Posted on 05/27/2020 2:37:43 PM PDT by Kaslin
They are just plain old Democrats now.
For nearly five years most of our nation’s largest and most powerful news media outlets have given so-called NeverTrump conservative pundits an outsized voice in our political landscape. Figures such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Tom Nichols, Jennifer Rubin, Ana Navarro, and Rick Wilson do their turns on TV creating the illusion that there is some huge constituency of anti-Trump conservatives. There is not. In fact, these people are no longer conservatives in any real sense.
Almost all of these pundits are now mainstream Democrats. They support Joe Biden, and many support voting a straight Democratic ticket. Many are involved with the Lincoln Project and its bizarre psychological warfare TV ads that they are certain get under Trump’s skin. And they almost never wholeheartedly support anything that the vast majority of American conservatives do.
And that’s fine. People change political stripes all the time, and in many ways it is a sign of an open mind. But for news outlets to continue pretending that these people are conservative is a great disservice to their audiences and the nation’s political dialogue.
The fact is that nearly all conservative commentators were at some point NeverTrump. In February of 2016, National Review, the bible of the conservative movement, ran a NeverTrump issue, in which a broad array of conservatives condemned Trump’s candidacy. Over the course of his presidency though, most became either Trump supportive or at least tolerant of Trump.
The basic reason for this change of heart, and it is essentially a change of heart, not a change of political philosophy, was that the sky did not fall under 45’s leadership. Conservatives racked up wins on judges, taxes, regulations, foreign policy and immigration. They learned to accept the president’s abrasiveness.
The people who have actually changed their political philosophies are the still die hard NeverTrumpers. About the only thing they have stayed loyal to is their disdain of Trump and their trust in a neoliberal world order that Trump threatens. But on a host of issues such as gun rights, race, abuses of power by the Obama administration and many others, the NeverTrumpers have essentially come around to thinking the Democrats have been right all along.
This is why Boot’s book is called “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.” It’s not why I left the Republican Party, but why I left the Right. This is at least honest, but at this point Boot’s politics are essentially a carbon copy of those of every member of NeverTrump. Put simply, these people are not conservative anymore.
NeverTrumpers have a fantasy that Trump will lose badly in November and they will purge the GOP of all of his sycophantic enablers, but in their eyes that’s basically every politician not named Romney or Amash. So that’s not ever going to happen. If Republicans lose the White House they will not reward the ex-conservatives who helped it happen with leadership in the party.
So the natural political home for the NeverTrumpers at this point is obviously the Democratic Party. As the presidential primary showed us, there are few actual moderate voices in the party, which has been given over to Green New Deals and “Medicare for All.” Perhaps the NeverTrumpers can help create a wing of the Democratic Party less friendly to socialism.
But in the meantime they are supporting a wildly left wing Democratic Party. You can’t be a Yankees fan who wants them to lose in the playoffs to the Red Sox. If you are a well-known political pundit working to elect Democrats, you are a Democrat. You’re not politically homeless; you’ve just chosen a new home.
I understand that NeverTrumpers will lose a good deal of cache if we all just acknowledge that they aren’t conservatives anymore. The initial source of their relevance was that they were going against their own team. But it’s not their team anymore. Surely they are talented enough writers and thinkers that they can do more than ride that one-trick pony forever.
Whatever happens in November, the GOP is never going to return to being the party of Bush and Romney. NeverTrump dreams of expelling every drop of populism and nationalism, but that isn’t going to happen. You’d have to expel almost everyone at this point.
So let’s just please call them what they are. They are liberal Democrats. That they may have once been conservatives is unremarkable, and at this point no longer implies any special significance to their standard, run of the mill Democratic talking points. NeverTrump is no longer a thing, and we should really stop pretending that it is.
That's a lot nicer than what we call them.
I'm not sure that GOPe/NeverTrump has a problem with expelling almost everyone.
They are all corporate globalist who peddle bullsh!t in the media and only pretended to be "conservative" when the GOP raised their banner as the party of open borders and endless nation-building campaigns around the world.
None of these @ssholes ever had a conservative bone in their bodies. Once a GOP candidate emerged from the crowded field in 2016 who was unapologetic about running against the Republican Party platform on issues like immigration, foreign trade, and endless wars in Third World dumps, these dopes couldn't run fast enough to support the globalist candidate in the 2016 campaign: Hillary Clinton.
This is why they're falling all over themselves to support a senile retardate in 2020, too.
Figures such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Tom Nichols, Jennifer Rubin, Ana Navarro, and Rick Wilson do their turns on TV creating the illusion that there is some huge constituency of anti-Trump conservatives. There is not. In fact, these people are no longer conservatives in any real sense.
The author should note that every one of these people works in the media. In other words, none of them have any real jobs that require them to maintain a degree of consistency to meet the expectations of a client or prospective customers in the general public. They're not real people. They're paid propagandists who don't hesitate to change their tunes once their globalist puppet masters tell them what to do.
And yet most still don't have much to say about Pres. Trump's actual policies or appointees, other than Boot. They keep finding all these non-policy intangible reasons to continually attack him. It's all "he's bad", "he's abrasive", "he's this he's that". Something very weird is going on.
And that is the SCHWEPUNKT; they were never really CONSERVATIVES, just privileged assholes with some spare time.
Kind of makes me wonder what all the FReepers who had wet dreams about Ann Coulter are thinking now?
I just thank the Good Lord that I never fell for her over the top crap or bought any of her stupid books.
I’m with you. Was worried that Trump was a liberal Trojan horse.
That was my main concern back then too. I was worried that he would ‘grow in office’ like Souter and join the DC party circuit.
Instead kissing up to him, flattering him with promises of ‘bipartisanship’, etc, the they went all World War Z on him and his family, cementing his conservative position.
Lots of suckers here fall for a pretty face.
Not so weird. They're not saying the real reason they don't like him, because they know that most of us would find it as a reason to like Trump even more.
They are Swamp Creatures, in bed with the Deep State, who have been fed insider info in exchange for being tame "controlled opposition".
They hate Trump, because Trump is against the corrupt and self-serving Deep State.
I don’t think most of them are thinking about the Deep State or have any significant connections with it. It’s something else.
A clue is that a lot of them periodically say something that indicates they have very weird ideas about Trump’s supporters. For example Bret Stephens said something to the effect that illegals in this country have a lower crime rate than Pres. Trump’s supporters. It was quite bizarre. Of course there’s no statistics that show that.
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