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Republican Never-Trumpers like @SykesCharlie face a peculiar conundrum. Their own constituency is quite small, as the 2016 GOP primaries and Republicans’ subsequent embrace of Trump made clear. Yet their public profile is pretty high. Who, then, do they speak for?
2. @SykesCharlie isn’t wrong to say there are ways Democratic candidates could alienate groups of voters. Some of them — like demanding abolition of private health insurance — are important to voters a Democratic Presidential candidate might hope to get, & therefore are risky.
3. But among the items on Sykes’ list are some that speak to conventional Republican priorities, unchanged since the Bush administration. Do nothing about gun crime, or alienate gun owners; spend nothing more on “free stuff” for “those people,” or alienate voters who already...
4...have health insurance, or went to college long enough ago not to have crippling student loan debt now; absolutely never ever even think about raising taxes on the class of large (and mostly Republican) political donors, or alienate...well, them. Also, abortion.
5. I sympathize with what I take to be @SykesCharlie’s views on the last one. I understand mine is a minority view among Americans any Democratic candidate has a chance of getting. That’s the jump most never-Trump Republicans fear to take — recognizing that....
6....their catastrophic defeat in the battle for influence within the Republican Party has left them in the wilderness outside it. It’s not impossible for a Republican to win the Presidency by scaring enough voters about the Democrats. In fact, it’s been done recently, in 2004.
7. Now, as then, it probably won’t happen because Democrats actually take extreme positions. It will be because they appear weak or uncertain in the face of a Republican President determined to do anything to win - as Bush, a screw-up as President, was in 2004, and Trump is now
8. My advice to never-Trumpers, then, is to forget about tradition. The Republican Party leadership across the country is Trump’s now: thoroughly corrupt, tolerant of moral degeneracy and white racism, open to foreign influence, and indifferent to the public good.
9. Treat it that way. Forget about comfortable labels inherited from the past. Or change their meaning — make “pro-life” mean reducing the number of abortions rather than banning the practice. Make “fiscally conservative” mean raising tax revenue to meet public needs.
10. Never-Trump conservatives will never be in the political majority in America again. Nor can they hope to speak persuasively for the relatively small number of largely rural swing voters pivotal in the 2016 election, with whom they have little in common.
11. I think Never-Trumpers can still wield some influence on policy, somewhat as the small Free Democratic Party did in Germany for so many years, by being supremely flexible on all but a few core issues, and knowing those better than anyone else.
12. The alternatives are reconciliation with the Trumpers, joining the Democrats, and political irrelevance. I can imagine a plausible argument only for the second of these. If that is off the table for never-Trump conservatives, they will have to come up with something else.
