You may recall the article that instilled a sense of urgency in a number of right-leaners two presidential election cycles ago:
In September 2016, Michael Anton wrote an essay for the right-wing Claremont Institute, “The Flight 93 Election,” making the case for Donald Trump’s election as a necessary gamble to stave off the destruction of conservatism. Anton then did a stint in Trump’s National Security Council, and last night was rewarded by the president with a posting to the National Board for Education Sciences. It was a fitting coda for Trump to single out the figure who most perfectly captured the spirit that right-wing intellectuals brought to the era.
Anton’s case was notable, first, for its novelty. Before Trump won, “Never Trumpers” constituted the dominant strain of right-wing intellectual sentiment. Here was a prestigious organ of the intellectual right making a positive case for a nominee that the movement had dismissed as a clown and a surefire loser. Anton memorably seized the imagination of his audience by likening the choice to that faced by the passengers of Flight 93, who wrested control of the plane from Al Qaeda hijackers on 9/11. Allowing Hillary Clinton to win would mean certain death for conservatism, whereas electing Trump was risky — “you may die anyway” — but clearly preferable to certain death.
Anton’s argument was filled with dramatic rhetorical flourishes like this, and what little of it that was not non-falsifiable was demonstrably false. (According to Anton, “liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s,” Democrats “treat open borders as the ‘absolute value,’” and Barack Obama engaged in “flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents.”)
Despite (or perhaps because of) these flaws, Anton articulated the bedrock principle that has driven the right the last [eight] years: The Democratic Party is so terrifying and all-powerful that literally any measures, however unwise, are justifiable to block them from winning an election. That is the power of Anton’s chosen analogy, which urges his audience to overlook all of Trump’s complete unfitness to handle the job (“You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” he concedes) on the grounds that the alternative means imminent national death.
Now, in summer 2024, former radio host and Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes has employed the same quickening-of-the-senses tactic, but from the opposite end of the spectrum:
When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.
For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”
There's nothing bizarre about that characterization, Charlie. She's on the record as, prior to this week's flip-flops, supporting the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a path to citizenship for pretty much anybody coming over the border, pretty much unrestricted abortion, creating of a federal Office of Paid Family Leave, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which conferred legitimacy on Iran's toxic regime.
He enlists the help of fellow Atlantic writer Tom Nichols in his disingenuous attempt to paint Never-Trumpers as looking for an excuse to vote for the Very Stable Genius:
It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Theissen leans on this sort of crude caricature because it’s useful for anti-anti-Trump Republicans who have been scrabbling desperately for an excuse — almost any excuse — to vote for Trump. For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Trump, whatever his crimes or his frauds, the other side is always worse. As Damon Linker once wrote, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”
But the gravamen of Thiessen’s argument was that Harris also posed an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives.
“Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated,” he claimed.
But, as it turns out, the choice of Trump vs. Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy choice for Never Trumpers, who have moved far beyond searching for a “benign alternative.”
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols posted a quick answer to Thiessen: “Yes, I have to pick between a normal person who is going to have some policies I won’t like and an unhinged, deranged wannabe dictator sociopath surrounded by goons.”
In other words, not really that hard at all.
On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.
Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”
The trauma of the last month also made the choice somewhat easier.
Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power.
Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering.
For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.
There are, however, still bumps ahead, and not every Never Trumper will be able to reconcile themselves to Harris’s style of progressivism.
That would be me.
But according to Sykes, this makes me a poseur, wishing to appear aloof:
Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance.
Irrelevance. Interesting framing. Just what sets the standard for relevance? A seat at the table for the food fight over which presidential candidate and political party will achieve the victory of clinging to power by its fingernails while being pelted with investigations, lawsuits and inevitably disillusioned purists of either stripe? Count me out. I'm interested in something with some lasting power, the immutable stuff.
I realize that identity and power are a lot sexier to the 2024 post-Westerner than the quest for truth, justice, beauty and wisdom. But that's what is. I'm interested in what should be. And I'm so damn interested in it that I can't abide by what Kamala Harris is about any more than I can what the VSG is about.
So, yeah, I still plan to stay home in November. For a reason I've laid out here before: I don't want to have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of American ruination.
It is the right thing to do to stand on this narrow sliver of terrain.
Charlie, why are you so eager to write us off? Do you maybe harbor occasional thoughts that ours is the honorable stance?
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