Never Trumper David Frum asks the question: 'What the Never Trumpers want Now'.
Political Observer comments.
The reader has to wonder at Mr. Frum’s striking a pose as if he were not a ‘Never Trumper’:
Many of the conservatives and Republicans appalled by Donald Trump’s presidency clutched a hope through the bewildering years: Someday this would all be over and politics would return to normal.
But normal has not returned. Those elected Republicans who stood for legality when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election found themselves party pariahs in 2021, on their way to being out of politics altogether in 2022.
And it’s not just a few politicians who have been displaced by the Trump era. Millions of voters have been too. “Never Trump is not a political party. It is a dinner party”: That jibe was heard a lot in 2017 and 2018. It has not been heard much since. In 2018, Democratic candidates won districts that had loyally voted Republican for 30, 40, 50 years, including those once held by Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich, and George H. W. Bush.
The anti-Trump Republicans did not return home in 2020. Now, in 2021, their former party seems much more eager to welcome anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers than to win them back.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/never-trumpers-democrats-now/620055/
After a bit of story telling, the reader is confronted by three paragraphs headed by ‘Once Republicans’ : this is where Frum enumerates the once virtues of his Party. The ‘as if’, is again, about Frum’s self- assigned status as an ‘impartial spectator’ of the Party. As even an apologist and operative of that Party. The reader’s journey through the thickets of Frum’s political moralizing, in the guise of an ‘impartial spectator’, wears thin as his experience as a propaganda operative is revealed :
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And again dissident Republicans and conservatives were left to wonder: What do we have in common with you?
This process of estrangement builds on itself.
I thought we believed X, says the dissident. You’re a bunch of hypocrites for now saying Y. You’re betraying everything I thought we believed.
No, reply the majority. We always deep down believed that Y was more important than X. We never before had to choose. Now we do. And if you choose X over Y, it’s you who are betraying us.
Economists call this “revealed preference”: a choice between two competing alternatives that forces the chooser to discover her highest values. Pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives have often each been mutually horrified to discover how radically their highest values differed from those of old allies and former comrades.
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As yet we readers have only reached page three, of my printed copy of Mr. Frum’s essay. This essay is 3,112 words, and we readers have not yet reached the key paragraphs, that I sample, under Frum’s rubrics:
Democracy:
Donald Trump hoped to reverse the 2020 election by junking votes after they were cast. His successors more shrewdly hope to decide the next election by suppressing votes before they can be cast in the first place, or by gerrymandering voters in such a way that they don’t count equally.
Many Democratic political professionals regret these maneuvers, but see little payoff in battling them. Based on their experience with the historic Democratic electorate, they believe that pocketbook issues are what matter most.
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Expertise:
The U.S. and global scientific communities have delivered incredible advances at record speed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It took only a few days for scientists to crack the virus’s genetic code, only a few weeks for scientists to understand how the virus spread, less than a year to develop effective vaccines.
And for their efforts, they were reviled by one of the country’s great parties as enemies of the people. The mild-mannered Anthony Fauci is now behind only critical race theory and Big Tech as a target of right-wing hate.
When your political coalition attracts support from millions of professionals, its respect for professional expertise rises. That’s how Democrats have become the party that acknowledges climate science and encourages vaccination, while Republicans tend toward the opposite.
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Globalism:
Globalism is a label for the quickening pace of cross-border immigration, trade, investment, information, and organization. The economic relationship among these factors is complex. Theoretically, it’s possible to have some without others. But the psychological relationship among the different elements of globalism tends to be more straightforward. Like some of them, and you will probably like all of them; fear any of them, and you will probably fear all of them.
Until recently, those who feared globalism formed a weakly partisan bloc that could swing back and forth between the two parties, or even to a third-party independent like Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. Trump, however, successfully consolidated the fearers into his Republican Party. Hostility to immigration, trade, and almost any form of international cooperation became a defining theme of his presidency.
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Moderation:
Days after the 2020 vote, Representative Abigail Spanberger complained to Democratic colleagues about the harm done to House members by reckless ideological rhetoric. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again ... We lost good members because of that.” The slogan “Defund the police,” she said, had done even more damage.
The crime wave of 2020–21, and the unceasing surge of unauthorized people across the southern border, has created a sense of disorder and threat. Some lefty Democrats have either denied that these trends are happening or dismissed their significance. But they are happening, and they do matter. Among Republicans, immigration is ranked as the country’s second-most-important issue (after the economy), and crime ranks just behind. Traditional Republicans and Republican-leaners are swayed by those same influences.
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Niceness:
Donald Trump lived by the old dictum that nice guys finish last. He proved it wrong. In 2020, Trump finished second in a two-person race—that is, last—in great part because Americans perceived him as nasty. On the eve of the 2020 vote, only one-third of Americans agreed that Trump could be described as “likable.”
You’ll recall that Trump got considerably more than 33 percent of the vote. A large number of Americans voted for Trump despite—or possibly because of—his offensive behavior and intemperate language. For those former Republicans who broke ranks against Trump, however, the behavior and language mattered, and mattered a lot.
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Mr. Frum’s public moralizing, that he frames as the thoughts of Adman Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’, lapses into an apologetic, for a Republican Party, that welcomed the racist Dixiecrats into the Republican Party, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Right Act of 1965. The evidence is made utterly clear by this bit of bluster:
Here’s the warning for the future: The Democratic Party is also home to some abrasive loudmouths. And although none of those abrasive loudmouths has mounted a serious campaign for the presidency, some hold other high offices, and others occupy visible places in the media. Liberal communities tolerate and even approve of language about white men like Mike Baker that they would never tolerate or approve of about anybody else. That language exacts immense political costs.
White Victimhood is the sin a qua non of so much of American political discourse, fostered by both Republicans and New Democrat!
An absolute majority of white Americans believe that white people face adverse discrimination in the United States. They are not reacting to personal experiences of mistreatment; only one-fifth to one-tenth of white Americans report anything like that. They seem instead to be reacting to a more generalized drumbeat of derision and hostility.
Mr Frum is a Neo-Conservative, whose faith in a toxic Ultra-Nationalism is the watershed, of Leo Strauss’ attempt to rewrite the History of Philosophy, placing faith in the hermeneutic skill of would be Platonic Guardians. To interpret texts and govern the polity.
Frum is a self-appointed member of this coterie. Frum wrote the ‘Axis of Evil’ catch phrase for Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld War Criminals. Not forgetting this news story from The New York Times , that speaks volumes about the watershed of ‘The War On Terror’ and its jingle writer, who birthed ‘The Axis of Evil’ :
Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror
Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.
The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/magazine/displaced-war-on-terror.html
Mr. Frum is a political shape-shifter, whose self-willed re-inventions, now, take on a comic character, so ineptly manifested are these attempts. Frum entertains the notion that he is considered to be, in the political present, a Wise Republican Elder.
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