A Republican NeverTrump Postmortem

“…Of all the bizarrerie over the last four years, the Republican NeverTrump (RNT) phenomenon is the strangest. Pundits, commentators, and writers who self-identified as Republican and conservative did not see Donald Trump’s historic upset victory as a cause for celebration. Instead, they saw it as a disaster to be mourned and attacked with more vitriol than they ever expended on Barack Obama, not just one of the most progressive presidents ever elected, but a failure both at home and abroad.

Many factors explain this mystery, but one stands out: the revelation that there is indeed a bipartisan political guild that cares more about maintaining its own power, prestige, and perks than instituting policies that keep America safe, prosperous, and free…

…Most important, this bipartisan guild believes in the “rules-based international order,” the congeries of multinational institutions whose rules and regulations should limit and hinder our own national sovereignty, which feeds a dangerous “nationalism” sure to mutate into fascism. And they endorse the narrative of “moralizing internationalism,” the century-old, dubious belief that all peoples across the planet want to be Westerners and enjoy our goods like prosperity, peace, human rights, religious tolerance, sex equality, free speech, and all the other cargo of the Western way.

These are the stale ideas that created the “endless wars” in the Middle East that Trump decried and began to end, even as he brokered normalization of relations between Israel and several Muslim states. And he did it by ignoring one of the foreign policy guild’s most cherished narratives: only a Palestinian Arab state, created at Israel’s expense and a threat to her security, could resolve that long bloody crisis––another reason for the RNT, foreign policy and national security division, to hate the president so intensely.

Of course, Trump’s seeming failure to get reelected has no doubt excited the RNT. Now Joe Biden, if elected by the Electoral College, will be running the government according to the decrepit protocols of the traditional postwar ruling class. That Biden will have won likely with the help of widespread electoral fraud won’t matter, any more than the degradation of journalistic professional standards, or the debasement of the FBI and DOJ, bothered the RNT. Their anger, bitterness, and outrage will be assuaged, and they can return to being the Dem’s “good” Republicans, the ones who will sacrifice conservative interests and principles to progressive ones…”