Right now, Never Trumpers are proving to be effective allies. Right now, I value their impact on the most important election in American history.
However, I am very mindful that they are TEMPORARY allies only! They will soon return to their core convictions: opposition to progress and protection of wealth.
When I look at Never Trumpers, I ask myself whether they are willing to examine the origins of Trumpism in their own actions and beliefs. As we all know very well, Trump merely cashed in on an ideological machine built to preserve wealth by cultivating racist, sexist paranoia. Never Trumpers helped build that machine and defended it for decades. For many of them, opposition to Trump is largely a matter of style, old money robber barons despising gauche new money. The Bush patriarchy doesn’t object to Trumpist policies, just his crudeness.
I feel some grudging respect for Steve Schmidt who has held the party and himself responsible. Jennifer Rubin? Not so much, though I must confess I don’t follow here closely.
But my bigger concern is for the Never Trump Enterprise, which is gathering cash and consolidating talent to attack the Orange Idiot. Let me clear: I am glad they are attacking Trump. But make no mistake: the moneyed forces behind that movement have no interest in our concern for our interests. The minute Trump is gone and normal governmental service is restored they will turn on us and return to supporting the oligarchy.
Here’s my read of the Never Trump support of Biden. In it, we see that they couldn’t care less about the Republican Party in itself. The minute it stops serving them, they are gone.
However, they know that they need control of a major party. Assuming Biden takes office, the Never Trumpers will have 3 options:
- Retake the Republican Party. This would be easiest IF they feel they can restore the party’s brand and reputation after the damage Trump did. And a key to that is what to do with the extremists they have relied on for a quarter century. Will those folks wander off? Be willing to return to the mainstream?
- Abandon the Republican Party and start up a “centrist” party defending wealth and social conservatism but repudiating extremism, at least on the surface. Re-learn the lessons William F. Buckley taught the movement in the 1960s: push the hate and racism underground. This has happened in the distant past and could happen again. I have no idea how hard it would be. They’d have to know that they could bring the core of the GOP infrastructure with them.
- Take over the Democratic Party and weed out the progressives. I actually imagine that Never Trumpers are assessing that strategy and that Never Trump support of Biden is a dry run.
For many years, I have felt that the real political battle would be within the Democratic Party. The GOP went extreme in an unsustainable way. That left centrists and progressive/liberals fighting for the Democratic Party. We have certainly fought those battles in site pie fights. Those will be the real battlegrounds for health-care, green, anti-racist, economic justice, gender equality, and gun safety initiatives. Because the GOP has been so corruptly sick, we haven’t been able to afford those battles. But they have to be fought.
If Trump and the GOP Senate go down in a blue tidal wave this fall, I think that right wing extremism will be shattered and will have to go underground again. I am not saying it will go away. I am saying that it will lose social legitimacy and the money will realize that supporting it will have become a tactical mistake.
The right side of the aisle will have to restructure itself. I think it will make a play for the Democratic Party. Ultimately, many of those mainstream conservatives in places like Orange County who have “gone blue” will be looking to either commandeer our Party, return to a “normalized” GOP, or find a home in a less extreme conservative party.
Meanwhile, Democrats will have to battle things out amongst themselves. And this is where the Never Trumpers, in my view, pose a danger.
Right now, they are offering us a great weapon against Trump. Yet in essence, this weapon is the old one: attack politics. Democrats so often lament their party’s messaging problem. And here are some battle hardened Never Trumper pros offering to win the election for us. What a temptation it is to welcome them into our tent.
And, again, I welcome this alliance on a TEMPORARY basis.
But don’t fall in love with that propaganda firepower. After this election, it will be arrayed against us, one way or another. Beware.