Secondly, it's funny to see you acting as if President Donald "First take the guns, then do due process" Trump, the guy who was pro-choice, pro-single payer, and pro-Hillary, literally 10 years ago is the standard definition of what it means to be a conservative. Also, real conservatives respect the rule of law and the Constitution - two things for which Trump has total disregard.
I don’t idolize Trump, and I don’t pretend that he’s even a good president; as I’ve said before, he’s mediocre at best. In fact, I really dislike Trump. He was never my preference for the Republican nomination, and I ardently opposed him throughout the entire primary season. Once Trump unfortunately secured the Republican nomination, I begrudgingly decided to support his candidacy because the alternative to electing him was and remains entirely unconscionable to anyone who has right-wing values or who could reasonably claim to be conservative or right-libertarian.
I realized that it was best to cut the losses and play with the bad hand we’d been dealt — this hand turned out not to be as awful as I had thought, as we averted the eminently catastrophic Hillary Clinton presidency.
On the other hand, some (small, and shrinking) contingencies who identify with the GOP decided to pitch a never-ending temper tantrum because ya’ll didn’t get your way. You people see politics sort of as a sport — a little game in which you’re just a spectator, and you can willy-nilly pick and switch sides when things don’t go as you’d like. You’re loyal to faces above values, and you choose who you follow based on entirely superficial, meaningless, and usually fraudulent qualities like “niceness,” agreeableness, “humility,” faux “courage,” faux “honor,” etc. You don’t care very much about substance — it’s all about the visceral fee-fee’s.
So anyway, your favored quarterback didn’t get the nod to play for the team in 2016 — that really sucks, doesn’t it? But instead of behaving like level-headed, rational beings and accepting this loss, petulant #NeverTrumpers have worked to actively sabotage and destroy the party and the values they once claimed to stand for (many, as we now know, were intellectual frauds all along).
This really frustrates me. Republicans should tolerate and accept dislike or even hatred for Trump within our ranks — I myself certainly don’t like the President’s personality and make this known to everyone who knows me for long. He isn’t a conservative, he’s a vain and ideologically capricious moderate who, in an ideal world, would never have come close to being the standard bearer for our party. We should even tolerate folks who refuse to vote for Trump — whether that be abstaining or voting third-party. What we should not and can not afford to accept, is the belligerent attitude from many #NeverTrumpers like yourself of frantically throwing wrenches in the cogs of our machine, trying to sabotage and dismantle the operation of the entire party because of superficial stylistic grievances with one rather unimportant man.
The best explanations for Never-Trump “Republicans” who haven’t thrown in the towel and transitioned into hardcore ideological Leftists (or secretly already were before Trump), are that they’re either unwilling to play the long game, or have a degree of naivety so strong that they can’t understand that the long game even exists. They’re content to fiddle while America burns, so long as they feel “respectable,” “decent,” and “comfortable” whilst doing so.
If you people aren’t mature enough to put values above your disdain for a temporary little accident like Trump, you simply have no place here. If you aren’t directly in league with the Left (as you seem to be), you at least really don’t care about preserving this nation from it. You’d rather see the last vestiges of liberty and hope be slowly squeezed out of it than to have a rough around the edges, uncivil guy (Trump is no more uncivil than most democrats, btw) have limited power for a few more years.
Finally, it's interesting to
accuse me of embracing left-wing authoritarianism when you seem to have a problem sharing a party with anyone who doesn't lick Trump's boots. Sounds a lot like the Stalin's approach towards dissenters or the CCP's approach towards anti-Xi thinkers, ya commie
I think the above pretty much covers this. I neither expect nor want
anyone to lick Trump’s boots, and I absolutely eschew such. That’s part of why I refuse to vote for folks like Tommy Tuberville in my home state who campaign solely on rubber stamping any initiative that comes out of the Trump White House.
You plan to vote for left-wing authoritarianism over very watered-down, mildly center-right nationalism, so I think that’s a fair assertion. You may not totally embrace the ideology, but you’re at least cowardly enough to roll out the red carpet for it and surrender without a fight, which makes you just about as good as a full-throttled believer.
I’m not suggesting you should leave the GOP because you disagree with it on some or many issues — I have a multitude of great disagreements with the party’s platform and M.O. But, you have dedicated yourself to destroying all attempts to preserve this country from the Left and to prevent Marxist worldviews from gaining a greater stronghold in our society and government. You have essentially promised your support to the Left for completely irrational and nonsensical reasons. You despise our party and have either disdain or indifference towards it values. You should get out and stay very far away, unless you decide to come to your senses.
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