Since our current president began, nearly three years ago, to become a major force within the Republican Party, and subsequently became the current occupant of the White House, there has been a small cadre of commentators, party officials, and campaign consultants who have publicly identified themselves as "Never-[his last name]." Since TRH has taken the position that it will not give the current present the publicity oxygen he doesn't deserve by using his last name, we'll just refer to these people, in today's post and otherwise going forward, as "Nevers."
At any rate, if (like me) you spend a significant about of time on Twitter, you know who most of these people are. They are not, however, a uniform movement of thought, apart from their antipathy toward Trump. Some of them, for example, are people with a high degree of institutional loyalty toward the Republican Party, or toward institutional conservatism (e.g., think tanks and foundations), who feel that the current president's sordid and criminal lifestyle has tarnished the ability of those institutions to advance their traditional beliefs. They don't object to the Administration's policies as much as they object to the personal conduct of its leader and his subordinates (to say nothing of his children). A few of them are people who have issue-specific objections (e.g., immigration), and a very few are people who feel that the conservatism of American politics has veered in directions that are ultimately too extreme to be fairly called conservatism.
I follow a number of these people on Twitter, principally to maintain a sense of what's going on, intellectually and otherwise, on the other side of our ideological divide. I find myself "liking" much of it, re-tweeting some of it, occasionally responding to it (sometimes with support, sometimes with criticism). Initially, and perhaps naively, I did this in the hope that doing so would lead to a dialogue of a more expansive nature, one that might be in some small way the beginning of a larger effort to bridge that divide and perhaps move all of us toward real solutions for Americans that most, if not all of us, could support.
What was I thinking?
Much of my attempts at dialogue were with Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a staunch Reaganite who, in spite of his political beliefs, voted for Hillary Clinton and encouraged others to do so. This led a number of Clinton supporters to attempt to engage him in a dialogue with on a broader array of issues, with varying degrees of success (mine, alas, were not particularly successful). To his credit, he objected to Mitch McConnell's political shell game with Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. But the conduct of the current Administration has not either moved him from supporting the Republican Party or a broad array of conservative principles generally.
In fact, the support he has gotten from liberal Tweeters has not even moved him more generally to a more positive view of liberals as individuals. Take a look at the following tweet from him, and you'll see what I mean. He stills seems to hew to the literal party line that liberals are just congenital squabblers, incapable of uniting with anyone outside of their "tribe" for the sake of supporting a larger goal. And, with perhaps a handful of exceptions, the tweets of other "Nevers" are not much different in this regard.
Which has led me to wonder, in response, how much the "Nevers" are truly to be trusted with respect to the sincerity of their objections to the current President.
Are those objections so strong that they are willing to give up the various fruits of the poisonous tree? Would they be willing, for example, to give up the Republican Congress' middle-of-the-night tax cuts for the haves at the expense of the have-nots? Would they join Dr. Nichols in repudiating the process that wrongly denied Garland the opportunity for a hearing on his nomination? Would they, for that matter, repudiate the handshake deal between the current president and Anthony Kennedy to replace Kennedy on the Court with one of his former clerks? Would they support the concealment of that clerk's previous records, to prevent whatever apparent political dynamite that lies therein from seeing the light of day?
Quite frankly, it is the history of the modern Republican Party--and, for that matter, the modern conservative movement--that should inspire more questions about the sincerity of the Nevers than any such questions that could be directed at liberals. Every time they want to talk about 1960 and the Chicago graveyards, we should remind them about 1968 and the sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks Or 1972 and a certain hotel break-in (and a certain subsequent cover-up). Or 1980 and the delay of the release of the Iranian hostages. Or 2000, and Florida. Or two frigging years ago, and an election that in all probability was won by Vladimir Putin.
In fact, here's a challenge to the Nevers. You want to come together with us in opposing the current president and his systemic attempts to profit from the systems he is supposed to be administering for the benefit of us all? Then let's start with the application of the so-called "Biden rule." Let's let the American people "weigh in" on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and see what that yields. It would be one small but real way to make up for your participation in the disaster that gave us Justice Son-of-Anne-Gorsuch.
And, going on from there, let's stop President What's-His-Name from taking the dominant human rights issue of our time--the international refugee crisis and its subsequent impact on our immigration process--and pass the bipartisan 2013 immigration bill on which John Boehner sat in a doomed attempt to keep his Speakership of the House of Representatives. A bill supported by 68 Senators, enough to ratify a treaty (and when was the last time that happened?).
And one last thing, relative to the refugee crisis and its root cause: let's come together and figure out a way that all of us can agree on and support to stop the only planet we currently have to live on from burning to a crisp.
Well, there it is. A path out of our current hell, and a means by which the Nevers can demonstrate their good faith, and we can demonstrate ours.
Your move, Nevers.
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