NeverTrumps and the End of America as We Know It

The election of Hillary Clinton would mean final defeat for American conservativism -- for at least a generation and almost certainly for much longer than that. The demographic changes certain to flow from eight more years of open borders, general amnesty, and distribution of the newly arrived statist voters to electorally vulnerable states would make the Left’s presidential victory this fall, for all practical purposes, permanent. And that’s without considering the effect on the electorate of the increasingly intolerant and repressive educational and political environment, an environment that for eight more years would continue driving substantial segments of the populace, especially the vulnerable young, into the ever more mandatory belief systems of the Left.

But don’t worry: After Clinton’s election the elegant and witty columns of George Will, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg, aided by the surpassing political skills of the Bush and Romney families, will save us all from both these calamities, and from all the other unnamed ones that Hillary and the Left will bring. Uh, maybe not. If Clinton prevails there will be no conservative (or Republican) president during the lifetime of any adult member of the feckless Republican royal families, or of Mr. Goldberg or the children of George Will or William Kristol. Their prediction that the presidency will be recovered in short order is a pipe dream. Over the medium term, twenty to twenty-five years, that recovery would approach demographic impossibility. Despite the inarguable magnitude of the coming Clinton/Left disaster, Republican/conservative turncoats, led by these and other members of what Peggy Noonan aptly terms the “protected classes,” are working for Clinton’s election. In unalloyed self-destructive irrationality, the support of Hillary Clinton by Never Trump commentators and Republican politicians is sui generis. Never before in American history have intellectual and political leaders of a major party deliberately attempted to open the gates of enduring power to an enemy sworn to their eradication. Are they moved by general snobbery, confusion caused by overwork, East Coast social pressure? I’ve stopped trying to figure it out and stopped caring. But on a different level, on the level of their own personal careers and perceived short-term well-being, I’m absolutely certain what they think: “We’ll do fine under Clinton and the Left. Under Obama we’ve experienced all of what Clinton will bring and we’ve flourished. Under Clinton we’ll do it again. We’ll continue speaking out, politely and carefully of course, and they won’t touch us; we won’t lose our jobs, our children won’t be expelled, there’ll be no unpleasant changes in our expensive neighborhoods or our children’s toney private schools, we’ll drink with the same refined people in our clubs and cocktail parties. Through it all, we’ll continue making an excellent living as the articulate opposition to the wretchedness the Left will be imposing on the American working and middle classes. The little people, the unprotected people, will endure the downside -- low wages, high taxes, unsafe and decaying neighborhoods, destroyed public schools, and violent racial animosity. We’ll be the Left’s safe and well paid critics.” What an appalling betrayal of the vast majority of Main Street voters who elected two Bush Presidents and made conservative intellectuals ‘cushy lives possible! This is clear: Trump’s defeat, if it occurs, will be the work of the NeverTrumps. The margin by which Trump now trails in national and battle ground polls is almost exactly equal to that small but significant segment of the Republican and conservative voter base -- some 20 - 25% -- that’s still following the NeverTrumps off the cliff. Recent polling puts Trump’s support among likely Republican voters at about 73% (Romney got 93% in 2012). So, if Trump falls, the NeverTrumps will be grinning beside the body -- like Brutus perhaps a bit nervously -- bloody knives in hand. But as the Clinton debacle unfolds, and their role in bringing it about is meticulously established, dissected and seared into memory, who will be their political friends? Perhaps more pertinently, where will they hide? Questions for a different essay. Victory by the execrable Clinton and the Left is still avoidable, but only if the usually overwhelming percentages of conservatives and Republicans unite behind their Party’s candidate. 73% will not do, even with the new voters Trump’s issue candor and personal bravery are bringing. The Republican and conservative voter base has got to be persuaded to ignore the suicidal advice of their failed former leaders and snobbish intellectuals, and come together behind a candidate who ever more clearly is solidly with them on almost all the great issues: immigration and borders, freedom of expression and religion, the role and composition of the federal judiciary, taxation and regulation, national security, and public safety. But if 20-25%% of the Republican core continues to follow the wrist slitting advice of the Never Trump crowd, the Left once again will be victorious --as in 1992, when Republican defections to Perot gave the presidency to Bill Clinton with a puny 43% of the vote. America thereafter would be permanently transformed into a new nation, molded by the Left’s dystopian dreams of multiculturalism, racial and ethnic balkanization, boiling hatred of black for white, open borders, and a government suffocated economy, a new nation whose populace would be increasingly beaten down by the dictates of governmentally mandated orthodoxies. Here -- of singular importance for any future chance of conservative governance in America -- is what we know is coming from Clinton and the Left: Intensification of the Democratic Party-sponsored third world invasion of the country. In this so far highly successful project, the Left has substituted millions of statist newcomer voters for the politically uncooperative Americans who shunned them in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988. But the Left’s revolutionary demographic transformation of America is not complete. A stubborn and significant core of patriots and traditionalists remains. It will be the primary task of the Clinton presidency to overwhelm this annoyingly tenacious opposition once and for all. The following states require only a modest infusion of statist newcomers to place them out of reach for any Republican or conservative presidential candidate not pledged to open borders and a huge welfare state: Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona. When any five of these ten are gone it’s game over. Under Clinton, Illegals would continue moving north across America’s southern border in numbers sure to exceed those who came during Obama’s presidency (a minimum of 2.5 million according to liberal leaning Pew Research and the Center for Migration Studies). In addition to the illegals, at least 1.5 million overwhelmingly third world legal immigrants will arrive annually (up from 1.1 million per year under Obama), nearly all impoverished and nearly all with expectations of government formed in their statist homelands. Added to the legal and illegal immigrants will be the sure-to-be-legalized 11-20 million illegals already here (again Pew and Homeland Security admit to 11.2 million illegals already in America, but the actual figure is unknowably higher). And if Clinton’s amnesty runs into Congressional opposition and she resorts to unconstitutional executive orders, this time there’ll be no help from the Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court will become a five vote rubber stamp for the Left immediately upon Clinton’s appointment of Justice Scalia’s replacement. That majority will be sustained or enlarged by whatever further vacancies come Clinton’s way. So, adding it all up, the number of new future statist client voters after Clinton will be in the neighborhood of 26-38 million: 11-20 million amnestied illegals; 12 million new, almost exclusively third world, statist voting legal immigrants; and another 4-6 million newly arrived illegals. With the full power of the federal executive branch in their hands, and no opposition from an increasingly partisan federal judiciary and Supreme Court, the re-empowered Left will move its newly chosen voters around as it chooses -- to the states where their voting presence will have the greatest effect. Have the Bush and Romney families -- and their intellectual enablers – given all this even passing thought? How many of these new voters do Messrs. Kristol, Will and Goldberg expect to persuade with their erudition? Much more likely, what they’ve focused on is what’s always been their main concern: continued politically useless but personally remunerative occupation of the places of party power. Over the last 25 years, neither the intellectuals nor the Party leaders of the NeverTrump crowd has prevented, or even slowed, the Left’s march through our cultural institutions. And now, to round out their litany of failure, they urge us to give the Left permanent possession of the presidency and the federal judiciary. One last fatal give-away from the crowd that’s already failed so grandly. I submit that Ronald Reagan, America’s most successful conservative president, and William Buckley, America’s most effective conservative intellectual, would be appalled by this selfish, self-destructive claque of clueless politicians and confused scribblers who are trying to lead America into the arms of the Left. Reagan and Buckley had the unfailingly good judgement to vigorously support the most conservative electable candidate. Especially where the US presidency was at stake. Barring calamity, the list of possible next American Presidents contains two names. There are no others. It would take Ronald Reagan or Bill Buckley all of a microsecond to give Trump their full support in this crucial election. It should be evident by now that the determined suicides within Republican Party and conservative leadership ranks can’t be reached by reason. This is the time to simply ignore them. Doing so now will be good practice for the future. As for the rest of us, we can only work to ensure that, in the end, the overwhelming majority of America’s conservatives and Republicans are guided by what their greatest leaders would have done in these circumstances, and not by the willfully destructive, self-interested counsel of the snobs who are trying to hand America to the Left.