Conservatives: “Monsters” From the Outside, “Traitors” From the Inside
As little as a few years ago, conservative pundits laughed off the idea of a crack-up on the Right. The last I recall reading it — the laughing off, not the crack-up — was about the time of Mitt Romney’s nomination. Weeks earlier, Rod Dreher or David Frum (if memory serves, as I have not been able to find the link I remember now five years later) had written a warning during the long campaign, while every candidate had their go at Romney because the base simply did not want him. The worst case scenario for the Right was to have Romney get the nomination but then lose the election. The reckoning would be something to behold, Dreher or Frum warned. Someone in The Corner linked to the argument to poo-poo it.
I recall it because it was one of the reasons I stopped reading The Corner. A crack-up was clearly possible, and they didn’t want to see it.
Fast-forward five years. The crack-up has already happened.
While those outside the Right see all conservatives as monsters, as Kitten Holiday tells in her story, within this new, fractured Right, many Trump supporters reflexively view non-Trump supporters as traitors. In both cases, the accusers accept no mitigating argument. You either agree with them completely and support or renounce Trump completely, or you are persona non grata.
Within the Right, this came to a head — or so we thought — during the election, when Trump’s supporters were desperate to get the last balkers to back him. They told us not to worry, that if Trump won, then Congress would hold him accountable, and if Congress didn’t, then we the voters would. When we bitterly laughed at the notion of Congressional GOP members standing against the party, they countered with “but Hillary.” If we didn’t work against her by voting for Trump — nothing else was acceptable — then we were traitors.
Into this environment Georgi Boorman wrote “No Party Owns My Vote,” a piece on a novel little idea that politicians have to earn votes with persuasive ideas.
Trump won despite our holding out (most of those final holdouts that I know did not end up voting for Trump). He opened with mistakes, and as we had anticipated, neither the GOP nor Trump’s supporters cared to hold him accountable for those mistakes. It was not even two weeks into his term when I wrote up the strategic errors in the first immigration executive order fiasco. I got the message to “stop bitching, stop undermining, and start supporting” the President.
There was never going to be accountability for Trump from his supporters. There was only accountability for us, the skeptics. We are encouraged — that’s the word I will use, encouraged — to write off his mistakes as the fault of media rather than failures of leadership. Logic is stretched to defend the President’s words and actions.
Things seemed bad in 2016. They have not improved. Over support for the man currently occupying the Oval Office, friendships I did not think could break, broke. I’ve seen long-lasting organizations crumble. I’ve seen jobs lost.
Back him up or shut up. That is the message. But the last of the holdouts are the “here I stand” type. That type has never been very good at shutting up, and we won’t now.
