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Never Trumpers: We realized in 2016 that we completely misunderstood the rank-and-file voters of the party we'd supported for decades. Mea Culpa.
Also Never Trumpers: You progressives who saw the Trumpist GOP coming for years don't get how American politics works.
Also Never Trumpers: You progressives who saw the Trumpist GOP coming for years don't get how American politics works.
Ok, here's my read on what people like Brooks and Stephens are up to. All of their grown lives the GOP has been pushing the political "center of gravity"--the boundaries of what counts as "reasonable" policy--ever rightward. To them, this feels "natural" and "normal."
What's happening now is that for the first time since the early 1970s, the political winds are blowing leftward and shifting our "center of gravity" to the left. That means certain policy ideas that were once "wacko leftism" are now becoming part of the mainstream conversation.
In 1974 if you had said to the average voter that in 30 years a Republican President could get elected while floating the idea of privatizing Social Security, they would have looked at you like you had two heads. In 2004, that idea failed, but it was considered "worth debating."
Stephens and Brooks are comfortable in a world where the most far right ideas are "worth considering" while anything left of Clinton is "dangerous, un-American socialism that will put us on the road to serfdom." The times they are a-changin' dudes...
Rather than start swimmin', folks like Brooks and Stephens seem to prefer sinking like stones...they are basically like the white centrist Democrats of the 1980s who thought Reaganism was just a fad and soon we'd be return to the days of LBJ/Kennedy's reasonable liberalism.
The flavor of Reaganite conservatism that they view through rose-colored glasses is NEVER COMING BACK. It metastasized into Trumpism and they never saw it coming. So maybe a bit of epistemological humility might be in order.
What drives me nuts about the rhetoric of these Never Trumpers is that they will look at empirically-grounded, evidence-based policy ideas to their left and brand them "kooky," "unreasonable," and "impossible."
They don't have to agree with those policies, but they could at least not feed the MAGA-mill by starting from the premise that such ideas are "dangerously radical."
Engage in the damn argument about policy like a grown up instead of going all *Chicken Little* "THE SKY IS FALLING" every time you hear an idea you don't like.
One question I'm left with is this: What's left of "American conservatism" if you take away the hysterical (and inaccurate) obsession with "the wacko left?"
This article by @DavidAstinWalsh provides the deep backstory to what folks like Brooks and Stephens are doing. It's as old as American conservatism itself. It has worked politically, but it's lazy as hell intellectually.
@DavidAstinWalsh Speaking of intellectual laziness, here's a thread on the difference between the worlds of conservative and liberal podcasting. It's nearly impossible to find a conservative podcast that's not >50% hyperventilating about "the left" or "liberals."
