Counter-Trumpism is just Trumpism in reverse

Charlie Sykes has coined the term "anti-anti-Trump" to describe those on the right who totally understand that Donald Trump is a disaster and acknowledge his ignorance, his instability, his immaturity, and often both his incompetence and his bad policy choices but still insist on supporting him. It's a category that includes a great many people I know and have always respected.
I don't understand them. If Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination things would be a little different. I, for one, probably wouldn't vote this year; I don't think there's even a third-party candidate running whom I'd feel comfortable supporting. But the moderate wing of the Democratic Party- which is to my left, too, and will probably not retain control of the party once Joe Biden passes from the scene- absolutely thrashed the crazies in the Democratic primaries. Biden isn't ideal; Kamala Harris is even less so, But Joe isn't an Antifa fanatic, and contrary to the Trump commercials he doesn't support defunding the police, the Green New Deal, "Medicare for all," or any of the other things Republican mothers scare their children with when they're being naughty.

Joe Biden is survivable. The only candidate foaming at the mouth is President Trump. The Republican Party, of course, is firmly in the grasp of the crazies; it started drifting in that direction after 2012, and while I expected the saner branch of the far-right to prevail by nominating Ted Cruz or some other extreme but essentially rational and intelligent red-meat type, things went haywire and the party ended up with a wild man instead.

I don't see the Republican Party finding its way back to the Reagan/Bush/McCain/Romney kind of sanity and responsibility any time soon. There is simply no way that any objective person who isn't so far out in right field that his or her perspective is totally distorted could fail to recognize that next to Donald Trump Joe Biden is the very definition of a safe, sane centrist. True, he's eccentric. True he- like Mr. Trump- has a talent for saying awkward and sometimes ridiculous things. But he's basically a mainstream kind of guy, a labor union Democrat, very much in the American political tradition. Next to President Trump, he's about as frightening as a teddy bear.

But many on the right nevertheless claim to be afraid of him. If you scratch beneath the surface, of course, it turns out that what they're really afraid of is the "woke," politically correct, savagely intolerant radicals who will undoubtedly take over the party once Joe Biden is gone. Just as the more partisan Democratic goofs claimed that Dubya was a figurehead and that Dick Cheney was actually pulling his strings, the common argument you hear among Republicans today is that Biden is a dotard who drools in his soup and that Kamala Harris will really be running things if the Democrats take back the White House in November.

That, of course, is nonsense, and attacks on Biden's mental status aren't working; apparently more people question President Trump's mental fitness for the job than question Biden's, and Biden's experience and background would seem to mean that he would be far more likely than Mr. Trump to know what he was doing. Is increased competence scary? With all his flaws, Biden's level of experience and his personality together with his relative moderation seem more apt to inspire confidence than Mr. Trump's. He's our one shot at returning to a normal, sane relationship with the rest of the world and with reality.

Still, voting for a Democrat is really hard for some people. After all these years it will be difficult for me, and sometimes it almost seems that some Democrats are trying to make it as hard as possible. That's been on my mind of late. Just as so many conservatives who really know better deep down inside feel an atavistic urge to follow the elephant and Donald Trump over the cliff, some Democrats don't seem able to accept the support of people like me very graciously. 

I'd like to coin a term of my own: "Counter-Trumpers." These are folks who might be thought of as Trumpers turned inside-out. They're very much like Trumpers- except they're Democrats rather than Republicans and liberals progressives rather than conservatives (or what passes for conservatives in the post-modern Age of Trump).

"Never Trumpers are not our friends!" That's a refrain we hear from everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to your "woke" friends on Facebook or down the hall from you. This fellow is a good example:





 Ok. Let's begin by getting a few things straight.

I can't speak for all Never Trumpers, but I'm comfortable saying that what I'm about to say holds for most.

I am supporting Joe Biden because I don't think America can handle another four more years of Donald Trump. I don't think the world can, either.  I believe him to be radically unfit to hold the office of President, and every moment he spends in that role a threat to our national security.

If he wins, he will continue to divide us and to push people's buttons, cynically manipulating them based solely on his own personal political interests. He stands for division and hatred, and those things are poisoning us. I have serious questions about his emotional and psychological soundness. His massive ignorance is bad enough; coupled with his unwillingness to listen to people who actually know more than he does, it is a disaster. 

While I disagree with Joe Biden on some things, I think he's a fundamentally decent human being. He is experienced. He is knowledgeable. He is willing to listen. And he is likely to govern at a level of competence of which Donald Trump can only hallucinate having already reached. He will seek to solve problems rather than exacerbating them for his own political benefit. He will seek to work with the people with whom he disagrees rather than seeking to destroy them.

It is not true that Never Trumpers simply despise Donald Trump personally while agreeing with him philosophically. Democrats and "progressives" have been accusing Republicans and conservatives of being haters and racists and bigots and authoritarians and promoters of oppression for decades. When those things are said, as they have been, about people like Ronald Reagan and the Bushes and John McCain and Mitt Romney, they are lies. They are slander. But it's a flavor of slander with which Democrats have become comfortable, just as they're comfortable going beyond the undeniable fact that Dubya was tragically mistaken when he went to war in Iraq based on faulty information believed by every intelligence service in the world and insisting with malice and relish that "Bush lied, and people died."

Mitt Romney was never a heartless plutocrat. John McCain had a heart and by all accounts a big one. Dubya may be inarticulate and may have been mistaken about many things, but he is not stupid. Gerald Ford could, indeed, walk and chew gum at the same time. And Ronald Reagan was no more the devil incarnate than were Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. But those lies have been told so long and so often that they and similar falsehoods fall easily from Democratic lips all too easily even now.

It's not surprising that Farron Cousins, the YouTuber whose video I've linked to, can make the absurd claim that anti-Trump Republicans merely dislike Donald Trump personally while agreeing with him philosophically. After all, Democrats accused Reagan and Ford and the Bushes and McCain and Romney of being ideologically indistinguishable from what Donald Trump, in fact, turned out to be. They have been claiming that campaign after campaign for decades. But they were not, and we are not.

Ford and Reagan and the Bushes and McCain and Romney did not admire or cozy up to authoritarians and dictators. They absolutely didn't side with our country's enemies and against American interests, rejecting the consensus of the American intelligence community because they wanted to. Can you imagine Russian state television joking that Ronald Reagan or even George W. Bush were Russian intelligence assets? In case anyone has forgotten, Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was our most formidable strategic opponent during the debates in 2012!

Isolationism, which fell into disrepute among Republicans after World War II,  has been a thing again for certain Republicans in recent years. Ron Paul was its leading advocate for quite a while; his son Rand has picked up the fallen banner. So, of course, has Donald Trump. One might well criticize Dubya for his unilateralism when the Iraq thing went down, but nobody can fairly challenge his commitment to the alliances and the practice of multilateralism in principle. Nor can any of the other men I've named be said to have espoused foreign policies as inward-looking, disjointed, and self-destructive as Mr. Trump's, as disdainful of our role in the international community, or as devastating to our relationships with friendly nations and to our position and reputation in the world. You would be hard-pressed to find Never Trump Republicans who resemble Mr. Trump in any of these areas, either.

None of those men holds or held  freedom of speech or freedom of the press in contempt or would think of calling the media "enemies of the people." None of them would suggest, as Mr. Trump has more than once, that journalists should be legally liable for "intentionally false" stories or offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone who would beat up a protester. Neither would Never Trump Republicans (or, in my case, ex-Republicans).

However they- or we- might differ from most Democrats on the details of policy, it's obscene to accuse either them or us of the lack of empathy toward the unfortunate and the oppressed which has characterized Mr. Trump. And that is not "merely" a matter of personality. It is a problem precisely because it finds its expression not only in practice but in policy.

All of them- and most of us- are far more sympathetic to immigrants and their plight than is Mr. Trump. And that, too, finds its expression in policy. It would be well for us to reflect more often than we do on all the civil rights legislation that passed over the years because of bi-partisan support, however much many Democrats would like to think that all of it was their doing, and theirs alone. If too few Republicans manifest the same level of concern for racial justice these days, it might conceivably be because the current Piper-in-Chief is playing a different tune entirelyl

I don't think Donald Trump is a racist because I don't think he cares enough about race to be a racist. But I do believe that he is willing to appeal to racists and to excuse racists and to consciously court racists to promote the one thing he does care about: his own interests. 

All of those other men- and Never Trumpers pretty much by definition- had or have principles. And it's absurd to suggest that in many, many areas there are no points of convergence between the "progressive" agenda and that not only of Never Trump Republicans but of the Republican Party historically. And not the least of these is a commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States, both of which Donald Trump holds in manifest contempt.

No, Mr. Cousins. It's not just his personality. It's his policies, and hopefully, you as much as we are supporting Joe Biden not only out of personal dislike of Donald Trump, but because we reject this administration's approach to policy.

None of the Republican presidents or presidential candidates in the recent past have resembled Donald Trump ideologically. That, as much as his personality, is what we find objectionable about him! Sadly, as we've found out recently, Donald Trump is not the only Republican who holds the positions he holds on freedom of the press and of assembly, on matters of race, on immigration, on foreign policy, or on a myriad of other issues. But the suggestion that we Republicans and former Republicans who oppose him are on even approximately the same page with him philosophically is outrageous enough that it suggests an almost Trumpian disconnect from reality.

I mean, c'mon. Are international relations and immigration and civil rights and our relationship with our allies and seeking to heal rather than divide and trade and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law and our fellow citizens not matters of policy? I'd say that with all of our differences- and they are many- "progressives" and Never Trumpers have quite a bit in common policy-wise when compared to Donald Trump.

Let's get another thing clear: we Never Trumper's don't expect a quid pro quo for supporting Joe Biden. We are not doing it as a pathway to power or for a "seat at the table" in the Biden Administration. While I hope that a President Biden would reach across the aisle and seek to open dialog and achieve accommodation with those with whom he disagrees, and while our expectation is that he will be willing to do so where Donald Trump has not, we differ from Mr. Trump in that we are acting out of principle and out of love for the country and not out of a hope for "a seat at the table."

We hold out no such hope. Our position during a Biden Administration will be ambiguous; we'll support him at times and oppose him at others, depending on the issue. We will neither be a part of his administration nor in opposition to it.  We're still getting used to this business of being neither fish nor fowl, but don't worry. We are not looking for influence in the next administration. We just want it to be smarter and more humane and more competent and more decent than this one.

And that brings me to the bottom line. Demonizing those we disagree with. Lying about them. Calling them names. Portraying them, not as mistaken and therefore to be persuaded, but as evil and therefore to be excluded and seen as enemies. Approaching them with a closed fist rather than an open hand. Making distrust and even hatred one's accustomed way of dealing with them. Emphasizing differences rather than areas of agreement, and seeking to divide rather than unite. Just who does that sound like, anyway?

If anything, the problem is not that Republicans and Democrats differ so much from one another. The problem is that they are too much alike. Both parties are being taken over by the extremes, and those extremes are far quicker to reject those with whom they disagree about anything and to treat them as enemies than to try to find common ground with them. 

Authoritarians are authoritarians, whether they're trying to intimidate the press or "cancel" those with whom they have a bone to pick. America is facing a crisis of authoritarianism on both sides of the political spectrum, and not only on the Trumpist right.  There's too much racial bigotry on the right, and there's too much religious bigotry on the left. And on both ideological extremes, we find the urge to discredit and dismiss rather than to listen and understand.

Perhaps, if I may presume to speak for Never Trumpers as a group, our most serious difference not only with the nationalist monstrosity the Trumpist Republican Party has become but also with the wild-eyed band of Bernie Brothers the Democratic Party seems in the process of turning into is our conviction that America is dying of self-righteousness and political intolerance, locked into competing echo chambers which lack even common sources of authority for what is true and what is not, and that our survival as a free people depends on our finding a way out of that mess.

A Republican president said it first. A Democratic president quoted him on the night of his election. I find it hard to imagine these words in the mouth of either Donald Trump or of the Democratic left. But it's something we need to take to heart:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Wouldn't it be nice if we tried a bit harder to listen to one another, rather than being so quick to declare that this group or that group "are not our friends?"

But that's what we must be, despite our differences. We must not be enemies. Isn't that finally the message of the Biden campaign? Isn't that the very point in dispute?