Here’s a sentence I never expected to find myself writing: Recently, influential liberal commentators recommended that liberals quit arguing with conservatives about public policy.

It all started when Ben Wittes, a national security specialist at the Brookings Institution, recommended in an 18-tweet manifesto that Americans who oppose Trumpism suspend discussion of what divides them so they can together confront this “national emergency.”

He wrote, “We have grave disagreements about social issues, about important foreign policy questions, about tax policy, about whether entitlements should be reformed or expanded, about what sort of judges should serve on our courts.” He added: “I believe in putting them all aside.”

Michael Tomasky, editor of the journal Democracy and former editor of the American Prospect, then wrote a Daily Beast piece about the proposal floated by Wittes, declaring: “I’m with him.”

I’m not. And the best way to explain why is to look at someone else Tomasky says he’s now with: Bill Kristol, the neoconservative writer and political operator. Tomasky correctly anticipates that one source of liberal resistance to Wittes’s proposal will be the disturbing prospect of making nice to people like Kristol. Kristol, after all, is famous for, among other things, working hard to get us into the Iraq War and working hard to defeat Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1993 plan to expand health care coverage. Tomasky writes, “Well, Bill Kristol’s done a lot of things I don’t like. And I’ve probably done a lot of things he didn’t like. … But I’m ready even to forget Iraq.”

Again, I say: I’m not. I’ve advocated something called “mindful resistance,” and one thing it entails is figuring out what array of forces created Trumpism so we can attack the problem at its roots. Well, (IMHO) there are few people who have more influentially abetted those forces than Bill Kristol.

Consider a few areas of Kristol’s influence.

1) Foreign policy. Had it not been for the Iraq War, ISIS as we know it would almost certainly not exist. More generally, the Iraq War, by nourishing the America-versus-Islam narrative that jihadist recruiters love, and by creating the kind of chaos in which they do their best work, was a big boost for anti-American terrorism.

And if you imagine a 2016 election with no ISIS, and little in the way of recent anti-American terrorism, you’re imagining an election in which Trump’s Islamophobia doesn’t have nearly the appeal it had — an election Trump probably loses. And Kristol didn’t just favor the Iraq War — he crusaded for it, and built a whole institutional edifice that helped bring it about.

2) Health care. How was Donald Trump able to make the repeal of Obamacare a powerful issue? Partly, of course, by distorting the public’s perception of Obamacare. But he got a big assist from genuine deficiencies in Obamacare — deficiencies that resulted from concessions made in the face of strong and longstanding opposition to more encompassing and coherent health care reform. And Kristol was — from the Clinton presidency through the Obama presidency — an influential opponent of such reform.

3) Economic policy. A big asset for Trump in 2016 was the sense among many low-income whites that there are two Americas: an America of affluent metropolitan elites and a low-income stratum of middle America that those elites don’t care about. The Senate tax bill that passed this month will exacerbate income inequality. And it is only the latest in a series of conservative tax initiatives that have had that effect, and thus reinforced this sense of grievance. Kristol has been on board for most of them.

Tomasky — who is one of our sharpest and most sincere liberal voices, and whom I disagree with only respectfully — might argue that, actually, Kristol is no longer a leading contributor to things like income inequality. After all, didn’t he oppose this Republican tax bill? For that matter, didn’t he oppose Trump’s drive to repeal Obamacare? Yes, and Tomasky celebrates this leftward drift of Kristol and some other neoconservatives: “They’ve changed. Not me. I’m happy to make common cause with them.”

Kristol has a history of bending on domestic policy when it suits his interests

Forgive me for injecting a note of skepticism. This isn’t the first time Kristol has shown a malleability on domestic policy that wasn’t matched by malleability on foreign policy. (For example, he departed from Republican tax-cut orthodoxy in 2012.) A cynic might go so far — and some cynics have — as to suggest that a belligerent, militaristic foreign policy is the lodestar for Kristol and some other neoconservatives, and that they’re willing to support whatever constellation of domestic policies it takes to sustain a coalition for this militarism.

In this view, the current moment is, for Kristol, an opportunity to win favor from fervent liberal anti-Trumpers, favor that can be used later to sell another war. Certainly Kristol has used a river of emotionally resonant anti-Trump tweets, produced with factory-like efficiency, to massively increase his Twitter following and win the hearts of swooning liberals.

The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal.

WHAT IS HAPPENING? — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 21, 2017

Which leads to one big reason we can’t afford to put our differences with Kristol on hold until Trump leaves office: That next war could be coming soon. Trump is already undermining Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (which Kristol energetically opposed) and in other ways exacerbating tensions with Iran. If reports of an upcoming administration reshuffling are true, we will soon have passionate and reckless anti-Iran hawks running both the State Department and the CIA. (And, by the way, the one at CIA, Tom Cotton, is a Kristol protégé.)

This is the irony of Kristol’s Trump-era makeover into what Vox’s Matt Yglesias has called “woke Bill Kristol”: It began to take shape during the presidential campaign, when Trump was sounding like a neocon’s worst nightmare — criticizing US military entanglements and talking rapprochement with Russia; but, predictably, Trump has been engulfed by the Republican foreign policy establishment, which is to say the neoconservative foreign policy establishment. So Bill Kristol is getting much the kind of foreign policy he likes while absorbing the good will that comes from remaining officially anti-Trump. He is perfectly positioned to influentially encourage the next foreign policy disaster.

And now, as I understand it, we’re being told by Wittes and Tomasky that, if that disaster starts to unfold, and people like Kristol start abetting it, we should remain silent because “the resistance” is some kind of sacred brotherhood? Indeed, have I somehow betrayed the resistance by spending the last few paragraphs reminding people of Kristol’s pernicious views?

This isn’t just about foreign policy, and it isn’t just about Kristol. The many areas of disagreement within “the resistance”— in foreign policy, tax policy, health care policy, and so on — are not things we can suspend discussion of if we’re serious about defeating Trumpism. Because the drift of policy in these areas will help determine whether the ground in America stays fertile for future versions of Trump — whether our policies continue to foment terrorism, income inequality, bad health care, uneven educational opportunity, and the many other things that leave many Americans feeling alienated.

We don’t want to get rid of Trump only to find ourselves singing the lyrics of the old Who song: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” So we can’t afford to spend the interim hugging everyone who opposes Trump and singing Kumbaya.

Robert Wright is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God, and, most recently, Why Buddhism Is True. He runs Bloggingheads.tv and Meaningoflife.tv and publishes the Mindful Resistance Newsletter, where a version of this piece first appeared. He is currently a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.