NeverTrumpers for Biden, AlwaysTrumpers for Trump
The Republican tribal media and their sheep were pretending to be up in arms this past week over reports that some so-called “NeverTrumpers” were floating the idea of supporting Joe Biden, whom they perceive as the most moderate or least volatile of the Democratic presidential candidates, as a means of thwarting a second Trump term. The tribe’s leaders and followers were (of course) of one mind in condemning the level of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that would cause a self-described conservative to vote for a progressive Democrat merely to stop Trump — as though voting for Trump were anything other than voting for a progressive Republican.
Let’s state this directly for the millionth time: Donald Trump is not a conservative; nor is he a “moderate.” He is a progressive authoritarian in thinking and style, one prevented from causing even more damage to the republic than he has already caused by nothing but his own deep-seated cowardice and the nagging self-awareness, which he reveals with every “double-down” tweet, that he is an ignorant fraud living in constant fear of exposure.
So it’s true that no one who would vote for Joe Biden (or any other Democrat) has any business pretending to be conservative. But that truth is instantly reduced to at best a half-truth when it is used as a criticism of “NeverTrumpers” by Trump supporters. For their idol is at least as far from anything a conservative ought to be supporting as any Democrat. In fact, cynical opportunism aside, Trump is in essence a Democrat. And that is why the idolaters love these attacks on “NeverTrumpers” that neatly reduce the opposition to Trump to a few establishment pundits and Evan McMullin. They have nothing coherent to say against any of the valid and genuinely conservative criticisms of Trump; hence, they prefer to burn down straw men.
As usual, I make an exception for conservatives who will find themselves between a rock and a hard place in 2020, and might therefore decide to vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils. However, the people railing against the “TDS-suffering NeverTrumpers” in this context are not principled conservatives holding their noses one more time, but, at best, dupes of the most ingenious and devilish GOP establishment “binary choice” bait-and-switch of all time.
The Republican Party, to the extent it was still alive at all as any kind of meaningful opposition to the American left, is now utterly dead. Mitch McConnell’s establishment killed it. And the murder weapon was Donald Trump. The sooner people realize this and walk away from the binary choice nonsense, closing their ears and their hearts to the tribesmen shouting their irrationality about a non-vote for Trump being a vote for the Democrats, the better.
“The better for what?” you ask. For the souls of the emancipated. It is too late to reverse course for the United States, politically. The progressive usurpers have won for the foreseeable future. The proper and realistic goals now must be spiritual, educational. The hope — and it is a reasonable one — is not reversal, but revitalization, which is the work not of elections but of intellection, not of calculation but of courage, not of winning but of wisdom.
