...and whining that Democrats don't know anything about middle Murrica, boy do I have a Bulwark podcast for you.
Oh the things I do for the England.
At this point you might be asking yourself (for the hundredth time), "WTF is
wrong with these people?
Well gather 'round, kids, and old Unca Driftglass will tell you WTF is wrong with these people.
The begin with, the one thing elite political professional Never Trumpers now swear they never understood was [dramatic pause] their own fucking party. I know this because they have said as much, over and over again, for the last nine years. Complete surprise. Utter shock. Who could have predicted! Because it's either that, or they would have to cop to fucking well knowing better -- that they understood that their party was built on a foundation of racism, paranoia and rage -- but they never believed that the Vesuvius of bigots and imbeciles they had built would blow its top in their lifetime, or damage them personally.
Oops.
So having presided over the destruction of their own party, they rowed their lifeboats across the bay to a realm they understood even less: the Democratic party.
Never Trumpers don't know shit about Democrats. And they don't really care to know shit about Democrats. I've done my best to explain to them who we are and why we are the way we are, but they're, shall we say, aggressively disinterested in any of that. All they know or care about are the caricatures of Democrats they themselves helped manufacture in order to rile up their own base of bigots and imbeciles enough to get them to the polls and voting against their own interests.
And since they were run out of their own party, none of that has really changed. In computer terms, they've installed a few, shitty translation apps that helps them communicate basic concepts -- air, water, food, MSNBC -- but their basic hardware and operating systems remain virtually unchanged. And based on that, they are seized with the conviction that, in order to save!democracy! the entire Democratic party is obliged to tilt on its axis and change its orbit to accommodate them.
From Matthew Sheffield's essay on the subject over at Flux.
...Ever since Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016, we have heard constantly from self-described “centrists” that Democrats are painfully out of touch with White rural America, and that they need to do more to reach citizens who have been left behind by economic globalization and changing demographics and opinions, but if that really were the objective, why then has there been so much Never Trump resistance to Tim Walz, a jovial man from rural Minnesota who has a teacher’s talent for explaining himself? If you want agrarian outreach, Tim Walz is almost the perfect candidate to do it for Democrats, especially since he practices a full-inclusion model of politics that includes people of all races, sexes, beliefs, and orientations.
Tim Walz is everything these pundits pretended to want. What he isn’t is what they actually want, a conservative Democrat.
It’s more than a little ironic for me to complain about this as a former Republican, but the inconvenient truth is that there are way too many conservatives who gave up on their own party and are trying to turn Democrats into the party they once controlled before Trump took it over.
...Nine years after Trump first announced his candidacy, the Republican party as currently constituted is no place for conservatives. It is a reactionary authoritarian party. But instead of fighting the radical right within their own party, conservatives have been trying to move Democrats to the right, while also calling themselves “centrists.”
They cannot help themselves.
They hate the party they left behind, and they deeply resent the party that has generously given them refuge. All they have left are nostalgic memories of the Imaginary Republican Party of their youth, which is why, no matter what moves Democrats make or what Democrats believe or propose or accomplish, they will never stop insisting/demanding/cajoling the Democratic party to become Republican-lite.
They pine for the Imaginary Reagan Party of their childhood, and really believe that we'd all be better off if Democrats would just hand the keys over to them and let them save us from ourselves by dragging the party to the right far enough that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney would find themselves at home there.
And the more the Democratic party doesn't budge, the crankier they get. And because the media invited them to colonize cable news and America's op-ed pages, their little tantrums now cast wildly outsized shadows.
