Never Never Land

"Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured."--Sir Winston Swampdrainer

Prof. Hanson:

"When Hillary Clinton assumed the mantle of the “Resistance,” she was deliberately using a metaphor to convey the idea that she is analogous to a French patriot under occupation and Trump is a veritable foreign Nazi belligerent. ...

From the opposition to Trump’s first 100 days, we can sense where the Clinton agenda was headed: a Supreme Court pick further to the left than Merrick Garland; expanded race/class/gender themes across cabinet offices; a likely single-payer health system; higher taxes and more regulations, a radical climate change menu, and increased identity politics.

Any presidential election is a zero-sum game; a Republican staying home was a vote for Clinton in the fashion of a Sanders supporter sitting out 2016 was a vote for Trump. Far from a Clinton victory being a catharsis, it would have green lighted more illegal immigration, expanded the themes of the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch Justice Department, and lost the Supreme Court for 20 years.

As far as a catharsis, it has already occurred though perhaps in ways not anticipated. A reported 92 percent of Republicans voted for Donald Trump, even if in some cases on the low-bar assumption that 51 percent of something was better than the alternative.

A Never Trump movement, I think it is fair to say, had absolutely no influence on the 2016 election. In theory, elites may have convinced a few key Republican voters in swing states to stay home or to vote for Hillary Clinton; but in reality they were far outnumbered by huge numbers of new Republican voters who saw in Trump hope that they did not in far more experienced and sober men of character.

Like it or not, a Rubio or Cruz nominee likely would have not won these swing voters and thus likely would have lost the election, and with it ensured at least 12 and likely 16 years of a hard progressive government.

Finally, there was something deeply wrong in the Republican Party that at some point required a Trump to excise it. The Republican Party and conservative movement had created a hierarchy that mirror-imaged its liberal antithesis, and suggested to middle class voters between the coasts that the commonalities in income, professional trajectories, and cultural values of elites trumped their own political differences. How a billionaire real estate developer appeared, saw that paradox, and became more empathetic to the plight of middle-class Americans than the array of Republican political pundits is one of the most alarming stories of our age.

Trump was not so much a reflection of red-state Americans’ political ignorance, as their weariness with those of both parties who ridicule, ignore, or patronize them—and now seek to overturn the verdict of the election.".......

No.