I when he struck Syria I went on television I defended him.  I thought, y'know, that first State of the Union a little shaky, but I said okay he seems like he's y'know... But as you say, by 2020 you know who he is.  By 2021 -- by January 7th, 2021 -- you know exactly who he is.

Sykes: Exactly.

Now attend the following very closely, keeping in mind that these men are the creatures of a Conservative political and ideological movement, which has been powered for decades by 1) their smug certainty of the Right's moral superiority and 2) The non-stop-slagging-Democrats-as-depraved-morons vocabulary of Rush Limbaugh and tactics of Gingrich.  Never had a problem calling a Liberal everything but a child of God (as my grandma used to day), but now go through the agonizes of the damned at the thought of looking at the fascists and klansmen who have been their fellow travelers for decades and having to choke out the words, maybe, just maybe, "you're not a good person".

Nichols: And now in 2023, after two more years of this, y'know, this is where I just find myself... I hate it because it's so destructive to our sense of community and and citizenship.  But somebody today who says to me "I'm gladly  voting for Trump in 2024", I feel like I'm turning them and saying maybe you're not a good person?

Sykes: Yeah.

Nichols: Y'know?  And I don't want to do that because there's people that love their families and they're good to their kids and all things but there's almost like there's this moral blind spot or this... this kind of moral trap that says I'm a good person but I'm going to vote for this horrendous dangerous sociopath simply because it's going to annoy other people and it's going to make me feel like I'm part of a club and I'm gonna go wave my flags and you know put my trump flyers on my truck.  These are not the actions of a civic and serious people 

Because they are not now and never have been a civic and serious people.

Sykes: So let's talk about what this next term would be and why I find what Brian Kemp is saying so just sort of mind-blowing. I  mean, look, this is not a referendum 2024.  It's not a referendum on Trump's first term as president which I think was was horrific and terrible but, y'know people can disagree about this.  

Once again, at every available opportunity, we see Sykes lowering the threshold for absolving his former Republican colleagues.  Trump's first term as president was objectively horrific.  People who disagree are unfit to be citizens of my country.

Sykes: But 2024 will also be a referendum on what we want the presidency to be.  So the New York Times had this story over the weekend which I think is very very detailed and also reflects exactly what Trump and the Trumpets have said openly and, y'know, repeatedly.  We used to be the party of small government...

Except, you were never the "small government" party.  

And now one, last, small thing that I have noticed.  A consistent verbal tic across all Never Trump media:  that some travesty by Trump Republicans can almost never be simply, objectively bad in and of itself.  It almost always has to be framed as nearly as bad as what those fucking Lefties are up to.

Sykes: I keep thinking that we're living through this simulation, y'know thinking.  That somebody's going, "Well, what if we did this? Well, how would people react? And so what if we actually had conservative Republicans who sounded like Code Pink Looney Leftists?"  

It's not a simulation, Charlie.  

Believe me, if it were I'd know exactly what to do.

Burn The Lifeboats