It's not 1968, folks. It's 1933.


So Von Papen and Hindenburg took a risk. On 30 January 1933 Hindenburg made Hitler Chancellor. He thought he could control Hitler – how wrong he was. In the end, Hitler did not TAKE power at all – he was given it.  --Hitler's Rise to Power by John D Clare

National Review's Tim Alberta, like a shocking number of conservatives, just doesn't get it.

For many years and with good reason, conservatives have habituated themselves to seeing Hillary Clinton as Satan incarnate. She has become the symbol of everything we oppose, the opposite of everything we stand for. But this November the American people will not go to the polls to elect a symbol. They will go to the polls to elect a president.

They aren't going to the polls to elect a dictator, either. And while both presumptive nominees have personalities which create legitimate cause for concern about the abuse of power, one of them openly promises to abuse it to steamroll his opponents into silence or submission.

Hillary Clinton is not the devil. But Donald Trump is the closest we have ever come in this country to a potential dictator. And dictatorship aside, his election would not only validate but give power to the most irrational, hate-filled, bigoted and extreme elements of the crazy Right. It's not that the Klan and the Nazis back Trump that scares me. It's that people who espouse their values seem to be the core of his support.

It's that 45% of the Republican primary electorate, whether or not they realized it, voted for their values. And that is itself a national emergency of a magnitude few in our history have ever come close to matching.

The bottom line is that although many conservatives can't seem to get their heads around it, Donald Trump is a far greater threat to the nation, to the Constitution and to the values conservatism stands for than even Hillary is. Trump is not just globally ignorant, intellectually incoherent, personally immature and psychologically unstable, but he holds the Constitution in contempt, espouses a trade policy that would plunge us back into recession, and articulates a foreign policy that is a threat to the peace of the world and our national security. He is a bully who promises- actually promises- to abuse the powers of the presidency to punish his political opponents. Not since Huey Long has America faced a threat to our national values like Donald Trump.

People, the Klan, Nazis, the nativists, and the nuts have taken over the Republican party. They cannot be given power. Not only is the threat Trump and his movement poses greater than the threat Hillary and the Left poses, but it is exponentially greater.This is NOT a time for party loyalty! Nor is it a time to allow a quite understandable hatred of Hillary Clinton to blind us to a greater threat.

I don't think people recognize the historical emergency posed by the fact that 45% of Republican voters voted for this man. The Republican party is dead to me, personally. The gutlessness of people like Mitt Romney and Tom Coburn, who might have given us a way to fight back but when the chips were down backed away, does not change the seriousness of the disaster that fact represents. Republicans, with the nomination of Donald Trump, have given well-nigh irrefutable evidence of being everything the Democrats accuse them of being. A vote for Trump is a vote for declaring them right all along.

He will never have my vote. I don't think I can bring myself to vote for Hillary for obvious reasons; I cannot vote for someone who is OK with the murder of unborn children, with defying nature with regard to gender, and with destroying marriage. But Trump MUST be stopped. And far from being dead, the Never Trump movement still has its most powerful card to play: a large and hitherto dependable segment of the Republican party will not support the national ticket.

I have no confidence that Trump, once in power, will appoint Supreme Court justices loyal to anyone or anything but Donald Trump. I am by no means convinced that he'll follow through on his promise to nominate Supreme Court justices any better than the ones Hillary would nominate. He's a loose cannon whose word means nothing and who has proven capable of reversing himself not only on his party affiliation but on almost every single other issue within the space of the last 12 months. Why expect him to be any more loyal to conservativism than he was to liberalism? He is loyal only to Donald Trump.

And giving a man like that power is far more dangerous than anything Hillary could do.

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