Mrmuni12 has a very nice blog on the rec list where (he) discusses a Washington Post column about Never Trumpers. Never Trumpers can be a pretty intense subject around here, with typically 2 types of responses about them.
1) Burn em at the stake for what they’ve done.
2) Believe their repentance and forgive them.
I have to start with the premise, that Trump is the symptom and the Republican party is the disease.
I think we need to distinguish between Never Trumpers. Like most things there’s a scale of how never Trump they actually are. I’ve followed some never Trumpers on Twitter (Wilson, Sykes, Wallace, Boot, Schmidt...) for quite a while now. I divide them into two categories.
1) It’s all Trump’s fault! Sykes and too a much lesser extent Wilson are in this category. Trump is rotten to the core and if we get rid of him, everything will return to normal. If John Kasich were president and appointed the same judges, gave the same tax break, was silent about voter suppression, gerrymandering, discrimination, Global Warming… as long as he didn’t tweet stupid shit, then everything is fine.
2) The Republican party is rotten! Schmidt, Boot… they view the entire party as rotten, but they still don’t get that the Republican party has been rotten for decades and that it’s not a new problem.
In World War II FDR made an alliance with Stalin so they could defeat an existential threat to civilization. Stalin was on the same evil scale as Hitler. Most of the Never Trumpers are not evil even though they may have done some evil things in their past. They also seem to be much tougher on Republicans than Democrats are. We are united in defeating the fascist Republican cult so that we can save our democracy.
I’m willing to forgive those who’ve made bad mistakes in the past and recognize they’ve done so, even though they still may not see ALL the mistakes they made. But I am not willing to forget!
They were WRONG on Global Warming, on tax cuts, on foreign wars, on public lands, on incarceration…, and they continue to be WRONG on who we Liberal Democrats are! They still think we are the polar opposite extreme version of the fascist cult that they just abandoned, but who we have known about for decades. They weren’t just morally wrong, they were intellectually WRONG. The facts were there in front of them, and yet they made the wrong decisions.
Here’s my greatest fear. I’m already hearing never Trumpers like Max Boot starting to talk about deficits and big government, and Nicole Wallace still brings her old friends on to talk about “how do we fix” Global warming, what programs need to be cut to reduce the deficit, and Charlie Sykes still pushes the lie that Democrats are just as extreme as the cult he helped build… NO! NO! NO!
I forgive their sins, but I do not forget their overwhelming errors! You were WRONG too many times! We face enormous problems but your judgement can not be trusted. Stop talking like you have the answers to our problems. You forfeited your right to push for any policy that impacts the major problems we face today, because you were so WRONG yesterday!
So we shouldn’t despise the never Trumpers because they came late to the party, most are not bad people. But we can not forget the severity and quantity of the mistakes they’ve made in the past and they can’t be allowed to drive the many important polices that we now need to fix their mistakes.
RESIST!