Thread by @matthewstoller

1. Why are #NeverTrumper so frustrating? Turns out GOP politics mirrors Dems politics almost exactly. In the 1990s/2000s, Clinton and Bush reacted to the end of the Cold War with a fascinating experiment. They sought to break business and finance from control of the state.

2. They placed authority in the Fed, deregulated banks, enacted NAFTA/the WTO, and regulated banks via bailouts of Mexico and East Asia. Locking it in was the opening to China. A perfect libertarian machine, global utopia. No rules on capital flows, no party to complain to.

3. Here's James Carville: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

That's it right there.

4. There was also a perception that Clinton, and then Bush and Obama, were seeking a safe handoff to China in terms of global hegemony. These three Presidents' job was to manage the decline of the American empire, safely. That was the GOP hardline perception.

5. George W. Bush was pro-immigrant, pro-China, went to war in Iraq, and oversaw the collapse of American finance. He was a catastrophe, in the eyes of populist conservatives And yet, the GOP neoliberals were fanatics. They didn't admit any errors. Their machine was perfect.

6. Obama shocked the GOP the way Trump shocked Democrats. And a debate started. The Tea Party wave began attacking Bush neoliberals. But no one would go after Bush in any real way, so Romney took the nomination in 2012.

7. Romney, Boehner, and the Koch's still thought the world was perfect, run via the Bush family's Christmas card list. In 2016 they would put Jeb on the throne. Then came Trump. Trump represented angry Republicans who thought Bush sold out America with libertarian fantasies.

8. Trump first crushed the Bush family, in a Republican debate blaming Bush for 9/11 as a security failure and lying about Iraq. He was heartily booed and everyone said his campaign was over. But he wasn't. Turns out a lot of GOPers hated neoliberalism.

9. Note I haven't talked about race. We don't think about Bush's racism because we don't think about the Iraq War as a fundamentally racist enterprise that killed a half a million non-whites. But Bush, Clinton, and Biden leveraged fear and racism against Muslims to launch a war.

10. In other words, the problem for #NeverTrumpers and Iraq war supporters wasn't Trump's racism, it was the fact that Trump wasn't polite about it.

11. The #NeverTrumpers are not Republicans upset that Trump is a racist, they are Republicans upset that Trump hates the libertarian world order they venerate. They are unreconstructed Bush fans and financiers. For example, they are nostalgic for Obama, and hate Bernie.

12. Trade is the one area where's a populist coalition for working people. Trump & labor Dems weakened the WTO, and hammered out a labor-backed new NAFTA w/labor standards in Mexico and gets rid of the global super-court for corporations. It's a strike at the libertarian order.

13. So while the #NeverTrumpers sometimes sound like they could be Democrats, they are in fact just allies of the upper class faction of the Democrats, and the upper class faction of the GOP. They want rule by aristocrats in a global utopia of free capital flows.

14. Trump is trying to construct a 19th century GOP coalition, uniting labor and Wall Street using protectionist policies. He sees himself oddly on the side both of the little guy and the big guy, against the snotty technocrat progressive, the upper class and the foreigner.

15. Meanwhile the Democrats probably like George W. Bush almost as much as the Republicans do at this point. He's cute! He paints! He wasn't that bad!

That's exactly the upper class narrative #NeverTrumpers believe.

16. The truth is, that libertarian machine constructed in the 1990s and 2000s has totally failed to deliver any semblance of justice or social stability in America. Bush was a true catastrophe, and he set us up for a realignment because he was just that bad.

17. Obama could've realigned the country if he had taken the side of the working class instead of China/Wall Street. He didn't. Now we have Pelosi going after Mitch McConnell over Russia, even though McConnell is married to a China PRC connected shipping magnate. Neoliberalism!

18. I don't think Trump can realign the country. He's too racist and not smart enough. For example, despite his anti-China tough talk, he appointed McConnell's wife to his cabinet.

But someone's going to do it. And the #NeverTrumpers will hate them for it.