No, it's not that Never Trumpers want the Democratic candidate next year to agree with us

I've recently become a regular reader of The Bulwark, a rationally conservative electronic publication whose ideological posture is more or less my own. Yes,  it's Never Trump. But it's at least as critical of the Democrats, and especially the far-left wing of the party which seems to dominate its rank-and-file just as much as the far-right dominates that of the Republicans.

Here's an excellent article on the way exactly the kind of hubris and short-sighted ideological self-indulgence we're used to hearing from the Tea Party folks have become prominent among the Democrats these days. It shows how the Trumpist right and the fanatical left in the media have been smearing each other lately with such lurid, badly-reasoned, and over-the-top opinion pieces that only a fellow fanatic could fail to laugh at them. It dwells in particular on the peculiar idea some on the Democratic left seem to have somehow gotten that Never Trumpers expect or even want the Democrats to nominate someone to their liking because we're rooting for Biden or another relatively moderate Democrat to oppose President Trump in 2020.

We don't. As the author of the article, Charles Sykes, points, out, we already have a candidate in the race who, at least in broad terms, shares our policy objectives. His name is Donald Trump.

We don't support him and are even willing to consider supporting a Democrat in preference to him because we perceive him as not particularly bright, as erratic and temperamentally unstable, as psychologically unfit to be president, as a mean-spirited divider bent on setting Americans against one another, as willfully and stubbornly ignorant, as dishonest and unethical, as a man who seems lacking in any principle or loyalty other than his own self-glorification, who is unwilling and perhaps unable to learn from his mistakes or even to admit that he has made them, and who is all these things to the point of being a danger to the Republic.  Besides, we perceive him as someone who personifies a tendency in the nation at large which we find intellectually and morally repugnant and from which we believe the Republican party must be rescued if it is to ever again be a viable alternative to the Democrats for decent Americans.

As Sykes points out, the Democrats who suggest, often snidely, that we are rooting for a moderate Democrat because we expect the 2020 nominee to be someone we agree with or even necessarily like. We are not looking for a kindred spirit in the 2020 Democratic nominee and fully expect to disagree with that nominee on the issues far more profoundly than we disagree with Mr. Trump. It is not so much the president's policies which make supporting him untenable for us as his personal weaknesses and inadequacies.

But we would sort of like it if he lost. One would expect most Democrats to share that preference. But it's not at all clear that defeating Mr. Trump is their highest priority. The fact of the matter is that "Medicare for All," as much as many Americans might sympathize with it in principle, is deeply unpopular with the American people because they know that we can't afford it.  Most Americans support equal rights for women (half of them are women), and for the LGBTQ community and see transgendered folk with a certain amount of sympathy. But they're not completely convinced that there are quite as many genders as the far left suggests or that straight white men are actually demons in disguise. While most Americans support the easy availability of abortion at least in the first trimester, they have grave reservations about it in the third. As deeply unpopular as Donald Trump personally and many of is policies are, it doesn't seem to make much sense to squander that advantage by nominating a candidate whose positions on the issues are just as unpopular if not more so.

And that's the reason why we Never Trumpers are rooting for a moderate and are alarmed by the prospect of somebody like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders being Mr. Trump's opponent next year. It's not that we either want or expect the Democrats to care which of the candidates we like or don't like, much less to nominate one that suits our fancy.

It's just that we'd kind of like that candidate to defeat Donald Trump, and as I said, one would sort of expect most Democrats to share that preference. And that's why we're anxious about the possibility of their nominating someone who would rather be left than president.