Monday, June 1, 2020

Please Stop Calling NeverTrumpers Conservatives

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.
Read the rest from David Marcus HERE.

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