One phenomenon of the Trump era that I may never be able to grasp is the appeal of the group of hardcore, rightwing, warmongering Republicans known as NeverTrumpers.
Jennifer Rubin has a high public profile among politically engaged Democrats due to her regular Washington Post column. In
Don’t torture yourself with the clown show Washington Post 03/22/2020, she argues, "It is only in the disastrous Trump era that we have been bludgeoned by ignorance, cruelty, incompetence and narcissism on an unprecedented scale."
That is an argument that I wouldn't make in the way she does. And it's a reminder of how the political establishment of both parties and the corporate media in general failed to seriously process the implications of the Bush-Cheney Administration with its serious crimes and abuses.
I've been re-reading Al Gore's 2007 book
The Assault on Reason. He was engaging in real time with that Administration's policies. It's surprisingly hard going. Not because the writing is difficult to follow, on the contrary. The problem is that I can't make it through a whole chapter in one sitting, because it's stunning to remember how cosmically bad that Administration was.
Think about what was involved: the Iraq War, the bungled Afghanistan War, Guantanamo, Abu Ghuraib and "special rendition" and John Yoo (aka, criminal torture), the total ignoring of the Al-Qaida threat in 2001, John Ashcroft, Halliburton, Katrina.
With the Iraq War in the mix, I wouldn't say that Trump has yet reached the Shrub Bush level of cruelty, incompetence, etc.
But be that as it may, that horror show of a government was
creating clear precedents for the worst practices of Trump's scary clown show of a government. People like Gore and John Dean were saying clearly at the time what kind of horrendous precedents Bush and Cheney and their whole crew were creating.
Take this current very legitimate concern as an example. The current Attorney General, William Barr, served in the first Bush Administration, where he was already in favor of packing the jails full. (Sagiv Galai,
William Barr Was an Ardent Champion of Mass Incarceration ACLU.org 01/10/2019) Now he's asking for more power to keep people in jail without charges, aka, preventive detention, using the COVID-19 crisis as justification, as Betsy Woodruff Swan reports (
Politico DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic 03/21/2020):
The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States. ...
The request raised eyebrows because of its potential implications for habeas corpus — the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.
“Not only would it be a violation of that, but it says ‘affecting pre-arrest,’” said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.” [my emphasis]
Here is what Gore wrote in his 2007 book:
... the diminished role of individuals in America's national conversation has been accompanied by a diminished respect for the rights of individuals- especially during the Bush-Cheney administration.
For example, President Bush has declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen whom he alone determines to be a threat to our nation- without an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, and without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned. The president claims that he can simply snatch an American citizen off the street and keep him or her locked up indefinitely - even for the rest of his or her life- and refuse to allow that citizen the right to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer even to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. [my emphasis in bold]
Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft, who like Barr was a Christian dominionist who disdained separation of church and state, infamously used the aftermath of the 2001 9/11 attack, followed by an unrelated shooting spree in the Washington area by two men and the never-fully-explained mailings of anthrax powder to politicians and media offices, to get a grab-bag of increased surveillance and police powers enacted which was basically a wish-list of measures of things the Justice Department wanted anyway.
This history forms my own view of the NeverTrumper schtick. Which starts from the fact that NeverTrumpers particularly visible in the press such as Rubin, Max Boot, Butcher's Bill Kristol, David "Bobo" Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, Michael Gerson, are
rightwing Republicans. They are not people who had some kind of "Road to Damascus" conversion in which they became aghast at the loyal support for the Bush-Cheney Administration and its horrible precedents. The main impulse for the "NeverTrumper" crew was Trump's seeming departures from hawkish Republican war policies, as illustrated by this joint statement of various conservative foreign policy figures from March 2016,
Open Letter on Donald Trump From GOP National Security Leaders War on the Rocks 03/02/2016.
So why do some Democrats who don't necessarily identify with their rightwing policy positions find NeverTrumper arguments attractive? It seems to me several factors are at work. One is the novelty factor, which weighs heavily with the favorable media reception of the NeverTrumpers. The NTers are making "counterintuitive" arguments, something the media loves, i.e., they are professed rightwing Republicans arguing against the rightwing Republican President.
But why do Democrats find their arguments attractive? Here are my thoughts at this point.
As Republicans, the NT's have a kind of "insider" credibility.
They insist on what would be nice to believe, that Trump is a bizarre aberration who will soon give way to a restored normalcy. Rubin writes, "Though so much is uncertain and our lives have been put on pause, we will hold elections in November. We will be able to replace Trump and his exasperating band of buffoonish advisers."
They often stress broad (classical) liberal principles like the rule of law and respect for institutions.
The Democratic leadership really has since the Reagan years gotten comfortable with a "duck-and-cover" approach. Part of that, as George Lakoff has described at length, is that Democrats are sorely tempted to adopt Republican "framing" on major issues. Or simply conceding the framing to Republicans are try to argue against a Republican
worldview by stressing
facts but not distinguishing a progressive, Democratic worldview/framing. (Patt Morrison,
Linguist George Lakoff on what Democrats don’t understand — and Republicans do — about how voters think Los Angeles Times 11/22/2018) The NeverTrumpers give centrist Democrats anti-Trump arguments prepackaged in Republican framing.
And, let's be blunt, a not-insignificant number of Democratic voters
support the more hawkish worldview of the NeverTrumpers. It's worth noting that the "neoconservative" foreign policy mode of thinking was heavily influenced by
Democratic Party "Cold War liberalism," notably that of Washington Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. The post-1989 political world saw the emergence of a strong "humanitarian hawk" view within the Democratic Party associated with foreign policy figures like Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power. This provided some combination of conviction and political cover that led Democratic Senators Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry to vote in support of the Iraq War in 2002, a disastrous war whose results were far from being humanitarian.
The Democratic Party is the center-left party of the US and has traditionally was the pro-labor party. But - at least prior to the COVID-19 crisis and the beginning recession! - has not been doing politics in a country where Franklin Roosevelt once famously saw "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." (
“One Third of a Nation”: FDR’s Second Inaugural Address History Matters) Poverty is obviously a very persistent problem! But a key part of the Democrats' current voting base are affluent city-dwellers and suburbanites, sometimes referred to with the (to me) awkward term "professional-management class (PMC)". These voters tend to be more liberal on formal freedoms like voting rights and women's rights. But many of them are also comfortable with conservative economics, including corporate-deregulation "free trade" treaties and to the rhetoric of "humanitarian hawks".
For some Democrats, the NeverTrumper way of thinking will be an "gateway drug" to becoming, uh, Republicans.
A couple of concluding comments on the NTers. The driving concern of the NeverTrumpers has been their concern that his foreign policy was insufficiently warlike and/or too incompetent at trying to start wars. (On the latter, see Susan Glasser,
The Trials of a Never Trump Republican New Yorker 03/23/2020: "Trump has done plenty of things the old Republican foreign-policy establishment would cheer for, if someone else were doing them.") The NTers are
Iraq War Republicans. And the Iraq War is what catastrophe looks like.
Which means they are
Dick Cheney Republicans. Which is why the prefer to give the impression that they came out of some clean, respectably democratic and responsible Republican Party which went astray with a strange and unprecedented character named Donald Trump. But the Trumpist of 2016-2020 would not have been possible without the Cheney-Bush Republican Party of 2001-2009. That's what the Republican Party still is. The NeverTrumpers just want a slightly more respectable-sounding Dear Leader. And, yes, much of the Republican adoration of Shrub Bush was the same kind of cringe-worthy Dear Leader idolatry that today's Republicans give to the Malicious Orange Clown.
My bottom line: NeverTrumpers, bah, humbug!
