Magnets! No one even knows how they work, but there they've been, since the world began 9,000 years ago, making it possible to manufacture extremely inexpensive bolt and screw holding dishes, and providing crucial plot points for groundbreaking teevee shows.
Magnets are also useful in one other way: generating metaphors.
For example, did you know that, despite the name "magnet" as in "magnet", they can also repel each other? It's true! I proved this using Science and two Scotty dog magnets I bought from a train station vending machine when I was five or six.
As I recall, we were waiting on the Denver Zephyr to take us out west to see relatives. One round-trip coach ticket cost $47.30. It was good for six months.
Anyway, one of the things you can do with magnets is force two north or two south poles together, if you apply sufficient force. I could push my Scotty dog magnets (but were they really "mine?" Do any of us really "own" the magnets in our lives?) and make them touch north to north or south to south, then let go and they would jump apart. Hours of entertainment on the long trip to Denver!
Later in life I learned that there were different kinds of magnets, but you could still play with them the same way -- forcing north to north or south to south. However the amount of force required was...considerably different.
And this is what our little alliance with the Never Trumpers has been so far: the smothering, hydraulic fascism of Donald Trump and the Republican party were enough to hold this coalition of otherwise repulsive forces together.
But this also where our analogy begins to fall apart.
First, because the two forces were wildly asymmetrical in size: 97% the OG Democratic party coalition smooshed in with 3% recently-former Republicans cast out of the shithole empire they had made.
Second, because the two forces were wildly asymmetrical in terms of expectations. Dirty hippies like me were scolded repeatedly that it was just plain rude to expect these arrivistes to, y'know, admit they'd been wrong. Or apologize. Or even minimally acknowledge that us dirty hippies got it right. Or reflect honestly on the lifetime of labor they had spent on behalf of Team Evil. Or talk about the Before Time and how we got to where we are.
In fact, quite the opposite has happened. They have been left free to go right on blaming the Left for much of the mess they had made. To continue to "Both Sides" Republican atrocities. To carp about how we ran our party and roll their eyes at issues that matter to us: issues on which the Democratic party -- which now shelters them -- was built. And, in general, carry on like aggrieved elite guests who had expected 5-star service from us Democratic menials and loudly complain to the management when they don't get it.
And above all, they demanded the media spotlight. To be the center of attention, and the arbiters of public discourse. And what little was left of the "liberal" media consented, no strings attached.
But this was all supposed to be temporary, right? They were to cohabit with us, and we were charged with putting up with their bad manners and sense of arrogant entitlement, until such time as Trump was defeated. Which they supposed would be fairly easy given their delusion that the problem was just a handful of bad actors, while the rest of the GOP were just dupes and innocents who Trump bamboozled.
And then they found out the ugly truth. The truth we had been trying to tell them all along, and which they refused to believe. That it's not just Trump. Not just a few bad actors. It's the whole shebang. The whole fucking party, from "the root to the fruit" as the saying goes.
That means the Republican party is going to be a bone in the throat of American democracy for decades to come, and ridding ourselves of its toxins is going to be a long, slow grind, against which the fascists will fight us every inch of the way. Which is not what our Never Trump allies signed up for. They were, as the saying goes, "here for a good time, not a long time". The plan was to use our party, our media, our energy, our resources to, as the saying goes, "decapitate the regime". They would then return to their own party where, as the saying goes, the would "be greeted as liberators".
But that dream is dead.
And so, facing the realization that there will never be a hospitable Republicans party to go back to, and the only viable alternative are people you spent the last 30 years professionally hating, for many Never Trumpers the external force keeping them in grudging alliance with us dirty hippies has begun to falter, and they find themselves in a kind of civic freefall. So, with nothing to orient them but their own, internal ideological gyroscope, they are returning to their truest forms.
For example, this is where you find the one-time main pitchman for The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes: decamped to a standalone podcast where he has the likes of Adam Kinzinger, Ryan Lizza, Tom Nichols and Chris Cillizza on continuous rotation. A frictionless environment where the strawman Left can catch strays all day long without a discouraging word ever being uttered.
Or Mona Charen (above) who, in this Trump 2.0 timeline, has also shed herself of her weekly Bulwark roundtable podcast. In her new digs she can hang out with the likes of disgraced former The Atlantic writer, Kevin Williamson, and Both Sides to her heart's content, and there's no one around to say otherwise.
Or Bloody Bill Kristol, reverting to type like neocon memory plastic the minute the prospect of invasion and conquest in the middle east was raised.
Do not doubt that it is a new world, because it is. And these unreconstructed Republican "allies" of ours are figuring out that there is no going back to the way things used to be. But their creed is a brittle one, and reverence for an imaginary Conservative golden age is the only scripture they have left, and frankly they're too old to change now. So within the political physics of this new and frightening world, they seek out/create habitats where they can continue, as much as possible, to wear the old vestments, practice the old rites, and chant the old holy words.
