Tag Archives: #NeverTrumpers

Posted on by

“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” said no Republican leader, ever.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, an extreme supposed champion of the working class in 19th century France, purportedly said what serves as my headline, which came to my mind when I read this from Robert Stacy McCain:

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Think about what Donald Trump advocated to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He advocated control of our borders, something every other Republican candidate did. He differed in one respect: he actually proposed a way to do it, building a wall along our border with Mexico, to make simply walking across the border far more difficult. He took strongly pro-life positions, as almost all of the other Republican candidates did. He advocated tax cuts, as all of the other Republican candidates did.

What was different about Mr Trump? He spoke in terms that the Republican primary voters saw as not just mouthing platitudes, but believed that he would actually do something to achieve the goals he set forth.

The result? We saw thousands of supposed Republicans marshal against him, including both the elder and younger President Bush, the ‘neo-conservatives’ like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, the subsequently scandal-ridden “Lincoln Project,” and, sadly, Patrick Frey. Mr Trump used strong, strong, language, and he wasn’t a particularly nice guy, but the great mass of Republican voters saw in him someone who would actually fight for the things he advocated. It helped that Mr Trump was running against the wholly uninspiring Hillary Clinton, and he flipped stated like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin red. The Keystone State, despite normally being called a ‘battleground state,’ had not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

The nation was stunned, and the Republican ‘leadership’ were most particularly stunned. How could this boorish brute win the presidency? I mean, the guy couldn’t even be bothered to button his suit coat during his inauguration!

The Republican ‘leadership’ would have been much happier had they lost the election with Jeb Bush as the nominee, than win it with Donald Trump. My guess is that they’d have rather lose the election with Jeb Bush than win it with Ted Cruz as well, because Mr Cruz can be a bit on the bull-in-a-china-shop side himself.

But the Republican voters loved Mr Trump, even if the ‘leadership’ did not.

And so we come to Representative Liz Cheney Perry(R-WY). Mrs Perry, who did not respect her husband, Philip Perry, enough to take his name, but to whom I will not show a similar disrespect, decided that President trump should be impeached, even as his term was coming to an end, due to the college-keg-party-gone-wild that is the Capitol kerfuffle. More, she allowed herself to be appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the committee to investigate the kerfuffle, when Mrs Pelosi would not accept the Republican members nominated by the House Minority Leader. Mrs Pelosi wanted a kangaroo court, and got one, with a couple of pro-impeachment Republicans for window dressing.

In 2020, not only did President Trump carry Wyoming, but by percentage of the vote, the Cowboy State was his strongest state; he defeated former Vice President Joe Biden 193,559 (69.94%) to 73,491 (26.55%). The same voters who gave the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney 68.56% of the vote in her 2020 re-election campaign gave Mr Trump even more votes, 193,559 to 185,732.

Back to Mr McCain:

Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.

“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

This is the part that’s important: the Republican Party, like any political party, is made up of the mass of Republican-registered or identifying voters, but for Mrs Perry, for the (supposedly) Republican #NeverTrumpers, for the disaffected neoconservatives, what the vast majority of the Republican Party want is not only not what they want, but what is anathema to them. As I said, they’d rather lose with a polite milquetoast than win with a strong fighter.

The problem for them is simple, even if they don’t understand it: the mass of the Republican Party have moved beyond them. Mrs Perry has made noises about running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but look how the left view them:

As I have noted previously about Bill Kristol and the “Lincoln Project”, the left may look upon them as useful for the moment, but they’ll never actually trust them, while Republicans will never trust them either. Mr Kristol destroyed the opinion magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, by refusing to allow any articles which supported President Trump, thus alienating a significant portion of his readership, still supports a few, few! conservative positions, positions which are anathema to the Democrats. Given the opinions of some of them, like Max Boot and Mr Kristol, to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccines, the Libertarian Party won’t want to have anything to do with such authoritarians, either. They have nowhere to go!

This is, in the end, a good thing. The mass of the Republican Party have moved toward populism, an ideology which holds that the great mass of the people are not being seriously listened to by the political elites. There’s some of that in the Democratic Party as well, as exemplified by the ridiculous “Occupy Wall Street” movement and some of their far-left but nevertheless back-bench politicians like the anti-Semitic squadristi,[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to … Continue reading but, at least thus far, the left of the Democratic Party have nevertheless fallen into line with the (purportedly) more moderate elements to support President Biden.

The Republican elites are looking for their people, so they might lead them, but the mass of the party have no interest in being led along the garden path of squishy go-along-to-get-along Republicanism. They want leaders who will fight, who will fight the left, and that’s why Mrs Perry lost.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.
Posted on by

The Patricians really, really don’t like the plebeians! The peasants are revolting!

The New York Times, always ready to help the elites, gives OpEd space to Republicans of the past.

    We Are Republicans With a Plea: Elect Democrats in 2022

    By Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman[1]Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times … Continue reading | Monday, October 11, 2021 | 5:00 AM EDT

    After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the G.O.P. would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take back the party. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national G.O.P., the state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.

    Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democratic Party.

    Earlier this year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps by forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, G.O.P. leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.

    Breaking away from the G.O.P. and starting a new center-right party may prove in time to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.

There’s more at the original, but in the fourth paragraph, Mr Taylor and Mrs Whitman admit the real problem about which they complained in their third. “Rather than return to founding ideals, G.O.P. leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office,” they complained, but they next lamented that “Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries.” Their real problem? The plebeians are simply not voting the way the Patricians tell them they must.

Populism is a name for a kind of political movement. Populists usually try to make a difference between common people and “elites” (meaning usually, top classes of people) . Populists may think of wealthy people or well-educated people as belonging to the class of elites. Populists may also call those who have been working in government for a long time “establishment” and count them as elites too.

According to Wikipedia, Miles Taylor, net worth roughly $2,000,000:

    grew up in La Porte, Indiana, where he was an Indiana state debate champion, and graduated valedictorian from La Porte High School in 2006. While in high school, he served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He received a Bachelor of Arts in international security studies from Indiana University Bloomington, which he attended as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and Herman B. Wells Scholar. As a senior, he received IU’s inaugural Presidential Student Internship and was a recipient of the Elvis J. Stahr Award given to the university’s top few graduating seniors. Taylor received an MPhil in International Relations from New College, Oxford, which he attended as a 2012 Marshall Scholar.

Clearly, Mr Taylor, who is only 33 years old, grew up with some privilege. As for the description of him as a “lifelong Republican,” Mr Taylor donated $85, “when (he) was a completely broke college student”, to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. His ‘explanation’ of that is completely disingenuous:

    I’m proud that I spent that $85 because even though I was gunning for John McCain, and John McCain’s been a lifelong personal hero of mine, I wanted to be able to tell my kids that if Barack Obama got elected president, that in some way I supported the first Black president of the United States. Of course, I knew I was going to oppose him on policy issues, and I did that. I was a big McCain supporter.

Oh, good grief! That’s an explanation?[2]Full disclosure: in 2008, I switched my party registration from Republican to Democrat, so I could vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against the odious Hillary Clinton. That meant, alas!, … Continue reading

According to Wikipedia, Mrs Whitman, net worth at least $9,470,000:

    born Christine Temple Todd in New York City, the daughter of Eleanor Prentice Todd (née Schley) and businessman Webster B. Todd. Her parents were involved in Republican politics,] and both the Todds and the Schleys were wealthy and prominent New Jersey political families. Her mother’s family were among the first New Yorkers to move to what became Far Hills, New Jersey, which became a popular suburb for wealthy, moderate Republicans. Her maternal grandfather, Reeve Schley, was a member of Wolf’s Head Society at Yale and the vice president of Chase Bank. He was also a longtime president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Christine’s father amassed a fortune from working as a building contractor on projects including Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. Webster used his wealth to donate to Republican politicians, and became an advisor to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Her mother Eleanor served as a Republican national committeewoman and led the New Jersey Federation of Republican Women.

Yeah, that’s a pretty Patrician background, too. Worrying about having food on the table at suppertime was not one of her problems.

For Mr Taylor and Mrs Whitman, the problem is simple: they consider themselves to be leaders of the Republican Party, but Republican voters do not seem to be willing to follow where they would lead. Their complaint that Republican “leaders in the House and in many states” are going along with “Trumpism” is a complaint that elected Republicans are going along with what their constituents want. What, the elected leadership, following the wishes of those who voted for them? Heaven forfend!

Mr Taylor and Mrs Whitman want to get rid of the influence of former President Trump, and to do that, they are urging people to vote for Democrats. But voting for Democrats has a real cost: it puts Democrats in office, and that means pushing the Democrats’ policies. Sunday’s headline in The Washington Post said, “Liberal Democrats have become the mainstream of the party and less willing to compromise with dwindling moderates.” Even the (purported) moderates in the House are going along with the socialists’ progressives’ plans, if only slightly nibbling at the edges, and only Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) are preventing a massive, ‘progressive’ plan from being passed. Elect more Democrats, and a bill festooned with benefits for unions and welfare for the well-to-do get passed. The authors would accept ‘progressive’ policies which would seriously damage our republic, grant greater opportunities for fraudulent voting, destroy all state restrictions on abortion as well as having the taxpayers pay for abortions, and destroy our economy just to get rid of the influence of a 75-year-old man who eats absolute junk.

I have news for them: even if Donald Trump dropped dead today, the populist voters he has energized will still vote for Republican primary candidates who espouse policies similar to his.

Mrs Whitman and Mr Taylor wrote about, as a “last resort,” “starting a new center-right party.” This is where they truly fail: Republican voters tired of a “center-right” party under the younger President Bush, and rejected a “center-right” party not only under the other presidential candidates during the 2016 primaries, but in the TEA Party revolt of 2010 and Republican primaries subsequent to that. They want a truly conservative party, not a ‘moderate’ — moderate meaning: caving in to the left on too many issues, the old go-along-to-get-along Republican Party under Hugh Scott and Everett Dirksen — one.

    For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong G.O.P. members to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.

The most important vote that any member of Congress casts is his first of the session, the one which sets the majority control of the chamber. It matters not how ‘centrist’ a particular Democrat is, if he is going to be voting for someone like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer to control the chamber, his vote is for the devastation of all that conservatives hold dear, a vote for enacting the agenda that the Post called to now be the “mainstream” of the Democratic Party. That is very much the wrong thing to do.

References

References
↑1 Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Christine Todd Whitman (@GovCTW) was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and served as E.P.A. administrator under President George W. Bush.
↑2 Full disclosure: in 2008, I switched my party registration from Republican to Democrat, so I could vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against the odious Hillary Clinton. That meant, alas!, voting for Mr Obama in that primary. After the primary, I quickly changed my registration back to Republican, and of course I voted Republican in the general election. I have never given as much as a single penny to a Democratic candidate.
Posted on by

Comment rescue: We told you so!

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Remember: 81 million people allegedly voted for this senile fool. If you don’t want to blame Biden, blame the idiots who elected him.

On Patterico’s Pontifications, I commented:

    neither Trump nor his supporters ever proposed “the result” that you supporters of Biden have handed all of us.

    Being a critic of Trump and his fanatical devotees doesn’t mean being a supporter of Biden, or an apologist for his Afghanistan policy.

    Actually, it means that you own it!

    Our esteemed host wrote, maybe more than a year ago — it was the concluding line of a main post, which, alas!, I didn’t save — that he’d vote for Joe Biden and accept the [insert slang term for feces here] show that would follow, because he thought President Trump was a crook. That, at least, was admitting that he owned the results.

    I told everyone here that perhaps President Trump wasn’t a nice guy, but it was his policies, not his personality, which mattered. So many people here voted for Mr Biden’s personality, ’cause he wasn’t an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like President Trump, but along with the nice guy with the two German Shepherds and the wife with a doctorate, you got an imbecile who wants to not only keep abortion legal, but force taxpayers to pay for them, who can’t tell the difference between males and females, who is pushing through a $3.5 trillion (faux) infrastructure plan, who wants to make vote fraud easier rather than more difficult, is locking up the Capitol kerfufflers without bail, so that they can be punished before they ever go to trial, who is caving in to the idiotic Black Lives Matter philosophy, who has reopened our borders to waves of illegal immigrants, and 8,724,366.7 other idiotic things.

    If you voted for Joe Biden, you voted for all of those things, along with an even worse person to be just a heartbeat away from a Presidency currently held by a 78 year, 8 month, and 27 day old guy in questionable mental health.

The Never Trumpers need to be reminded of just what they sought, of just for whom the voted.

Posted on by

Neoconservatives want to fight for American-style freedom and democracy everywhere, but don’t seem to want Americans to have individual rights

If someone was asked to put names to a list of neoconservatives in the United States, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz might come to mind. Irving Kristol was an editor and publisher who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine, founded the now-defunct magazine The Public Interest, and was described by Jonah Goldberg as the “godfather of neoconservatism.” His son, William Kristol, founded the magazine The Weekly Standard, which quickly took hold to challenge National Review for primacy among conservative opinion journals.

The Weekly Standard failed because, as a fervent #NeverTrumper, Mr Kristol guided the journal into being all-Never Trump, all the time, while National Review, with plenty of Never Trumpers in its fold, still tried to allow pro-Trump articles in its pages and on its website. Mr Kristol (probably) realized that yes, Donald Trump was a factor in Republican politics, and yes, some conservatives really did like his views and his style, but The Weekly Standard was never going to tolerate the views of the riff-raff to pollute its pages and website!

We have already noted how neo-conservative Max Boot of The Washington Post wants to make vaccinations against COVID-19 mandatory. The Post’s other neocon, Jennifer Rubin, while I have not seen anything from her yet urging making vaccination mandatory, certainly wants to do everything that can be done to stifle opposing views. The Post also supports “vaccine passports.”

Now comes the younger Mr Kristol, who, like so many others, wants to force you to be vaccinated. Not trusting Mr Kristol not to delete that tweet, this is a screenshot of it, but the hyperlink will take you to the original. If it’s difficult to see, you can click on it to enlarge it.

Mr Kristol and the neoconservatives, frequently fairly liberal when it comes to domestic and social issues, very much wanted to spread the ideas of American-style freedom and democracy around the world. But I have to ask: when so many of them are now opposed to individual liberty and individual rights, just what does their commitment to American-style freedom and democracy mean? One of the most basic freedoms of all, the right to decide what you will put into your own body, is a freedom they would deny people who have decided differently than they have.

Full disclosure: I have been vaccinated myself, a choice I made freely, and I believe that others should take the same decision I did. While no vaccine is 100% without risk, the benefits of being vaccinated outweigh the risks. But I respect the right, and yes, “right” is precisely the word I mean to use, of other people to choose whether or not to take the vaccine. That’s a right that the neoconservatives don’t seem to want you to have.
____________________________________
Related Article:

Posted on by

Sarah Longwell and Jennifer Rubin don’t like democracy, not if the rabble don’t kowtow to what they think is right

It was this tweet which caught my eye:

Wikipedia describes The Bulwark as:

an American anti-Trump conservative news and opinion website founded in 2018 by commentators Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol.[1][2][3] Its publisher is Sarah Longwell.[4] While it launched as a news aggregator, it was revamped into a news and opinion site using key digital staffers from the defunct magazine The Weekly Standard.

Anti-Trump? That’s why Jennifer Rubin likes it! Mrs Rubin has allowed her visceral hatred of former President Trump to change views she previously held:

Rubin has been one of the most vocal conservative-leaning writers to criticize Donald Trump, as well as the overall behavior of the Republican Party during Trump’s term in office. Rubin denounced Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement as “a dog whistle to the far right”, and designed to please his “climate change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy.” Previously, after Barack Obama had approved the agreement, Rubin characterized it as “nonsense” and argued that it would not achieve anything. Rubin described Trump’s 2017 decision to not implement parts of the Iran nuclear deal as the “emotional temper tantrum of an unhinged president.” She had previously said that “if you examine the Iran deal in any detail, you will be horrified as to what is in there.” Rubin strongly supported the United States officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Early in his presidency, she criticized Trump for not doing so, saying that it was indicative of his tendency to “never keep his word.” She concluded that Trump “looks buffoonish in his hasty retreat”. In December 2017, after Trump announced that he would move the embassy, she said it was “a foreign policy move without purpose.”[29]

In August 2019, Rubin was a guest on a panel on MSNBC’s “AM Joy” with the premise that Mr. Trump leads “an extreme administration” that is “dangerous.” Rubin said: “It’s not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again“. [30]

In a tweet referenced by CNN Media, Mike Huckabee questioned Rubin, writing: “Jen Rubin is WAPO’s excuse for conservative,” and adding that Rubin’s “contempt for all things Trump exposes her and WAPO as fake news“.[31]

In April 2021 Rubin was declared winner of the second annual Liberal Hack Tournament, hosted by the “Ruthless” variety progrum, becoming the first woman to win the title.[32]

Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic argued that after the 2012 presidential election, Rubin criticized aspects of the Mitt Romney campaign that she had previously praised, with Friedersdorf insisting that she had acted as “a disingenuous mouthpiece for her favored candidate”.[33]

In a November 21, 2013, column, Rubin called on the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to end its campaign against same-sex marriage.[34]

In September of 2020, she announced that she no longer described herself as a conservative, but given he criticisms of Mitt Romney’s positions and support of same-sex ‘marriage,’ perhaps she should have done that a decade earlier.

On to The Bulwark:

Did We Forget Our Democracy Is Still Under Threat?

Complacency is an inherent weakness of democracy.

by Sarah Longwell | April 22, 2021 | 5:30 AM EDT

Old joke: An old fish and a young fish pass each other. The old fish says, “Fine water today, isn’t it?” The young fish replies, “What’s water?”

This, I have learned in hundreds of hours of focus groups, is how many Americans think about democracy—or more accurately, don’t think about it. Democracy is the system we have, and have inherited, but most of our experiences with any of the alternatives are so remote that we view democracy as the default state. As something that just is.

That isn’t to say that Americans don’t think about politics. Oh, do we. Probably more than is helpful. We have, as a people, some pretty out-there opinions and preferences and expectations about politics.

But mostly when we think about politics, we think about the results we want. These choices are often framed in terms of personalities. Certainly, this phenomenon isn’t limited to the United States: Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, Bibi Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron—the list of personalities that more or less define political divides in democratic societies is long and diverse.

Sometimes the results we want are framed not as people, but as policies: higher taxes or lower taxes, more environmental regulation or less, strong national defense or retrenchment. Maybe having policy preferences is civically healthier than having preferences merely for certain individuals over others. Or maybe character is destiny and policy is transient, so choosing the better person is the way to go.

Miss Longwell continues on, to tell us about the enormous, enormous! dangers of the Capitol kerfuffle, but somehow manages to forget the definition of the words she uses:

Our freedom and self-government are under threat from domestic authoritarian cults in tacit—if not enthusiastic—alliance with foreign despots who desire that the world’s oldest democracy succumb to corrupt populist autocracy.

Uhhh, populist is defined as:

(noun) a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
(adj.) relating to or characteristic of a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

while autocracy is defined as:

a system of government by one person with absolute power.

Thus, a “populist autocracy” is a contradiction in terms.

“(D)omestic authoritarian cults”? It isn’t the Republicans who have held themselves in thrall to Democratic Governors exercising apparently unchecked power to issue orders regulating our lives under the pretext of protecting us from the China virus.[1]See this to explain why I have started to, occasionally, refer to COVID-19 as the China virus or Wuhan virus.

It isn’t the Republicans who are trying to control every aspect of our lives, to define other people’s beliefs as “hate crimes,” and to “cancel” people with whom they disagree from public life. Miss Longwell is upset, very upset, that we are now “debating corporate tax rates, Dr. Seuss, and trans bathroom access, like nothing ever happened,” as though she hasn’t come to grips with the fact that, though conservatives might not like it, we recognize that Joe Biden is President, that the Democrats control both Houses of Congress, and that we have to do everything we can to fight back against the leftists’ agenda.

But here’s where Miss Longwell really goes off the reservation:

Our democracy is under attack, for real, by a large portion of a major political party which seeks to utterly transform the relationship between the government and the governed.

Well, yes, we are trying to change the relationship between the government and the governed, because the government has become far, far, far too powerful. When a state Governor says that he can order us not to have too many people in our homes, and sets up ‘snitch hotlines’ so officious little Karens can tattle on us, when the Mayor of our largest city says that he can send the gendarmerie into your homes if you’ve traveled from the United Kingdom, then yes, we want to change that.

But, more than that, if a large portion of a major political party seeks to change that relationship, is that not democracy? If a large group of people want to change things, well doesn’t the First Amendment, which (supposedly) protects our freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of the people peaceably to assemble to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, protect our right to seek change, to ask for change, to demand change?

For Miss Longwell and Mrs Rubin, it appears that democracy is all well and good . . . as long as it produces the results they want. But people, acting in concert, to change things away from what they want? Now that’s a threat, and cannot be tolerated.

References

References
↑1 See this to explain why I have started to, occasionally, refer to COVID-19 as the China virus or Wuhan virus.