The dwindling band of NeverTrumpers fondly imagines that Republicans will snap back to the former party of beautiful losers when Trump departs the scene. We’re the people with ideas, they say, and we have ownership rights over Republican thinking. But they’re merely a rag-tag bunch of neocons, libertarian purists, prissy mugwumps, and party apparatchiks who have little in common apart from their detestation of Trump.
On both right and left, American politics has degenerated into a brain-dead battle over personalities, not principles. Which raises the question of where we’ll be when Trump leaves the scene. The Alexandrine poet C.P. Cavafy wrote about what happens when threats just go away. People had been terrified by the thought of a barbarian invasion. Except one day everyone realized that the barbarians wouldn’t show up. “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”
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