We are finally getting some good, strong conservative voices expressing strong opposition to Trump. Some of them are doing so with force and eloquence.
Columnist Jennifer Rubin has been on a roll for months. A recent sample (chosen almost at random):
A party willing to stand behind Trump or Moore is a party that presumably would stand behind David Duke or Richard Spencer. It’s a party without a soul or decency, a party that puts partisanship above country and is willing to indulge bigots and constitutional idiots. It is quite simply irredeemable.
George Will has also never been a Trump fan. For example:
With Trump turning and turning in a widening gyre, his crusade to make America great again is increasingly dominated by people who explicitly repudiate America’s premises. The faux nationalists of the “alt-right” and their fellow travelers such as Stephen K. Bannon, although fixated on protecting the United States from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right.
Republican Senator Bob Corker’s famous tweet (although he’s said a lot of more substantial things):
It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.
And of course John McCain, whose judgment about certain things can certainly be questioned, but never his patriotism or sense of duty to this nation:
To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.
And now former President George W. Bush, who reached what must be for him new heights of eloquence (admittedly a low bar):
This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.
These are some good, solid statements. They will reach people that would never listen to commentators or politicians on our side of the aisle. They are to be encouraged and lauded. We need all the allies against Trump we can get. (As I mentioned in a recent comment on this forum, the last time western civilization was under this much threat from ethno-nationalists, Roosevelt and Churchill were happy to ally with Stalin.)
So I am troubled when I read many of the reactions from people on the left (such as many of the comments in this story). It’s too late. Why didn’t they speak out sooner? They’re only speaking out because they’re not running for reelection. They enabled Trump. They’ve done some awful things, so screw ‘em.
All true, to varying degrees. (The “enabled Trump” thing is actually fairly problematic in most of the cases.) But that these are the initial reactions by so many on our side is not good. When people do something right (and statements like these from former presidents and senior sitting senators are not trivial things), the appropriate response is to be pleased. Even some praise (for their specific statements on this issue, not for their political view in general) would be appropriate.
That doesn’t mean anybody is forgetting for an instant about Iraq and Katrina, or Palin, or that Will is a pompous gasbag even when he writes about baseball. And people like McCain and Bush are never going to be our political allies. But that’s not the point. They do share with us some very basic beliefs about Trump, democracy and human decency. We should be happy to have them alongside us as we fight Trump. Once the threat to our nation posed by Trump and his cronies is past, we can go back to hating each other within the normal bounds of political discourse.
The stakes are simply too high for us to get snooty when picking our allies.